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Title: Canada and Newfoundland
Author: Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Language: English
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[Illustration: (Cover)]
[Illustration: (Map of Canada)]
CARPENTER’S
WORLD TRAVELS
_Familiar Talks About Countries
and Peoples_
WITH THE AUTHOR ON THE SPOT AND
THE READER IN HIS HOME, BASED
ON THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
MILES OF TRAVEL OVER
THE GLOBE
“READING CARPENTER IS SEEING THE WORLD”
[Illustration: WHERE MAN FEELS CLOSE TO GOD
Canada shares with the United States the glories of the Rockies, which
invite the traveller ever westward and, once seen, cast a spell that is
never shaken off.]
_CARPENTER’S WORLD TRAVELS_
CANADA
AND
NEWFOUNDLAND
BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
LITT.D., F.R.G.S.
[Illustration]
WITH 116 ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the publication of this volume on my travels in Canada and
Newfoundland, I wish to thank the Secretary of State for letters which
have given me the assistance of our official representatives in the
countries visited. I thank also the Secretary of Agriculture and our
Secretary of Labour for appointing me an Honourary Commissioner of
their Departments in foreign lands. Their credentials have been of
great value, making accessible sources of information seldom opened to
the ordinary traveller.
To the officials of the Dominions of Newfoundland and Canada I desire
to express my thanks for exceptional courtesies which greatly aided me
in my investigations.
I would also thank Mr. Dudley Harmon, my editor, and Miss Ellen McB.
Brown and Miss Josephine Lehmann, my associate editors, for their
assistance and coöperation in the revision of notes dictated or penned
by me on the ground.
While nearly all of the illustrations in Carpenter’s World Travels are
from my own negatives, those in the book have been supplemented by
photographs from the official collections of the Canadian government,
the Canadian National Lines, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the
Publishers’ Photo Service, the Holloway Studios of St. John’s, N. F.,
and Lomen Bros., of Nome, Alaska.
F. G. C.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START 1
II. THE KEY TO THE ST. LAWRENCE 3
III. AROUND ABOUT ST. JOHN’S 8
IV. THE COD FISHERIES OF NEWFOUNDLAND 13
V. IRON MINES UNDER THE SEA 24
VI. THE MARITIME PROVINCES 31
VII. IN FRENCH CANADA 42
VIII. STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND ITS MIRACULOUS CURES 52
IX. MONTREAL 60
X. CANADA’S BIG BANKS 69
XI. OTTAWA--THE CAPITAL OF THE DOMINION 79
XII. THE LUMBER YARD OF AN EMPIRE 88
XIII. TORONTO--THE CITY OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP 97
XIV. WATERFALLS THAT WORK FOR THE PEOPLE 106
XV. NIAGARA’S GIANT POWER STATION 113
XVI. THE SILVER MINES OF NORTHERN ONTARIO 119
XVII. NICKEL FOR ALL THE WORLD 127
XVIII. SAULT STE. MARIE AND THE CLAY BELT 134
XIX. THE TWIN LAKE PORTS 141
XX. WINNIPEG--WHERE THE PRAIRIES BEGIN 148
XXI. THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS 157
XXII. THE LAND OF FURS 166
XXIII. SASKATCHEWAN 175
XXIV. THE WORLD’S LARGEST WHEATFIELD 181
XXV. THE OPEN DOOR IN CANADA 188
XXVI. EDMONTON--THE GATEWAY TO THE NORTHWEST 197
XXVII. THE PASSING OF THE CATTLE RANGE 206
XXVIII. OVER THE GREAT DIVIDE 213
XXIX. THROUGH BRITISH COLUMBIA TO THE COAST 220
XXX. PRINCE RUPERT 226
XXXI. BY MOTOR CAR THROUGH THE WILDERNESS 232
XXXII. FROM WHITE HORSE TO DAWSON 241
XXXIII. THE CAPITAL OF THE YUKON 250
XXXIV. FARMING ON THE EDGE OF THE ARCTIC 259
XXXV. MINING WONDERS OF THE FAR NORTH 266
XXXVI. ROMANCES OF THE KLONDIKE 274
XXXVII. A DREDGE KING OF THE KLONDIKE 281
XXXVIII. THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE 288
SEE THE WORLD WITH FRANK G. CARPENTER 298
INDEX 301
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Where Man Feels Close to God _Frontispiece_
PAGE
The Untold Wealth of Canada 2
Newfoundland’s Rocky Coast 3
Icebergs off St John’s Harbour 6
The Capital City of Newfoundland 7
On the Fish Wharves 14
Spreading Codfish out to Dry 15
Fishing Villages 18
Hunting Seals on the Ice Fields 19
Caribou Crossing a River 19
Ore Piles at the Wabana Mines 22
The Annual Fishermen’s Race 23
Halifax Harbour 30
Cape Breton Island 31
Evangeline’s Well 38
Low Tide in the Bay of Fundy 38
A Quebec Farm House 39
French Canadian Woman Spinning 39
The Gibraltar of America 46
The St Louis Gate at Quebec 47
A Plank-paved Street 50
Ribbon-like Farms along the St Lawrence 51
A Wayside Shrine 54
The Church of Notre Dame 55
Grain Elevators of Montreal 62
Montreal from Mount Royal 63
In the Old French Market 66
Toboggan Slide Down Mount Royal 67
“Shooting” the Rapids 70
Through the La Chine Canal 70
Along the Rideau Canal 71
The Heights Above the Ottawa River 78
The Library of Parliament 79
A Giant of the Forest 86
Food for a Pulp Mill 87
A Forest Patrol Airplane 87
Log Jam on a Canadian River 94
Toronto’s Municipal Playground 95
Farm Scene in Ontario 95
Toronto, City of Sky-scrapers 102
Flax Raising in Ontario 103
Orchards of the Niagara Peninsula 110
The Big Ditch at Niagara 111
Ontario’s Giant Power Station 111
Potential Power for Canadian Industries 118
The Mining Town of Cobalt 119
Where One Walks on Silver 126
Erecting a “Discovery Post” 127
The World’s Greatest Freight Canal 134
Bascule Bridge at Sault Ste. Marie 134
Moose Feeding 135
Ontario Lake Country 135
Calling Moose 138
A Fishermen’s Mecca 139
The Mighty Elevators of Port Arthur 142
The Falls of Kakabeka 143
A Six-hundred-foot Lake Freighter 143
The Gateway to the Prairies 150
Cutting Corn by Machinery 151
Stacking Wheat 151
Over the Transcontinental Route 158
“Selling the Scenery” 159
Bargaining with the Eskimos 166
A Hudson’s Bay Trading Post 167
A Foster Mother for Foxes 167
Valuable Furs as Every-day Garments 174
The Capital of Saskatchewan 175
Grain Lands of the Prairies 178
American Windmills in Saskatchewan 179
Threshing Wheat 179
In Canada’s Great Wheat Province 182
Farming on a Large Scale 183
Future Citizens of the Dominion 190
A Modern Ranch 191
Raising Corn in Alberta 194
Railroads as Colonizers 195
Giving the Settler a Start 195
Digging Coal from a “Country Bank” 198
Milking Machines in an Alberta Dairy 199
Water for Three Million Acres 206
Passing of the “Wild West” 207
A Royal Ranch Owner 207
Calgary’s Business Section 210
Mounted Police Headquarters at Macleod 211
Lake of the Hanging Glaciers 214
The Monarch of the Herd 215
Mountain Climbing in the Canadian Alps 222
At the Foot of Mount Robson 223
The Land of the Kootenays 226
Apple Orchards of the Pacific Slope 227
Canada’s Most English City 227
Street in Prince Rupert 230
The World’s Greatest Halibut Port 230
Totem Poles at Kitwanga 231
Over the White Pass Railway 238
On the Overland Trail 239
Roadhouse on the Tahkeena River 239
The Head of Navigation on the Yukon 242
A Klondike Heating Plant 243
Islands in the Upper Yukon 246
Through the Five Finger Rapids 247
A Summer Residence in the Klondike 254
The White House of the Yukon 254
In the Land of the Midnight Sun 255
Redtop Grass Inside the Arctic Circle 258
A Ten-thousand-dollar Potato Patch 259
Dredging the Golden Gravel 274
Washing Down the Hills 275
Old-time Mining Methods 278
From Gold Seeker to Settler 279
The Prospector on the Trail 279
A Dredge King of the Klondike 286
Hydraulic Mining 287
The Guardian of the Northwest 290
An Eskimo of Ellesmere Island 291
CANADA
AND
NEWFOUNDLAND
CANADA AND NEWFOUNDLAND
CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START
The country through which we shall travel in this book is the biggest
on the North American continent. The Dominion of Canada is almost as
big as all Europe. It is bigger than the United States and all its
outlying possessions. It is thirty times as big as Great Britain and
Ireland, and it has one third of all the land over which the Union Jack
flies.
We shall find the country one of magnificent distances and wide, open
spaces. It lies just over our boundary and reaches from there to just
below the North Pole. Moreover, it is so thinly settled that it could
increase its lands now under cultivation fivefold and not exhaust its
available farms.
The Dominion has untold mineral and industrial wealth. It has enough
natural resources to support many times its present population of nine
or ten millions, and one day it will have, so Canadians tell me, as
many white people as the United Kingdom and all the colonies of the
British Empire have now.
This book is the result of many journeys through Canada. I have visited
the Dominion again and again in the various stages of its development,
and have followed the star of the new nation as it moved ever westward.
I have stopped with the French in the St. Lawrence Valley, have
travelled along the Saskatchewan when the United States farmers rushed
into the wheat belt, and have seen the Klondike and the Yukon when they
were still pouring streams of gold into the world.
We of the United States are vitally interested in the Canadians. We are
largely of the same blood, and the lines of our national lives have run
along side by side. Thousands of us have relatives in the Dominion,
for more than a million former American citizens are now living on
the other side of the border. We have so much faith in Canada that
our financial investments there are already in excess of two thousand
million dollars, and our trade with it is more important to us than
that of almost any other part of the world.
For this reason we shall start out knowing that we shall receive
everywhere a most cordial welcome. The men and women whom we shall
meet, for the most part, speak our own language, think much the same
thoughts, and have the same high ideals of life. Indeed, we shall
be surprised again and again at the vivid realization of our great
similarity, and the rich inheritance we have received from our common
ancestors.
Two empires, by the sea.
Two peoples, great and free,
One anthem raise.
One race of ancient fame,
One tongue, one faith, we claim;
One God, whose glorious name
We love and praise.
[Illustration: “Canada is a land of untold wealth. Its treasures extend
from the humming industries of the east to the great forests and
fisheries of the West, and from the golden wheatfields of the South to
the bricks of the Klondike gold I saw in the Far North.”]
[Illustration: What John Cabot saw when he discovered the American
continent were stern cliffs of gray rock such as this near St. John’s,
which now has a tower erected in his honour, five hundred feet above
the water.]
CHAPTER II
THE KEY TO THE ST. LAWRENCE
Imagine yourself aboard ship with me. We are steaming along off the
coast of Newfoundland, bound north for St. John’s, the capital and
chief port of the oldest and smallest British dominion. Just before
daybreak this morning I was awakened by a glaring light flashing full
in my face. I jumped from my berth and looked out of the porthole.
As I did so three blasts from the whistle tore the air and made the
ship tremble, and were answered a moment later by the w-h-a-a-n-g of a
foghorn from over the water. The dazzling light that had awakened me
flashed around again. I knew then that we were saluting Cape Race, the
southeast tip of Newfoundland, and chief signal station for the ocean
traffic of the North Atlantic.
We were hardly a mile from the shore. If it had been daylight, we would
have steamed closer in. The lighthouse towered high in the air, the
flash seeming to come from out of the sky. Cape Race light is more
than three hundred feet above the water, and, with its foghorn and the
wireless station close by, tells thousands of mariners their position
at sea. It is usually the first land sighted in coming to Canada across
the Atlantic, and marks the point where practically every vessel in
these waters changes its course.
Day has dawned since we passed Cape Race, and we can see for miles
over the bright blue ocean, silvered and dancing under the sun. The air
is so fresh and crisp it is almost intoxicating. Even the dolphins,
leaping and diving in graceful curves beside the ship, seem to share
our feeling that it is a wonderful morning on which to be alive and at
sea.
Now turn to the map in this book, and see just where we are. Like most
Americans, I had always thought of Newfoundland as a sub-arctic country
far to the north of us. Since leaving New York I have felt like an
explorer on his way to the Pole. The fact is, however, that we have
been steaming much more to the east than to the north, and are at this
moment only about sixteen hundred miles from the west coast of Ireland.
We have come hardly three hundred miles north of New York, but so far
to the eastward that we are half way to Liverpool. We are still south
of England, in the same latitude as Paris, and are not far from the
shoals that form the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, famous the world over
as cod-fishing grounds. Here the bed of the ocean rises to within less
than five hundred feet of the surface, and the cold arctic currents
meet the Gulf Stream, causing the fogs so much dreaded in this part of
the Atlantic.
As seen on the map, Newfoundland is a triangle of land that nearly
fills, like a plug, the gaping mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
but it also commands the sea routes of the North Atlantic, and its
possession by an enemy power would menace both Canada and the United
States. It has an area of forty-two thousand square miles, being larger
than Ireland and of about the same size as Tennessee. At first glance
it seems a part of the mainland, but a closer look shows the Strait
of Belle Isle separating the island from the Labrador coast. Though
in some places only eight or ten miles wide, this strait furnishes a
summer-time passage for transatlantic liners to Canada.
For some years there has been talk of building a dam across the Strait
of Belle Isle, to stop the icy waters of the Labrador current coming
through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This, it is claimed,
would force the Gulf Stream closer to Newfoundland, and give that
country and eastern Quebec a climate as warm as that of New Jersey. How
England would fare in this shifting of ocean waters no one can say;
the history of the world would have been vastly different but for the
present course of the Gulf Stream in relation to the British Isles.
However, no one has yet offered to pay for this project, and shipping
men say it would be impossible to make a dam strong enough to withstand
the enormous pressure of ice, which comes down from the arctic every
year in great floes of from five hundred to one thousand square miles
and sometimes piles up on shore to the height of a five-story building.
The Newfoundland coast greatly resembles that of Norway. Looking
shoreward, we see great headlands jutting out into the ocean, their
precipitous sides rising straight out of the water for three or four
hundred feet. Between them are deep bays and inlets, walled with
sheer rock. At the heads of the coves and smaller bays we can see the
white houses of little villages, clinging to the hillsides above tiny
beaches. On top, these great rock ridges are covered with low scrub,
now in red and brown autumn dress.
Now we are approaching St. John’s, which has one of the famous natural
harbours of the world. Our steamer heads for what seems an unbroken
wall of rock, five hundred feet high, and surmounted by a mighty stone
tower. This is Cabot Tower, erected to commemorate the discovery of
Newfoundland in 1497 by John Cabot, the Venetian mariner commissioned
by Henry VII of England to find him new dominions. Except for the
Vikings, five centuries earlier, Cabot was really the first to discover
the North American continent, as Columbus did not reach the mainland
until some years later.
Just south of the Cabot Tower is Cape Spear, the “farthest east” point
of all North America. It was on these hills that Marconi received the
first wireless message flashed across the Atlantic, and from them that
the first transatlantic hydroplane flight was begun. On these shores,
also, several of our transatlantic cables are landed.
[Illustration: Like pirate ships of old, icebergs in spring hover about
the rock-bound entrance to St. John’s harbour. The channel is so narrow
that the French once closed it to the British ships by a chain from
shore to shore.]
But see, there is an opening in the wall of rock straight ahead, and
we get a glimpse of the harbour and the city beyond. The passage is
only six hundred feet wide, and it seems much less from the deck of our
steamer. Here the French, during their brief possession of St. John’s,
slung chains across the Narrows to prevent the entrance of enemy ships.
Inside the Narrows, the harbour is about a mile long and one half as
wide. It is fringed with a forest of masts and the smokestacks of
steamers. On the right is St. John’s. The hill on which it is built
rises so steeply from the water that we can see the whole sides of
buildings, one above the other along the terraced streets. The painted
brick or wooden structures give the city a rather drab appearance,
which is emphasized by the absence of shade trees. This is partly
because the town has been burned three times, the last time in 1892.
Across the harbour the red and brown hillside is gashed here and
there with the slate gray of stone pits, or splotched with fenced-in
patches of green, so steep that it is hard to imagine how they are
farmed.
[Illustration: St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland, sits high
on a hill overlooking the land-locked harbour. It is the centre of the
fishing industry, and the commercial metropolis of the island. Its
atmosphere is distinctly British.]
St. John’s is not quite as large as Portland, Maine, but it is the
chief city of Newfoundland and the centre of the fishing trade. The
whole country has only about a quarter of a million inhabitants. It
is as though the people of Toledo formed the total population of the
state of Ohio. The Newfoundlanders are a mixture of English, Irish,
and Scotch, with an occasional trace of French. The original Indian
inhabitants have practically all disappeared. Most of the people
worship at the Church of England, though Catholics also are numerous.
Both denominations have cathedrals at St. John’s, the Catholic
edifice being especially conspicuous as viewed from the harbour. The
Methodist Church is well established, and there is a sprinkling of
Congregationalists. Education in Newfoundland is sectarian, each church
receiving a grant from the government for the support of its schools.
There is much rivalry between the churches, especially in the villages,
but I am told that some of the Protestants send their children to
Catholic schools, considering them better. The sons and daughters of
well-to-do people usually go to England to complete their education.
CHAPTER III
AROUND ABOUT ST. JOHN’S
Come with me for a drive around St. John’s. We can hire a touring car
of almost any make, but for novelty we choose a one-horse open coach.
The grizzled driver tells us times are dull with him just now, the
taxis getting most of the trade, but that he will have the best of it
in December, when the cars are laid up until spring on account of the
snow. St. John’s has an average of about four feet of snow in a season,
but I have seen pictures of the streets snowed in to the roofs of the
houses. The thermometer rarely falls below zero, but once the snows
begin, the ground is covered until April.
The chief business street of St. John’s is strung out for a mile or
more just back of the wharves. It is lined on both sides with three-
and four-story wood and brick buildings. Among the most modern is the
home for sailormen built by the Doctor Grenfell mission of Labrador
fame. Though the store windows look bright and attractive, many of the
shops are tiny affairs, and the street seems more English than American.
I notice many branches of Canadian banks, which monopolize the banking
business of Newfoundland. Contrary to the belief of many Americans,
Newfoundland politically is no more a part of Canada than it is of
New Zealand. It is a separate dominion of the British Empire, to
which its people are enthusiastically devoted, having more than
once refused to be federated with Canada. They will tell you that
the name of their country is pronounced with the accent on the last
syllable--New-found-_land_.
The main street of St. John’s has a trolley running practically its
entire length. Whenever the conductor collects a fare, he puts a little
ticket in a tiny cash register that he carries in his hand. Like all
the Newfoundlanders I have met, the car men are most courteous. One
of them left his car to ask a policeman on the corner to direct me to
the American consulate. Indeed, I like these Newfoundlanders. They
are cordial and hospitable and most polite, though sometimes I have
difficulty in understanding their Anglicized speech. I was told on the
ship that I would see none but natural complexions in St. John’s, and
as far as I have observed that is true, all the girls having bright
rosy cheeks. Both men and women here are long lived.
Our driver is now asking us to look at the government buildings. They
are high up above the harbour and surrounded by beautiful grounds. The
party having a majority in the lower house of parliament forms the
government and names the premier and his ministers. The upper house,
called the Legislative Assembly, consists of twenty-four members
appointed by the governor in council. The members of the lower house
are elected for terms of four years and meet every year. While the
humblest fisherman may be elected to parliament, Newfoundland has not
yet granted women the vote. It has no divorce laws.
Our next stop is at the west end of St. John’s, where the Waterford
River empties into the harbour. Here is a valley covered with truck
gardens, and beyond lies a park given to the city by one of its titled
shipping magnates. It is said that spring comes here two weeks earlier
than in the eastern end of town. The reason for this is that while the
fogs and the winds from the sea sweep over the bluffs at the harbour
entrance, they rarely penetrate to the valley.
Driving back to town we pass the station of the Newfoundland Government
Railway, a narrow gauge line that covers the most important parts of
the island. It runs far to the north, then to the west shore, and down
to Port aux Basques at the southwest. Branches jut out here and there,
linking the port towns with the main line and the capital. The greater
part of the south shore has no railroad, nor is there yet any line into
the Barbe Peninsula, which extends northward to Belle Isle Strait.
There is talk of bridging the Strait and connecting Newfoundland with
Canada by a rail line through northeastern Quebec.
The manager of the railroad tells me that the Newfoundland line is
unique in that its passenger revenues exceed its freight earnings. The
reason for this is that most of the people live near the sea, and the
bulk of freight goes by water. On the cross country route there are
many steep grades, for the interior is hilly, although the highest
point on the island is only two thousand feet above sea level. The
railroad skirts the shores of hundreds of lakes, of which Newfoundland
has more than it has found time to count. It is estimated that one
third of the land lies under water. I met a man to-day, just returned
from a hunting trip forty miles inland, who told me that he had stood
on a hilltop and counted one hundred lakes and ponds in plain sight.
He has a friend who has fished in no less than forty different ponds
within a half mile of his camp. Grand Lake, on the west side, is more
than fifty-six miles long, and two others are nearly as large.
American sportsmen have already discovered in Newfoundland hunting
and fishing grounds that rival those of Canada, and some of our rich
Americans have permanent camps along the rivers and streams on the
south and the west coasts, to which they come every summer for salmon.
The railroad manager promises that if I will take the train across
country I shall see herds of caribou from the car window.
Much of the land along the railway has been burned over, but
nevertheless the country has ten thousand square miles of well-timbered
land, worth as it stands five hundred million dollars. Some is being
cut for lumber, and more for mine props that go to England and Wales.
The chief use of the forests at present is to furnish pulp wood for
news print. Lord Northcliffe built at Grand Falls a six-million-dollar
plant, operated by water-power, to supply his newspapers and magazines,
and an even larger project, to cost twenty-five million dollars, is
now under way at the mouth of the Humber River, on the west coast. The
scenery there is much like that of the fiords of Norway.
The chief agricultural development of Newfoundland is on the west
side of the island, where stock is raised successfully and wintered
outdoors. This section of the country has produced as much as three
million pounds of beef or three times as much as the amount imported.
Newfoundland is not primarily, however, an agricultural country. The
efforts of the people have always centred largely on fishing and
related industries.
Newfoundland has had its gold fevers, especially on the coast of
Labrador, which it owns. So far, these have amounted to nothing. But
it has one of the world’s largest iron deposits, and at one time this
country was an important producer of copper. It suffers commercially
from its handicaps in the way of transportation, and also because of
its limited supply of capital.
In studying the map of Newfoundland, I have been interested in its many
fanciful names, and wish that I might see what inspired them. There
are, for example, “Heart’s Content” and “Heart’s Ease,” “Bay of Bulls”
and “Leading Tickle,” “Baldhead” and “Redhead Rocks.” “Come by Chance”
is a railroad station in eastern Newfoundland, while just to the north
is “Random.”
Most of the points on the Newfoundland coast were named by the early
mariners who learned from experience rather than charts how to navigate
these dangerous shores. To help remember sailing directions, they made
up little rhymes such as this one I learned from a schooner captain
just in from Labrador:
When Joe Bat’s point you are abreast,
Fogo Harbour bears due west;
It’s then your course that you must steer
Till Brimstone Head do appear.
And when Old Brimstone do appear,
Then Dean’s Rock you need not fear.
CHAPTER IV
THE COD FISHERIES OF NEWFOUNDLAND
Perhaps you have thought, as I did before coming here, that fish
are fish, all the world over. But in Newfoundland fish are cod. The
existence of the other finny creatures in the sea is recognized, but
they are referred to only by their proper names. There is a story that
a Newfoundlander was asked if there were any fish in a certain stream.
“No, there are no fish in here,” was the reply, “nothing but trout.”
The history of Newfoundland is largely the story of its cod fisheries
and the contests to possess them. Cabot reported to his royal master
that the waters off the Newfoundland coast were so thick with fish as
to impede navigation. Not long ago cod were so plentiful that dogs
caught them alive in the water as they were crowded upon the beach by
the pressure of the thousands behind, and to-day the cod fisheries here
are the largest of their kind in the world. Nine tenths of the people
of Newfoundland still make their living either directly or indirectly
from fish, and eighty per cent. of the export trade comes from them. At
one time dried cod formed the national currency, and debts were paid in
kind. This fall, as for many years, thousands of fishermen are paying
for their spring outfits, and for flour and molasses and pork on which
they will subsist during the coming winter, with fish.
Within a year after Cabot’s voyage, fishermen from Devonshire, England,
were on the Newfoundland coast, and several years later Portuguese
and French fishermen were competing with them for the right to share
in the phenomenal catches. Though claimed by the British by right of
discovery, Newfoundland became a kind of “no man’s land.” Its coast was
frequented by hordes of daring men, partly fishermen, partly traders,
most of whom were not above a little piracy now and then. In 1578, four
hundred fishing vessels were coming here every year. Of these nearly
half were French. The English dominated even then, and a quarter of
a century later ten thousand men and boys from the west counties of
England were spending their summers in the fisheries, as catchers at
sea and dryers on shore.
It is estimated that the annual catch of the English vessels was worth
one hundred thousand pounds, a huge sum in those days. The “Merchant
Adventurers” of England, who gained most of the profit, tried to set up
a monopoly. They did their utmost to drive the French from the fishing
grounds and shore stations, and discouraged all attempts to colonize
Newfoundland, spreading false reports that the country was desolate and
uninhabitable. At one time there were laws forbidding a fishing vessel
from taking any settlers to Newfoundland and requiring it to bring back
to England every man it carried away. The “Fishing Admirals,” as the
ancient profiteers of that industry were called, even secured an order
to burn the homes of the fishermen on shore. Indeed, it was not until
1711 that England changed her cruel policy toward Newfoundland and
organized the colony under a naval government.
[Illustration: Most of the people of Newfoundland get their living
directly or indirectly from the codfish industry. The bulk of the catch
is shipped abroad from St. John’s, chiefly to the warm countries of the
Mediterranean and the West Indies.]
[Illustration: The fisherman’s work has only begun when he has caught
the cod. After cleaning them, he and his family must spread the fish
out to dry every day, and stack them up every evening until they are
“made.”]
In the meantime, bitter struggles with the French had been going on.
The French recognized in Newfoundland a key to their possessions
in Canada along the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence. They succeeded
in gaining a foothold on the south shore of Newfoundland, and from
there frequently attacked the English settlements to the north, until
the Treaty of Utrecht compelled them to give up their holdings. All
that remains of French possessions in this part of the world are the
islands of Miquelon and St. Pierre just south of Newfoundland. With the
prohibition wave that swept over North America, the port of St. Pierre
has had a great boom as headquarters of the bootlegging fleets of the
North Atlantic. It has grown rich by taxing the liquor traffic, so much
so, in fact, that St. John’s is casting envious eyes at its island
neighbour, and making plans to get into this profitable trade.
I had my first glimpse of the native cod as I entered St. John’s
harbour. Just as our steamer passed a motor dory lying off shore, one
of the men in her caught a big fish. He pulled it out of the water, and
after holding it up to our view, clubbed it on the head and threw it
into the boat. To-day I visited one of the fishing villages, where I
saw the day’s catches landed and talked with the fishermen.
I took a motor in St. John’s and drove out to Waterford Valley, up over
the gray rocky hills into the back country. On the heights I found
a blue pond, just below it another, and then another, like so many
steps leading from the heights down to the sea. The last pond ended in
a great wooden flume running down the rocky gorge to a little power
station that supplies electricity to the city of St. John’s.
Here I stopped to take in the view. Before me was a little bay,
perhaps a half mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, where the stream
from the hill ponds empties into the ocean. This was Petty Harbour,
a typical Newfoundland “outport.” On both sides of the harbour rocky
walls rose almost straight up to a height of three or four hundred
feet. The only outlets were the waters of the tiny bay and the gorge
through which I came. There was literally no level land, only a few
narrow shelves and terraces along the sides of the hills. There were no
streets, only a winding roadway down the slope. The lower portion was
too narrow for our motor, so that I had to go part of the way down on
foot. The houses were placed every which way on the steep hillsides.
Most of them had tiny dooryards, with a patch of grass and sometimes a
few flowers in front. Behind them, or at the sides, were other patches
of green, on some of which small black and white goats, wearing pokes
about their necks, were feeding. Small as were the houses, each was
neatness itself and shiny with paint. Every one of the hundred or so
houses was built by its occupant or his father before him. Indeed, I
am prepared to believe, after what I have seen, that the Newfoundland
fisherman is the world’s greatest “handy man.” He builds not only his
house, but also his boats, landing stages, and fish-drying platforms;
he makes his own nets, raises his own vegetables, and often has a sheep
or two to furnish wool, which his wife will spin and weave into a suit
of clothes or a jersey.
Walk along with me the rest of the way down to the waterside. You must
step carefully on the path that leads over and between the ridges
of out-cropping rock. Behind us a troop of youngsters are proving
themselves true citizens of the kingdom of boyhood by tooting the horn
of our motor. I notice many children playing about, and I ask where
they go to school. In reply two little frame buildings are pointed
out on the hillsides, one the Church of England school, and the other
maintained by the Catholics. The children we see look happy and well
fed, and the little girls especially are neatly dressed and attractive.
But here is a fisherman, drying cod, who offers to show us about. With
him we clamber down to the nearest stage, built out over the rocks, its
far end resting in water that is deep enough for the boats. The stages
are built of spruce poles and look like cliff-dwellers’ homes. At the
end nearest the water is a little landing platform, with steps leading
down to the motor dory moored alongside.
A boat has come in with a load of fish. They are speared one by one and
tossed up to the landing stage, while one of the men starts cleaning
them to show us how it is done. He first cuts the throat to the
backbone, breaks off the head against the edge of the bench, and then
rips open the belly. He tosses the liver to the table and the other
organs to the floor, cuts out the greater part of the backbone, and
throws the split, flattened-out cod into a tub at his feet. It is all
done in a few seconds.
Outside there is now a great heap of cod. This fish has a gray-greenish
back, a white belly, and a great gaping mouth lined with a broad band
of teeth so fine that to the touch they feel like a file. One big
fellow a yard long weighs, we are told, perhaps twenty-five pounds, but
most of them will average but ten or twelve pounds.
These fish were caught in a net, or trap. When set in the water the
cod trap measures about sixty feet square. It is moored in the sea
near the shore. The fish swim into the enclosure, are caught within
its walls, and cannot make their way out. The size of the meshes is
limited by law, so that the young fish may escape. Three fourths of the
Newfoundland cod are taken in this manner. Fish traps may cost from
six hundred to one thousand dollars each, and making them is the chief
winter job of the fishermen.
Sometimes the cod are caught with trawls, or lines, perhaps three or
four thousand feet long, with short lines tied on at every six feet.
The short lines carry hooks, which are baited one by one, and the whole
is then set in the ocean with mooring buoys at each end. The trawls are
hauled up every day to remove the fish that have been caught, and to
bait up again.
I had thought a fisherman’s work done when he brought in his catch,
but that is really only the beginning. The Newfoundland fisherman has
nothing he can turn into money until his fish are salted and dried. The
drying process may take a month or longer if the weather is bad. It
is called “making” the fish. The flat split fish are spread out upon
platforms called “flakes.” The sun works the salt down into the flesh,
at the same time removing the moisture. Every evening each fish must
be picked up and put in a pile under cover, and then re-spread on the
flakes in the morning. The children are a great help in this part of
the work.
[Illustration: Wherever there is a slight indentation on the high
rock-faced coast you will find a fishing village with its landing
stages and drying “flakes,” built of spruce poles and boughs, clinging
to the steep shore.]
It is in the perfection of the drying, rather than by size, that fish
are graded for the market. At one of the fish packing wharves in St.
John’s, I saw tons of dried cod stacked up like so much cord wood. They
all looked alike to me, but the manager said:
“Now, the fish in this pile are for Naples, those in that for Spain,
and those on the other side of the room will be sent to Brazil. It
would never do to mix them, as our customers in each country have
their own taste. Some like their fish hard, and some soft, and there
are other differences we have to keep in mind as we sort the fish and
grade them for export. The poorest fish, those you see in the corner,
are for the West Indies. The people there nearly live on our fish,
which will keep in their hot climate, but they can’t afford to buy the
best quality.”
[Illustration: Arrived at the ice fields, the seal hunters armed with
spiked poles scatter over the pack. They kill for their hides and fat
the baby seals which every spring are born on the ice of the far north
Atlantic.]
[Illustration: Caribou are plentiful in Newfoundland. They are often
seen from the train on the railroad journey across the country. The
interior has thousands of lakes, one third of the island lying under
water.]
Newfoundland exports more than one hundred and twenty million pounds
of dried cod every year. Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Portugal take about
ninety million pounds, while the West Indies, Canada, Greece, and the
United States absorb the balance. The fish are exported in casks each
containing about two and a half quintals, or two hundred and eighty
pounds.
While the shore fisheries account for most of the annual Newfoundland
catch, there are two other ways of taking cod. The first is the “bank
fishery,” in which schooners go off to the Grand Banks where they put
out men in small boats to fish with hook and line until a shipload is
caught. The fish are cleaned and salted on board, but are dried on
shore. The crews of the schooners usually share in the catch, as in our
own Gloucester fishing fleets. The third kind is the Labrador fishery.
Sometimes as many as nine hundred schooners will spend the summer on
the Labrador coast, fishing off shore, and drying the catches on the
beach. Whole families take part in this annual migration. Labrador fish
do not, however, bring as good a price as Banks or offshore fish.
The prosperity of the Newfoundlanders depends every year on the price
of cod. This may range from three dollars a quintal to the record
prices of fourteen and fifteen dollars during the World War. Just now
the price is depressed, and Newfoundland is feeling competition from
the Norwegians, who are underselling them in the western European and
Mediterranean markets. Consequently, many Newfoundlanders, especially
the young people, are emigrating to the United States. Some of the men
go to New England and engage in the Massachusetts fisheries. Others
ship on merchant vessels, while the girls are attracted by high wages
paid in our stores, offices, and factories.
I have made some inquiries about the earnings of the Newfoundland
fisherman, and find his net cash income amounts to but three or four
hundred dollars a year. While he builds his own boat, he has to buy his
engine, gasoline, and oil. He must buy twine and pitch for his nets,
cord and hooks for his baited lines, and salt for pickling. A fisherman
usually figures on making enough from the cod livers and their oil to
pay his salt bill. The bones and entrails and also the livers after the
oil has been removed are used as fertilizer.
The fisherman usually has no other source of income than his catch, and
during the winter he does little except prepare for the next season. He
goes in debt to the merchant who furnishes his outfit and the supplies
for his family. His catch for the year may or may not bring as much
as the amount he owes, but he must deliver it, at the current price,
to the firm that gave him credit. This system accounts for the big
stores in St. John’s, some of which have made a great deal of money.
The merchants render a real service in financing the fishermen, whom
they carry through the lean years, but there are those who believe the
credit system has outlived its usefulness.
Some years ago a farmer-fisherman-mechanic named William Coaker
organized the Fishermen’s Protective Union, with local councils in the
outports. The union organized coöperative companies that now buy and
sell fish, build ships, and handle supplies of all kinds. It even built
a water-power plant to furnish electricity at cost to light the men’s
homes. A new town, called Port Union, was developed on the northeast
coast. This has become the centre of the Union activities, and there
its organizer, now Sir William Coaker, spends his time. The Union
publishes a daily paper in St. John’s. Its editor tells me that in the
last ten years the dividend rate paid by the F. P. U. companies was
ten per cent. for eight years, eight per cent. for one year, and none
at all for only one year. The Union went into politics, and for three
elections has had eleven members in the lower house. By combination
with other groups this bloc has held the balance of power. While the
Union has a strong voice in the government, the conservative business
houses seem to be the dominant influence here in St. John’s, where,
quite naturally, the fishermen’s organization finds little favour.
St. John’s is the centre for the Newfoundland sealing industry. This
is not the seal that yields my lady’s fine furs, but the hair seal,
which is killed chiefly for its fat, although the skin is used to make
bags, pocketbooks, and other articles of leather. The oil made from the
fat is used as an illuminant, a lubricant, and also for some grades of
margarine.
The annual seal hunt starts from St. John’s on March 13th. The sealing
steamers carry from two hundred to three hundred and fifty men each,
packed aboard like sardines in a can. The vessels make for the great
ice floes off the northeast coast, and it is on the ice that the seals
are taken. The animals spend the winter in waters farther south, but
assemble in enormous herds each January and start north toward the
ice. Within forty-eight hours after reaching the ice-field, some three
hundred thousand mother seals give birth to as many babies. The baby
seals gain weight at the rate of four pounds a day, and rapidly take on
a coating of fat about two and a half inches thick. When they are six
weeks old, they leave their parents and start swimming north. It is a
matter of record that the parents reach the ice and the young are born
in almost the same spot in the ocean, and on almost the same day, year
after year.
I visited one of the sealers. It happened to be the _Terra Nova_, the
ship in which Captain Scott explored the Antarctic. It was a black
craft, designed to work in the ice-fields and carry the maximum number
of men and seals. I held in my hands one of the six-foot poles, called
“bats,” with which the seals are clubbed to death on the ice. Once the
ship reaches the ice-pack, the hunting parties scramble overboard and
make a strike for the seals. The ice is usually rough and broken, and
a man must make sure that he can get back to his ship. Each hunter
kills as many seals as he can, strips off the skin and layer of fat,
and leaves the carcass on the ice. The skins and fat are brought back
to the ship. The baby seals are the ones that are preferred, for since
they feed only on their mothers’ milk, the oil from their fat is the
best. Seal hunting is exciting and dangerous work while it lasts,
though from a sporting standpoint baby seals can hardly be considered
big game.
[Illustration: During the winter season the red iron ore from the
Wabana mines is stored in huge piles. In the summer it is shipped by
steamer to the company’s steel mills in Nova Scotia.]
[Illustration: The annual race between schooners of the rival fleets
from Nova Scotia and Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a unique sporting
event. Every other year the contenders meet on a course off Halifax
harbour.]
The start of the annual seal hunt is a great occasion for St.
John’s. Two thirds of the proceeds of each catch are divided among
the crew, the steamer owner taking the balance. It is an old saying in
Newfoundland that “a man will go hunting seals when gold will not draw
him.” The ships usually return by the middle of April. In a good year
each man may get about one hundred and fifty dollars as his share.
From one hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand seals are brought
into St. John’s every year. At the factories gangs of skinners strip
off the fat from the hides as fast as they are landed. Sometimes one
man will strip as many as six hundred and forty skins in a day. The fat
is chopped up and steam cooked, and the oil drawn off into casks. The
skins are salt dressed.
One might think the seals would be wiped out by such methods, but the
herd does not decrease and remains at about one million from year to
year. The seals live largely on codfish, each one eating an average
of four every day. The estimated consumption of cod by the seals is
fourteen times greater than the number caught by the fishermen.
CHAPTER V
IRON MINES UNDER THE SEA
I have just returned from a trip through caves richer than those of
Aladdin. They lie far under the ocean, and their treasures surpass the
wildest dreams of the Arabian Nights. The treasures are in iron ore,
from forty nine to fifty two per cent. pure, and so abundant that they
will be feeding steel mills for many generations to come.
I am speaking of the Wabana iron mines, located on, or rather under,
Conception Bay on the southeast coast of Newfoundland. They are on an
island seven miles long, three miles in width, and three hundred feet
high. Along about a generation ago deposits of rich hematite ores were
discovered in veins that ran down under the water with a slope of about
fifteen degrees. They were gradually developed and within the last
thirty years millions of tons of ore have been taken out. The under-sea
workshops have been extended more than two miles out from the shore and
it is believed that the great ore body crosses the bay. The capacity
yield at this time averages about five thousand tons for every working
day of the year, and the location is such that the ore can be put on
the steamers for export almost at the mouth of the mines. The property
is owned by the British Empire Steel Company, made up of British,
American, and Canadian capital.
But let me tell you of my trip. I left my hotel in St. John’s in the
early morning. The rocky promontories that form the narrow entrance to
the harbour were canopied in light fog, under which fishing schooners
could be seen tacking back and forth, beating their way out to the open
sea beyond. As we drove out over the hills the moisture gathered on the
windshield of the motor-car so that we had to raise it and take the
fog-soaked air full in our faces. We went through King’s Road, where
many of the aristocracy of St. John’s reside in big frame houses with
many bay windows and much gingerbread decoration. They were set well
back from the street, and, in contrast with most of the houses of the
town, were surrounded by trees.
As we reached the open country, rolling hills stretched away in the
mist. They were gray with rock or red-brown with scrub. Here and
there were patches of bright green, marking vegetable gardens or tiny
pastures for a cow or goat. The growing season in Newfoundland is
short, and the number of vegetables that can be successfully raised is
limited. I saw patches of cabbages, turnips, and beets, and several
fields of an acre or more that had yielded crops of potatoes. Most of
the fields were small, and some no bigger than dooryards. All were
fenced in with spruce sticks. The houses were painted white, and had
stones or turf banked up around their foundations. A few farms had
fairly large barns, but most had no outbuildings except a vegetable
cellar built into a hillside or half-sunk in the ground.
Newfoundlanders follow the English fashion of driving on the left-hand
side of the road. It made me a bit nervous, at first, whenever we
approached another vehicle. It seemed certain that we would run into
it unless we swung to the right, but of course it always moved to the
left, giving us room on what an American thinks of as the “wrong side
of the road.”
We met an occasional motor-car, and many buggies, but every few minutes
we passed the universal vehicle of Newfoundland, the two-wheeled “long
cart,” as it is called. Strictly speaking, it is not a cart at all, in
our sense of the word, as it has no floor or sides. It consists of a
flat, rectangular frame of rough-hewn poles, balanced like a see-saw
across an axle joining two large wooden wheels. The long cart is the
common carrier of all Newfoundland. It is used on the farms, in the
towns, and in the fishing villages. One of these carts was carrying
barrels of cod liver oil to the refinery at St. John’s, while on
another, a farmer and his wife sat sidewise, balancing themselves on
the tilting frame.
After a drive of ten miles we reached Portugal Cove, where I waited on
the wharf for the little steamer that was to take me to Bell Island,
three miles out in the Bay. The men of the village were pulling ashore
the boat of one of their number who had left the day before to try
his luck in the States. The boat was heavy, and seemed beyond their
strength. Some one called out: “Come on, Mr. Chantey Man, give us
Johnny Poker,” whereupon one of the men led in a song. On the last
word, they gave a mighty shout and a mighty pull. The boat moved, and
in a moment was high and dry on the beach.
This was the chantey they sang:
Oh, me Johnny Poker,
And we’ll work to roll her over,
And it’s Oh me Johnny Poker _all_.
The big pull comes with a shout on the final word “all.”
After a few minutes on the little mine steamer, I saw Bell Island loom
up out of the fog. Its precipitous shore rose up as high and steep as
the side of a skyscraper, but black and forbidding through the gray
mist. I was wondering how I could ever reach the top of the island when
I saw a tiny box car resting on tracks laid against the cliff side,
steeper than the most thrilling roller coaster. The car is hauled up
the incline by a cable operated by an electric hoist at the top of the
hill. I stepped inside, and by holding on to a rail overhead was able
to keep my feet all the way up. Nearly everybody and everything coming
to Bell Island is carried up and down in this cable car.
From the top of the cliff, I drove across the island toward the mines,
and had all the way a fine view of the property. The mine workings are
spread out over an area about five miles long and two miles in width.
The houses of the miners are little box-like affairs, with tiny yards.
Those owned by the company are alike, but those built by the miners
themselves are in varying patterns.
The miners are nearly all native Newfoundlanders. They are paid a
minimum wage, with a bonus for production over a given amount, so that
the average earnings at present are about three dollars and fifty cents
a day. When the mines are working at capacity, about eighteen hundred
men are employed.
The offices of the company occupy a large frame structure. In one
side of the manager’s room is a great window that commands a view of
the works. Looking out, my eye was caught first by a storage pile of
red ore higher than a six- or seven-story building. No ore is shipped
during the winter because of the ice in the Bay, and the heavy snows
that block the narrow gauge cable railway from the mines to the pier.
Also, since the ore is wet as it comes out of the mine, it freezes
during the three-mile trip across the island. This makes it hard to
dump and load. Another difficulty about winter operations above ground
comes from the high winds that sweep over the island, sometimes with a
velocity of eighty miles an hour.
With the manager I walked through the village, passing several ore
piles, to one of the shaft houses. Trains of cars are hauled by cable
from the depths of the mine to the top of the shaft house, where their
contents are dumped into the crusher. From the crusher the broken rock
is loaded by gravity into other cars and run off to the storage piles
or down to the pier. The cable railways and crushers are operated by
electricity, generated with coal from the company’s mines at Sydney,
Nova Scotia. The same power is used to operate the fans that drive
streams of fresh air into the mines and to work the pumps that lift the
water out of the tunnels.
At the shaft house I put on a miner’s working outfit, consisting of
a suit of blue overalls, rubber boots, and a cap with its socket
above the visor for holding a lamp. These miners’ lamps are like the
old bicycle lanterns, only smaller. The lower part is filled with
broken carbide, on which water drips from a reservoir above and forms
acetylene gas.
I was amazed at the ore trains that came shooting up out of the mine
at from thirty to forty miles an hour, and trembled at the thought of
sliding down into the earth at such speed, but my guide gave the “slow”
signal and we began our descent at a more moderate rate.
I sat on the red, muddy bottom of an empty ore car. My feet reached
almost to the front and I could just comfortably grasp the tops of the
sides with my hands. It was like sitting upright in a bathtub. As
we plunged into the darkness, the car wheels roared and rattled like
those of a train in a subway. My guide shouted in my ear that the shaft
was fifteen feet wide, and about eight feet from ceiling to floor.
I noticed that some of the timber props were covered with a sort of
fungus that looked like frost or white cotton, while here and there
water trickling out of the rock glistened in the light of our lamps.
As we descended the air grew colder. It had a damp chill that bit to
the bone, and though our speed kept increasing there seemed to be no
end to the journey. Suddenly, out of the darkness I saw three dancing
lights. Were they signals to us of some danger ahead? Another moment,
and the lights proved to be lamps in the caps of three miners, drillers
who had finished their work for the day and were toiling their way up
the steep grade to the world of fresh air and warm sunshine.
Another light appeared ahead. Our train slowed up and stopped on a
narrow shelf deep down in the earth and far under the ocean. Just
ahead, the track plunged steeply down again into the darkness. We were
at the station where the underground trains are controlled by electric
signals. On each side curved rails and switches led off into branching
tunnels.
For an hour or more we walked about in the under-sea workings. At times
we were in rock-walled rooms where not a sound could be heard but the
crunch of the slippery red ore under our rubber-booted feet, or the
sound of water rushing down the steep inclines. At other times the rock
chambers reverberated with the chugging and pounding of the compressed
air drills boring their way into the rock.
We went to the head of a new chamber where a gang was loading ore into
the cars. There was a great scraping and grinding of shovels against
the flinty rock as the men bent their backs to their work. The miners’
faces were streaked with sweat and grimy with smears of the red ore. I
picked up a piece. It was not as big as a dinner plate, but was almost
as heavy as lead.
We rode out of the mine at top speed. Upon reaching the surface, the
air of the chilly foggy day felt positively hot, while the sunlight
seemed almost unreal after the dampness below.
[Illustration: Halifax has a fine natural harbour well protected by
islands and with sufficient deep water anchorage for great fleets. The
port is handicapped, however, by the long rail haul from such centres
of population as Montreal and Toronto.]
[Illustration: Cape Breton Island has a French name, but it is really
the land of the Scotch, where village pastors often preach in Gaelic,
and the names in their flocks sound like a gathering of the clans.]
CHAPTER VI
THE MARITIME PROVINCES
I have come into Canada through the Maritime Provinces, which lie
on the Atlantic Coast between our own state of Maine and the mouth
of the St. Lawrence. The Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
and Prince Edward Island. Their area is almost equal to that of our
six New England states, and in climate and scenery they are much
the same. Their population, however, is only about one million, or
little more than one fourth as many as the number of people living in
Massachusetts. These provinces were the first British possessions in
Canada, and like New England they have seen the centre of population
and progress move ever westward.
Nova Scotia is the easternmost province of the Dominion of Canada. Its
capital and chief city is Halifax, situated on the Atlantic on one
of the world’s best natural harbours. This is a deep water inlet ten
miles in length, which is open all the year round. Montreal and Quebec
are closed to navigation during the winter months on account of the
freezing of the St. Lawrence.
Halifax is six hundred miles closer to Europe than is New York, and
nearer Rio de Janeiro than is New Orleans. As the eastern terminus of
the Canadian National Railways, it has direct connections with all
Canada. With these advantages, the city hopes to become one of the
great shipping centres on the North Atlantic.
Halifax has long been noted as the most English city in Canada. It
was once the military, naval, and political centre of British North
America, and gay with the social life of British officers and their
ladies. Now, both the warships and the soldiers are gone, and the city
is devoting itself to commercial activities.
As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands
guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has
meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at
the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were
using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty
years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of
Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters
for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the
war of 1812, the American warship _Chesapeake_ was brought here after
her defeat by the British frigate _Shannon_. During our Civil War
Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of
some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of
this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations
England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that
thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the
battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet
of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what
happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the
sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the
Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets.
Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front
to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city
extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of
it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel.
Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax
and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one
of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was
eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions
ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving
the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast.
Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and
eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left
in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck
gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the
vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the
explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story
window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since
then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved
town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible.
For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the
blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons
wearing patches over one eye.
Standing on the hill across the harbour one sees the town of Dartmouth,
where much of the industrial activity of the Halifax district is
centred. There are the largest oil works, chocolate factories, and
sugar refineries of Canada. Vessels from Mexico, South America, and
the British West Indies land their cargoes of tropical products at the
doors of the works. Fringing the water-front are the masts of sailing
vessels and the smokestacks of steamers. Among the latter is a cable
repair ship, just in from mending a break in one of the many submarine
telegraph lines that land on this coast. Next to her is a giant new
liner, making her first stop here to add to her cargo some twenty-five
thousand barrels of apples from the Annapolis Valley. This valley, on
the western side of Nova Scotia, is known also as “Evangeline Land.”
It was made famous by Longfellow’s poem based on the expulsion of the
French Acadians by the English because they insisted on being neutral
in the French-British wars. It is one of the finest apple-growing
districts in the world, and sends annually to Europe nearly two million
barrels. Many descendants of the former French inhabitants have now
returned to the land of their ancestors.
Looking toward the mouth of the harbour, we see the new terminal, a
twenty-five million dollar project that has for some years stood half
completed. Here are miles and miles of railroad tracks, and giant piers
equipped with modern machinery, a part of the investment the Dominion
and its government-owned railway system have made to establish Halifax
as a first-class port. Beyond the port works another inlet, Northwest
Arm, makes its way in between the hills. I have motored out to its
wooded shores, which in summer time are crowded with the young people
of Halifax, bathing and boating. It is the city’s chief playground and
a beautiful spot.
But now take a look at the city itself, stretching along the
water-front below where we stand. The big red brick building just under
our feet is the municipal market. There, on Saturdays, one may see an
occasional Indian, survivor of the ancient Micmacs, and Negroes who
are descendants of slaves captured by the British in Maryland when
they sailed up the Potomac and burned our Capitol. Farther down the
hillside are the business buildings of the city, none of them more
than five stories high, and all somewhat weatherbeaten. I have seen
no new construction under way in downtown Halifax; the city seems to
have missed the building booms of recent years. Most of the older
houses are of stone or brick. Outside the business district the people
live in wooden frame houses, each with its bit of yard around it. One
would know Halifax for an English town by its chimney pots. Some of
the houses have batteries of six or eight of these tiles set on end
sticking out of their chimneys.
The streets are built on terraces cut in the hillside, or plunging
down toward the water. Some of them are so narrow that they have room
for only a single trolley track, on which are operated little one-man
cars. I stepped for a moment into St. Paul’s Church, the first English
house of worship in Canada. Its front pew, to the left of the centre
aisle, is reserved for the use of royal visitors. Passing one of the
local newspaper offices, I noticed a big crowd that filled the street,
watching an electric score board that registered, play by play, a World
Series baseball game going on in New York. The papers are full of
baseball talk, and the people of this Canadian province seem to follow
the game as enthusiastically as our fans at home.
My nose will long remember Halifax. In lower Hollis Street, just back
from the water-front, and not far from the low gray stone buildings
that once quartered British officers, I smelled a most delicious aroma.
It was from a group of importing houses, where cinnamon, cloves, and
all the products of the East Indies are ground up and packed for the
market. If I were His Worship, the Mayor of Halifax, I should propose
that Hollis street be renamed and called the Street of the Spices. Just
below this sweet-scented district, I came to a tiny brick building,
with a sign in faded letters reading “S. Cunard & Co., Coal Merchants.”
This firm is the corporate lineal descendant of Samuel Cunard, who,
with his partners, established the first transatlantic steamship
service nearly a century ago, and whose name is now carried all over
the world by some of the greatest liners afloat.
Another odour of the water-front is not so sweet as the spices. It is
the smell of salt fish, which here are dried on frames built on the
roofs near the docks. Nova Scotia is second only to Newfoundland in her
exports of dried cod, and all her fisheries combined earn more than
twelve million dollars a year. They include cod, haddock, mackerel,
herring, halibut, pollock, and salmon. Lunenburg, down the coast toward
Boston, is one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing industry, and
its schooners compete on the Grand Banks with those from Newfoundland,
Gloucester, and Portugal.
I talked in Halifax with the manager of a million-dollar corporation
that deals in fresh fish. He was a Gloucester man who, as he put it,
“has had fish scales on his boots” ever since he could remember.
“We operate from Canso, the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia,” he said.
“Our steamers make weekly trips to the fishing grounds, where they take
the fish with nets. They are equipped with wireless, and we direct
their operations from shore in accordance with market conditions. While
the price of salt fish is fairly steady, fresh fish fluctuates from day
to day, depending on the quantities caught and the public taste. Such
fish as we cannot sell immediately, we cure in our smoking and drying
plants.
“All our crews share in the proceeds of their catch, and the captains
get no fixed wages at all. We could neither catch the fish nor sell
them at a profit without the fullest coöperation on the part of our
men, most of whom come from across the Atlantic, from Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, and also from Iceland. Next to the captain, the most
important man on our ships is the cook. Few fish are caught unless
the fishermen are well fed. The ‘cook’s locker’ is always full of
pies, cakes, and cookies, to which the men help themselves, and the
coffee-pot must be kept hot for all hands to ‘mug up.’”
From Halifax I crossed Nova Scotia by rail into the adjoining province
of New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is a peninsula that seems to have
been tacked on to the east coast of Canada. It is three hundred and
seventy-four miles long, and so narrow that no point in it is more
than thirty miles from the sea. The coast does not run due north and
south, but more east and west, so that its southernmost tip points
toward Boston. The Bay of Fundy separates it from the coasts of Maine
and New Brunswick, and leaves only an isthmus, in places not more than
twenty miles wide, connecting Nova Scotia with the mainland. The lower
or westernmost half of the province is encircled with railroads, which
carry every year increasing thousands of tourists and hunters from
the United States. The summer vacationists and the artists go chiefly
to the picturesque shore towns, while those who come up for hunting
and fishing strike inland to the lakes and woods. Deer and moose are
still so plentiful in Nova Scotia that their meat is served at Halifax
hotels during the season.
The scenery is much like that of Maine. Rolling hills alternate with
ledges of gray rock, while at every few miles there are lakes and
ponds. Much of the country is covered with spruce, and many of the
farms have hedges and tall windbreaks of those trees. The farmhouses
are large and well built; they are usually situated on high ground and
surrounded by sloping fields and pastures considerably larger than the
farm lots of New England. In some places the broad hills are shaped
like the sand dunes of Cape Cod. At nearly every station freshly cut
lumber was piled up, awaiting shipment, while one of the little rivers
our train crossed was filled with birch logs floating down to a spool
factory.
Some two hours from Halifax we came to Truro at the head of Cobequid
Bay, the easternmost arm of the Bay of Fundy. Scientists who have
studied the forty-foot Fundy tides attribute them to its pocket-like
shape. The tides are highest in the numerous deep inlets at the head of
the Bay. In the Petitcodiac River, which forms the northernmost arm,
as the tide comes in a wall of water two or three feet high rushes
upstream. These tides are felt far back from the coast. The rivers and
streams have deep-cut banks on account of the daily inrush and outflow
of waters and are bordered with marshes through which run irrigation
ditches dug by the farmers.
[Illustration: With his poem of _Evangeline_, Longfellow made famous
the old well at Grand Pré, the scene of the expulsion of the Acadians
because they wanted to remain neutral in the French-British wars.]
[Illustration: When the tide goes out at Digby, vessels tied to the
docks are left high and dry. At some points on the Bay of Fundy the
rise and fall of the water exceeds forty feet.]
Truro is a turning-off point for the rail journey down the Bay side
of Nova Scotia through “Evangeline Land” and the Annapolis Valley,
and also for the trip north and east up to Cape Breton Island. This
island is part of the province of Nova Scotia. It is separated from
the mainland only by the mile-wide Strait of Canso, across which
railroad trains are carried on ferries. In the southern part of the
Island is the Bras d’Or Lake, an inland sea covering two hundred and
forty square miles.
[Illustration: Because of the deep snows in winter the Quebec farmhouse
usually has high porches and often a bridge from the rear leading to
the upper floor of the barn. The older houses are built of stone.]
[Illustration: Spinning wheels and hand looms are still in use among
the French Canadian farm women. Besides supplying clothes for their
families, they make also homespuns and rugs for sale.]
Though Cabot landed on the coast of Cape Breton Island after his
discovery of the Newfoundland shore, it later fell into the hands of
the French. They found its fisheries worth more than all the gold
of Peru or Mexico. To protect the sea route to their St. Lawrence
territories, they built at Louisburg a great fortress that cost a sum
equal to twenty-five million dollars in our money. To-day, hardly one
stone remains upon another, as the works were destroyed by the British
in 1758. Not far from Louisburg is Glace Bay, where Marconi continued
the wireless experiments begun in Newfoundland, and it was on this
coast, also, that the first transatlantic cable was landed.
Cape Breton Island was settled mostly by Scotch, and even to-day
sermons in the churches are often delivered in Gaelic. As a result of
intermarriage sometimes half the people of a village bear the same
family name. For generations these people lived mostly by fishing, but
the opening of coal mines in the Sydney district brought many of them
into that industry. The Sydney mines, which normally employ about ten
thousand men, are the only coal deposits on the continent of North
America lying directly on the Atlantic Coast. They are an asset of
immense value to Canada, yielding more than one third of her total coal
production. One of the mines at North Sydney has the largest coal shaft
in the world. Because of these enormous deposits of bituminous coal,
and the presence near by of dolomite, or limestone, steel industries
have been developed in the Sydney district. Ownership of most of the
coal and steel properties has been merged in the British Empire Steel
Corporation, one of the largest single industrial enterprises in all
Canada. It is this corporation, you will remember, that owns the Wabana
iron mines in Newfoundland.
In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and north of the isthmus connecting Nova
Scotia with the mainland, is Prince Edward Island, the smallest, but
proportionately the richest province in the Dominion of Canada. It is
not quite twice the size of Rhode Island, and has less than one hundred
thousand people, but every acre of its land is tillable and most of it
is cultivated. The island is sometimes called the “Garden of the Gulf.”
Prince Edward Island is a favourite resort of Americans on vacation.
It leaped into fame as the scene of the first successful experiments
in raising foxes for their furs, and now has more than half of the
fox farms in Canada. The business of selling fox skins and breeding
stock is worth nearly two million dollars a year to the Prince Edward
Islanders. The greatest profits are from the sales of fine breeding
animals.
Most of the west shore of the Bay of Fundy and many of its northern
reaches are in the third and westernmost of the three Maritime
Provinces. This is the province of New Brunswick. It is Maine’s
next-door neighbour, and almost as large, but it has less than half as
many people. The wealth of New Brunswick, like that of Maine, comes
chiefly from the farms, the fisheries, and the great forests that are
fast being converted into lumber and paper. Its game and fresh-water
fishing attract a great many sportsmen from both the United States and
Canada.
St. John, the chief city of New Brunswick at the mouth of the St.
John River, used to be a centre of anti-American sentiment in Canada.
This was because the city was founded by the Tories, who left the
United States after we won our independence. St. John to-day is a busy
commercial centre competing with Halifax for first place as Canada’s
all-year Atlantic port. It is the eastern terminal of the Canadian
Pacific Railroad, whose transatlantic liners use the port during the
winter. It enjoys the advantage over Halifax of being some two hundred
miles nearer Montreal, but, like Halifax, suffers on account of the
long railway haul and high freight rates to central Canada. As a matter
of fact, New England, and not Canada, is the natural market for the
Maritime Provinces, and every few years the proposal that this part of
Canada form a separate Dominion comes up for discussion. Such talk is
not taken seriously by the well informed, but it provides a good safety
valve for local irritation.
CHAPTER VII
IN FRENCH CANADA
Come with me for a ride about Quebec, the oldest city in Canada, the
ancient capital of France in America, and a stronghold of the Catholic
Church. We go from the water-front through the Lower Town, up the
heights, and out to where the modern city eats into the countryside.
The Lower Town is largely French. The main part of the Upper Town used
to be enclosed by walls and stone gates, parts of which are still
standing. The dull gray buildings are of stone, with only shelf-like
sidewalks between them and the street. Most of the streets are narrow.
The heights are ascended by stairs, by a winding street, and in one
place by an elevator. The old French _caleche_, a two-wheeled vehicle
between a jinrikisha and a dog-cart, has been largely displaced by
motor-cars, which can climb the steep grades in a jiffy. Even the
ancient buildings are giving way to modern necessities, and every year
some are torn down.
As a city, Quebec is unique on this continent. It fairly drips with
“atmosphere,” and is concentrated romance and history. You know the
story, of course, of how Champlain founded it in 1608, on a narrow
shelf of land under the rocky bluff that rises nearly three hundred
and fifty feet above the St. Lawrence. Here brave French noblemen and
priests started what they hoped would be a new empire for France.
Between explorations, fights with the Indians, and frequent British
attacks, they lived an exciting life. Finally, General Wolfe in 1759
succeeded in capturing for the British this Gibraltar of the New World.
Landing his men by night, at dawn he was in position on the Plains
of Abraham behind the fort. In the fight that followed Wolfe was
killed, Montcalm, the French commander, was mortally wounded, and the
city passed into the hands of the English. If General Montgomery and
Benedict Arnold had succeeded in their attack on Quebec on New Year’s
Eve, sixteen years later, the history of all Canada would have been
different, and the United States flag might be flying over the city
to-day.
The British built in the rock on top of the bluff a great fort and
citadel covering about forty acres. It still bristles with cannon, but
most of them are harmless compared with modern big guns. The works
serve chiefly as a show place for visitors, and a summer residence
for dukes and lords sent out to be governors-general of Canada. The
fortification is like a mediæval castle, with subterranean chambers and
passages, and cannon balls heaped around the battlements. Below the
old gun embrasures is a broad terrace, a quarter of a mile long. This
furnishes the people of Quebec a beautiful promenade that overlooks the
harbour and commands a fine view of Levis and the numerous villages on
the other shore.
The Parliament building stands a little beyond the entrance to the
citadel. As we go on the architecture reflects the transition from
French to British domination. The houses begin to move back from the
sidewalk, and to take on front porches. I saw workmen putting in double
windows, in preparation for winter, and noticed that the sides of many
of the brick houses are clapboarded to keep the frost out of the
mortar. Still farther out apartments appear, while a little beyond are
all the marks of a suburban real estate boom. Most of the “for sale”
signs are in both French and English.
Now come with me and look at another Quebec, of which you probably have
never heard. The city is built, as you know, where the St. Charles
River flows into the St. Lawrence. The valley of the St. Charles has
become a great hive of industry, and contains the homes of thousands
of French workers. Looking down upon it from the ancient Martello
Tower on the heights of the Upper Town, we see a wilderness of factory
walls, church spires, and the roofs of homes. Beyond them great fields
slope upward, finally losing themselves in the wooded foothills of
the Laurentian Mountains. Cotton goods, boots and shoes, tobacco, and
clothing are manufactured here. It was from this valley that workers
for the textile and shoe industries of New England were recruited by
thousands. A few miles upstream is the village of Indian Lorette, where
descendants of a Huron tribe, Christianized by the French centuries
ago, make leather moccasins for lumberjacks and slippers for American
souvenir buyers. A big fur company also has a fox farm near Indian
Lorette.
Quebec was once the chief port of Canada, but when the river was
dredged up to Montreal it fell far behind. All but the largest
transatlantic liners can now sail for Europe from Montreal, though
they make Quebec a port of call. Quebec is five hundred miles nearer
Liverpool than is New York, and passengers using this route have two
days less in the open sea. The navigation season is about eight months.
The port has rail connections with all Canada and the United States.
Above the city is the world’s longest cantilever bridge, on which
trains cross the river. After two failures the great central span, six
hundred and forty feet long, was raised from floating barges and put
into place one hundred and fifty feet above the water.
In the English atmosphere of the Maritime Provinces I felt quite at
home, but here I seem to be in a foreign land, and time has been pushed
back a century or so. We think of Canada as British, and assume that
English is the national language. But in Quebec, its largest province,
containing about one fifth of the total area, nearly nine tenths of the
people are French and speak the French language. They number almost one
fourth of the population of the Dominion.
Quebec is larger than Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California
combined; it is nearly as big as all our states east of the Mississippi
River put together. Covering an area of seven hundred thousand square
miles, it reaches from the northern borders of New York and New England
to the Arctic Ocean; from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador
westward to Hudson Bay and the Ottawa River. Most Americans see that
part of Quebec along the St. Lawrence between the capital and Montreal,
but only one fourteenth of the total area of the province lies south of
the river. The St. Lawrence is more than nineteen hundred miles long,
and Quebec extends along its north bank for almost the entire distance.
Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1535 and claimed
possession of the new land in the name of “Christ and France.” Later,
French soldiers and priests pushed their way up the river, explored
the Great Lakes, and went down the Mississippi. It was French fur
traders, fishermen, and farmers who opened up and populated eastern
Canada. With no immigration from France since British rule began, the
population of the province of Quebec has had a natural increase from
about sixty thousand to more than two millions. The average family
numbers from six to eight persons, while families of twelve and
fourteen children are common. Quebec maintains the highest birth rate
of any province in Canada. It has also the highest death rate, but
there is a large net gain every year.
Quebec is one of the chief reservoirs of Canada’s natural wealth.
It leads all other provinces in its production of pulpwood, and
contributes more than one half the Dominion’s output of pulp and paper.
It is second only to British Columbia and Ontario in lumber production,
while its northern reaches contain the last storehouse of natural furs
left on our continent.
Canada is one of the world’s great sources of water-power. Nearly
half of that already developed is in the province of Quebec, and her
falling waters are now yielding more than a million horse-power. Tens
of thousands of additional units are being put to work every year,
while some five million horse-power are in reserve. It would take eight
million tons of coal a year to supply as much power as Quebec now gets
from water.
[Illustration: The ancient citadel on the heights of Quebec is now
dwarfed by a giant castle-like hotel that helps make the American
Gibraltar a tourist resort. Its windows command a magnificent view of
the St. Lawrence.]
[Illustration: The St. Louis gate commemorates the days when Quebec was
a walled city and always well garrisoned with troops. Just beyond is
the building of the provincial parliament, where most of the speeches
are in French.]
At Three Rivers, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec, the St.
Maurice River empties into the St. Lawrence. Twenty miles upstream
are the Shawinigan Falls, the chief source of power of the Shawinigan
Company, which, with its subsidiaries, is now producing in this
district more than five hundred thousand horse-power. This is nearly
half the total power development in the province. Around the power
plant there have grown up electro-chemical industries that support
a town of twelve thousand people, while at Three Rivers more paper
is made than anywhere else in the world. Shawinigan power runs the
lighting plants and factories of Montreal and Quebec, and also serves
most of the towns south of the St. Lawrence. The current is carried
over the river in a thick cable, nearly a mile long, suspended on high
towers.
In the Thetford district of southern Quebec, power from Shawinigan
operates the machinery of the asbestos mines. Fifty years ago, when
these deposits were discovered, there was almost no market for asbestos
at ten dollars a ton. Nowadays, with its use in theatre curtains,
automobile brake linings, and coatings for furnaces and steam pipes,
the best grades bring two thousand dollars a ton, and two hundred
thousand tons are produced in a year. Quebec now furnishes eighty-eight
per cent. of the world’s annual supply of this mineral.
The Quebec government controls all power sites, and leases them to
private interests for ninety-nine year terms. The province has spent
large sums in conserving its water-power resources. At the headquarters
of the St. Maurice River, it built the Gouin reservoir, which floods
an area of more than three hundred square miles, and stores more water
than the great Aswan Dam on the Nile.
Quebec is the third province in value of agricultural production.
What I have seen of its farms convinces me that the French Canadian
on the land is a conspicuous success. For a half day I rode along the
south shore of the St. Lawrence River through a country like one great
farm. Nearly every foot of it is occupied by French farmers. Most of
the time we were on high ground, overlooking the river, which, where
we first saw it, was forty miles wide. It grew constantly narrower,
until, where we crossed it on a ferry to Quebec, its width was less
than a mile. All the way we had splendid views of the Laurentian
Mountains, looming up on the north shore of the river. Geologists say
the Laurentians are the oldest rock formation on our continent. They
are not high, the peaks averaging about sixteen hundred feet elevation,
but they are one of the great fish and game preserves of the world and
are sprinkled with hunting and fishing clubs.
In accordance with French law the Quebec farms have been divided and
sub-divided among so many succeeding generations that the land is cut
into narrow ribbons. Contrary to the custom in France, however, every
field is fenced in with rails. I am sure that the fences I saw, if
joined together, would easily reach from Quebec to Washington and back.
They did not zig-zag across the fields like ours, thereby wasting both
rails and land, but extended in a straight line, up hill and down,
sometimes for as much as a mile or more.
The standard French farm along the St. Lawrence used to be “three
acres wide and thirty acres long,” with a wood lot at the farther end,
and the house in the middle. As the river was the chief highway of
the country, it was essential that every farmer have water frontage.
With each division one or more new houses would be built, and always
in the middle of the strip. The result is that every farmer has a
near neighbour on each side of him, and the farmhouses form an almost
continuous settlement along the highway, much like the homes on a
suburban street. Each wood lot usually includes several hundred maple
trees, and the annual production of maple sugar and syrup in Quebec is
worth several hundred thousand dollars. The maple leaf is the national
emblem of Canada.
The houses are large and well built. They have narrow porches, high
above the ground, reached by steps from below. This construction
enables the occupants to gain access to their living rooms in winter
without so much snow shovelling as would otherwise be necessary. For
the same reason, most of the barns are entered by inclines leading up
to the second floor and some are connected with the houses by bridges.
The older houses are of stone, coated with whitewashed cement. With
their dormer windows and big, square chimneys they look comfortable.
I saw the signs of thrift everywhere. Firewood was piled up for the
winter, and in many cases a few cords of pulpwood besides, sometimes in
such a manner as to form fences for the vegetable gardens. This winter
the pulpwood in these fences will be sold. The chief crops raised are
hay, oats, beans, and peas. The latter, in the form of soup, is served
almost daily in the Quebec farmer’s home.
In the villages all the signs are in French, and in one where I
stopped for a time, I had difficulty in making myself understood. The
British Canadian resents the fact that the French do not try to learn
English. On the other hand the French rather resent the English neglect
of French, which they consider the proper language of the country.
Proceedings in the provincial parliament are in both tongues. French
business men and the professional and office-holding classes can speak
English, but the mass of the people know but the one language and are
not encouraged to learn any other.
When the British conceded to Quebec the right to retain the French
language, the French law, and the Catholic Church, they made it
possible for the French to remain almost a separate people. The French
Canadians ask only that they be permitted to control their own affairs
in their own way, and to preserve their institutions of family, church,
and school. They cultivate the land and perform most of the labour;
they own all the small shops, while most of the big business is in
the hands of British Canadians. Any slight, real or fancied, to the
French language or institutions, is quickly resented. The other day a
French society and the Mayor of Quebec made a formal protest to a hotel
manager because he displayed a sign printed only in English. American
moving picture distributors must supply their films with titles in
French. Menu cards, traffic directions, and, in fact, almost all
notices of a public character, are always given in both languages. Only
two of the five daily newspapers are printed in English; the others are
French.
[Illustration: In the old Lower Town are all sorts of narrow streets
that may end in the rock cliff, a flight of stairs, or an elevator.
Many of them are paved with planks.]
[Illustration: Miles of rail fences divide the French farms into
ribbon-like strips of land that extend from the St. Lawrence far back
to the wooded hills. This is the result of repeated partition of the
original holdings.]
Quebec is now capitalizing her assets in the way of scenery and
historic association, and is calculating how much money a motor
tourist from the States is worth each day of his visit. The city of
Quebec hopes to become the St. Moritz of America and the centre for
winter sports. The Canadian Pacific Railroad has here the first of
its chain of hotels that extends across Canada. It is built in the
design of a French castle, and is so big that it dwarfs the Citadel.
The hotel provides every facility for winter sports, including skating
and curling rinks, toboggan slides, and ski jumps. It has expert ski
jumpers from Norway to initiate visitors into this sport, and dog
teams from Alaska to pull them on sleds. Quebec has snow on the ground
throughout the winter season, and the thermometer sometimes drops to
twenty-five degrees below zero, but the people say the air is so dry
that they do not feel this severe cold. Which reminds me of Kipling’s
verse:
There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck.
When they asked: “Are you friz?”
He replied: “Yes I is----
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.”
CHAPTER VIII
STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND ITS MIRACULOUS CURES
I have just returned from a visit to the Shrine of the Good Sainte
Anne, where three hundred thousand pilgrims worshipped this year. I
have looked upon the holy relics and the crutches left behind by the
cured and my knees are sore from climbing up the sacred stairway.
The Shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, some twenty miles down the river
from Quebec, is the most famous place of the kind on our continent.
Quebec is the capital of French Catholicism, and Beaupré is its Mount
Vernon, where good Catholics pay homage to the grandmother of their
church. The other day a family of five arrived at Ste. Anne; they came
from Mexico and had walked, they said, all the way. Last summer two
priests came here on foot from Boston, and I talked this morning with
a man who organizes weekly pilgrimages from New England. Thousands
come from the United States and Canada, Alaska and Newfoundland. I saw
to-day a couple just arrived in a Pennsylvania motor truck.
On Ste. Anne’s day, July 26th, the number of pilgrims is often twenty
thousand and more. Special electric trains and motor busses carry
the worshippers from Quebec to Ste. Anne. For the accommodation of
overnight visitors, the one street of the village is lined with little
hotels and lodging houses that remind me of our summer resorts. For a
week before Ste. Anne’s day, every house is packed, and sometimes the
church is filled with pilgrims sitting up all night. Frequently parties
of several hundred persons leave Quebec on foot at midnight, and walk
to Ste. Anne, where they attend mass before eating breakfast.
The story of Ste. Anne de Beaupré goes back nearly two thousand
years. The saint was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the
grandmother of Christ. We are told that her body was brought from
Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and then to Apt, in France, which thereupon
became a great shrine. In a time of persecution her bones disappeared,
but they were later recovered in a miraculous manner. According to
tradition they were revealed to Charlemagne by a youth born deaf, dumb,
and blind. He indicated by signs an altar beneath which a secret crypt
was found. In the crypt a lamp was burning and behind it was a wooden
chest containing the remains of the saint. The young man straightway
was able to see, hear, and speak, and the re-discovered shrine became
a great source of healing. This was exactly seven hundred years before
Columbus discovered America.
The first church of Ste. Anne was erected at Beaupré in 1658. Tradition
says it was built by sailors threatened with shipwreck, who promised
Ste. Anne a new church at whatever spot she would bring them safely
to land. Soon after the shrine was established bishops and priests
reported wonderful cures, and since then, as the fame of the miracles
spread, the shrine has become a great place of worship. Churches,
chapels, and monasteries have been built and rebuilt, and countless
gifts have been showered upon them. The first relic of Ste. Anne
brought here was a fragment of one of her finger bones. In 1892, Pope
Leo XIII gave the “Great Relic,” consisting of a piece of bone from the
saint’s wrist. This is now the chief object of veneration by pilgrims.
On March 29, 1922, the shrine suffered a loss by fire. The great
church, or basilica, was completely destroyed, but the sacred relics
and most of the other articles of value were saved. The gilded wooden
statue of Ste. Anne, high up on the roof over the door, was only
slightly scorched by the blaze. It now stands in the gardens awaiting
the completion of the new church. The new building has been planned
on such a large scale that five years have been allowed for its
construction. Meanwhile, the pilgrims worship in a temporary wooden
structure.
The numerous buildings that now form part of the shrine of Ste. Anne
are on both sides of the village street, which is also the chief
highway along the north bank of the St. Lawrence. On one side the
fenced fields of the narrow French farms slope down to the river. On
the other, hills rise up so steeply that they seem almost cliffs. The
church and the monastery and the school of the Redemptorist Fathers,
the order now in charge of the shrine, are on the river side. Across
the roadway are the Memorial Chapel, the stations marking “The Way of
the Cross,” the sacred stairway, and, farther up the hillside, the
convent of the Franciscan Sisters.
[Illustration: In the province of Quebec nine tenths of the people are
French-speaking Catholics. Every village supports a large church, every
house contains a picture of the Virgin Mary, and every road has its
wayside shrine.]
[Illustration: In the heart of the business and financial districts
of Montreal is the Place d’Armes, once the site of a stockade and the
scene of Indian fights. There stands the church of Notre Dame, one of
the largest in all America.]
One of the Redemptorists, the Director of Pilgrimages, told me much
that was interesting about Ste. Anne and her shrine. He gave me also
a copy of the Order’s advice on “how to make a good pilgrimage.” This
booklet urges the pilgrim to hear Holy Mass as soon as possible. It
says that “the greatest number of miraculous cures or favours are
obtained at the Shrine after a fervent Communion.”
“After Holy Communion,” the Order’s advices continue, “the act most
agreeable to Sainte Anne and the one most calculated to gain her
favours, is the veneration of her relic.”
The act of veneration is performed by pilgrims kneeling before the
shrine containing the piece of Ste. Anne’s wrist bone. It is then
that most of the cures are proclaimed. The people kneel in prayer as
close to the shrine as the number of worshippers will permit. Those
who experience a cure spring up in great joy and cast at the feet of
the saint’s statue their crutches or other evidence of their former
affliction. In the church I saw perhaps fifty crutches, canes, and
sticks left there this summer by grateful pilgrims. At the back
of the church I saw cases filled with spectacles, leg braces, and
body harnesses, and even a couple of wheel chairs, all abandoned by
pilgrims. One rack was filled with tobacco pipes, evidence of promises
to give up smoking in return for the saint’s favours.
The miraculous statue of Ste. Anne, before which the pilgrims kneel,
represents the saint holding in her arms the infant Christ. On her
head is a diadem of gold and precious stones, the gifts of the devout.
Below the statue is a slot marked “petitions.” Pilgrims having special
favours to ask of Ste. Anne write them on slips of paper and drop
them into the box. After three or four months, they are taken out and
burned. On the day of my visit the holy relic was not in its usual
place in the church, but in the chapel of the monastery, a fireproof
building, where it had been moved for safekeeping. It was there that
I gazed upon the bit of bone. The relic is encased in a box of solid
gold and is encircled by a broad gold band, about the size of a napkin
ring, set with twenty-eight diamonds. The box is studded with gems and
inlaid with richly coloured enamels. All the precious stones came from
jewellery given by pilgrims.
I visited also the “Grotto of the Passion.” This contains three groups
of figures, representing events in the life of Christ. In front of the
central group is a large, shallow pan, partly filled with water and
dotted with the stumps of candles lighted and set there by pilgrims to
burn until extinguished by the water. The Grotto is in the lower part
of a wooden structure that looks like a church, built on the side of
the hill. Above is the “Scala Sancta,” or sacred stairway. Large signs
warn visitors that these stairs, which represent those in Pilate’s
house, are to be ascended only on the knees. There are twenty-eight
steps, and those who go up are supposed to pause on each one and repeat
a prayer. As I reverently mounted the steps, one by one, I was reminded
of the Scala Sancta in Rome, which I climbed in the same way some years
ago. It is a flight of twenty-eight marble steps from the palace of
Pilate at Jerusalem, up which our Saviour is said to have climbed. It
was brought to Rome toward the end of the period of the crusades, and
may be ascended only on the knees.
The stairway at Beaupré is often the scene of miraculous cures, but
none occurred while I was there. At the top the pilgrims kneel again
and make their devotions, ending with the words, “Good Sainte Anne,
pray for us.”
Near the church are stores that sell souvenirs, bead crosses, and the
like, the proceeds from which go toward the upkeep of the shrine. At
certain hours each day articles thus purchased, or those the pilgrims
have brought from home, are blessed by the priests in attendance.
Another source of revenue is the sale of the shrine magazine, which has
a circulation of about eighty thousand. Subscribers whether “living or
dead, share in one daily mass” said at the shrine. Pilgrims are also
invited to join the Association of the Perpetual Mass, whose members,
for the sum of fifty cents a year, may share in a mass “said every day
for all time.”
The Director of Pilgrimages told me that the past summer had been
the best season in the history of the shrine. The pilgrims this year
numbered more than three hundred thousand, their contributions were
generous, and the number of cures, or “favours,” large. About one third
of these, said the Director, prove to be permanent. The Fathers take
the name and address of each pilgrim who claims to have experienced a
miraculous cure, and inquiries are made later to find out if relief has
been lasting. The shrine has quantities of letters and photographs as
evidences of health and strength being restored here, and I have from
eye-witnesses first-hand accounts of the joyous transports of the lame,
the halt, and the blind when their ailments vanish, apparently, in the
twinkling of an eye.
I have referred to Quebec as the American capital of French
Catholicism. It is not only a city of many churches, but is also
headquarters for numerous Catholic orders, some of which established
themselves here after being driven from France. The value of their
property holdings now amounts to a large sum, and one of the new
real-estate sub-divisions is being developed by a clerical order. Many
of the fine old mansion homes, with park-like grounds, once owned by
British Canadians, are now in the hands of religious organizations.
The Ursuline nuns used to own the Plains of Abraham, and were about
to sell the tract for building lots when public sentiment compelled
the government to purchase it and convert it into a park. A statue
of General Wolfe marks the spot where he died on the battlefield. It
is the third one erected there, the first two having been ruined by
souvenir fiends.
The homes of the Catholic orders in Quebec supply priests for the
new parishes constantly being formed in Canada. They also send their
missionaries to all parts of the world, and from one of the nunneries
volunteers go to the leper colonies in Madagascar. Other orders
maintain hospitals, orphanages, and institutions identified with the
city’s historic past. Before an altar in one of the churches two nuns,
dressed in bridal white, are always praying, night and day, each couple
being relieved every half hour. In another a lamp burning before a
statue of the Virgin has not been extinguished since it was first
lighted, fifteen years before George Washington was born. Some of the
churches contain art treasures of great value, besides articles rich in
their historical associations.
Driving in the outskirts of Quebec I met a party of Franciscan
monks returning from their afternoon walk. They were bespectacled,
studious-looking young men, clad in robes of a gingerbread brown,
fastened with white girdles, and wearing sandals on their bare feet.
All were tonsured, but I noticed that their shaved crowns were in many
instances in need of a fresh cutting. These men alternate studies with
manual labour in the fields. In front of the church of this order is a
great wooden cross bearing the figure of Christ. Before it is a stone
where the devout kneel and embrace His wounded feet. Near by is also a
statue of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order, standing with one
foot on the neck of a man who represents the heretics.
There are in Quebec a few thousand Irish Catholics, descendants of
people who came here to escape the famine in Ireland. They have built a
church of their own. Another church, shown to visitors as a curiosity,
is that of the French Protestants, who, according to the latest
figures, number exactly one hundred and thirty-five.
Though a city of well over one hundred thousand people, Quebec has an
enviable record for peace and order and for comparatively few crimes.
The credit for this is generally given to the influence of the Church,
which is also responsible, so I am told, for the success of the French
Canadian in “minding his own business.” The loyalty of the people to
their faith is evidenced by the fact that even the smallest village has
a big church. Outside the cities the priest, or curé, is in fact the
shepherd of his flock, and their consultant on all sorts of matters. I
am told, however, that the clergy do not exercise the same control over
political and worldly affairs as was formerly the case, and not nearly
so much as is generally supposed. It is still true, however, that the
Catholic religion is second only to the French language in keeping the
French Canadians almost a separate people.
CHAPTER IX
MONTREAL
Following the course of the French explorers, I have come up the St.
Lawrence to the head of navigation, and am now in Montreal, the largest
city of Canada and the second port of North America. It is an outlet
for much of the grain of both the United States and Canada, and it
handles one third of all the foreign trade of the Dominion. Montreal is
the financial centre of the country and the headquarters for many of
its largest business enterprises. In a commercial sense, it is indeed
the New York of Canada, although totally unlike our metropolis.
In order to account for the importance of Montreal, it is necessary
only to glance at the map. Look first at the Gulf of St. Lawrence and
the broad mouth of the river! See how they form a great funnel inviting
the world to pour in its people and goods. Follow the St. Lawrence down
to Quebec and on by Montreal to the Great Lakes, which extend westward
to the very heart of the continent. There is no such waterway on the
face of the globe and none that carries such a vast commerce into the
midst of a great industrial empire.
Montreal is the greatest inland port in the world. It ships more grain
than any other city. It is only four hundred and twenty miles north of
New York, yet it is three hundred miles nearer Liverpool. One third of
the distance to that British port lies between here and the Straits of
Belle Isle, where the Canadian liners first meet the waves of the open
sea. The city is the terminus of the canal from the Great Lakes to the
St. Lawrence and of Canada’s three transcontinental railways. Vessels
from all over the world come here to get cargoes assembled from one of
the most productive regions on the globe. Although frozen in for five
months every winter, Montreal annually handles nearly four million tons
of shipping, most of which is under the British flag. It has a foreign
trade of more than five hundred million dollars. The annual grain
movement sometimes exceeds one hundred and sixty bushels for each of
the city’s population of almost a million.
In the modern sense, the port is not yet one hundred years old, though
Cartier was here nearly four centuries ago, and Champlain came only
seventy years later. Both were prevented from going farther upstream by
the Lachine Rapids, just above the present city. Cartier was seeking
the northwest passage to the East Indies, and he gave the rapids the
name La Chine because he thought that beyond them lay China.
At the foot of the rapids the Frenchmen found an island, thirty miles
long and from seven to ten miles wide, separated from the mainland by
the two mouths of the Ottawa River. It was then occupied by a fortified
Indian settlement. The presence of the Indians seemed to make the
island an appropriate site on which to lay the foundations of the new
Catholic “Kingdom of God,” and the great hill in the background, seven
hundred and forty feet high, suggested the name, Mont Real, or Mount
Royal.
Although the Indians seemed to prefer fighting the newcomers to
gaining salvation, the religious motive was long kept alive, and it was
not until early in the last century that the city began to assume great
commercial importance. During the first days of our Revolution, General
Montgomery occupied Montreal for a time, and Benjamin Franklin begged
its citizens to join our rebellion. It had then about four thousand
inhabitants. Even as late as 1830 Montreal was a walled town, with only
a beach in the way of shipping accommodations. The other day it was
described by an expert from New York as the most efficiently organized
port in the world.
I have gone down to the harbour and been lifted up to the tops of grain
elevators half as high as the Washington Monument. I have also been
a guest of the Harbour Commission in a tour of the water-front. The
Commission is an all-powerful body in the development and control of
the port. Its members, who are appointed by the Dominion government,
have spent nearly forty million dollars in improvements. This sum
amounts to almost five dollars a head for everyone in Canada, but the
port has always earned the interest on its bonds, and has never been a
burden to the taxpayers.
An American, Peter Fleming, who built the locks on the Erie Canal, drew
the first plans for the harbour development of Montreal. That was about
a century ago. Now the city has its own expert port engineers, and last
summer one of the firms here built in ninety days a grain elevator
addition with a capacity of twelve hundred and fifty thousand bushels.
A giant new elevator, larger than any in existence, is now being
erected. It will have a total capacity of fourteen million bushels of
grain.
[Illustration: Montreal’s future, like her present greatness, lies
along her water front. Here the giant elevators load the grain crop of
half a continent into vessels that sail the seven seas.]
[Illustration: On a clear day one may stand on Mt. Royal, overlooking
Montreal and the St. Lawrence, and see in the distance the Green
Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks of New York.]
The port handles at times as much as twenty-three hundred thousand
bushels of wheat in a day. It is not uncommon for a lake vessel to
arrive early in the morning, discharge its cargo, and start back to
the head of the lakes before noon. Rivers of wheat are sucked out of
the barges, steamers, and freight cars, and flow at high speed into
the storage bins. There are sixty miles of water-front railways, most
of which have been electrified. Every operation possible is performed
by machinery, and there are never more than a few workmen anywhere in
sight. Yet the grain business is a source of great revenue to the city,
and furnishes a living to thousands of people. One of the industries
it has built up is that of making grain sacks, of which one firm here
turns out two and one half millions a year.
But let me tell you something of the city itself--or, better still,
suppose we go up to the top of Mount Royal and look down upon it
as it lies under our eyes. We shall start from my hotel, a new
eight-million-dollar structure erected chiefly to accommodate American
visitors, and take a coach. As a concession to hack drivers, taxis are
not allowed on top of Mount Royal.
Our way lies through the grounds of McGill University, and past one
of the reservoirs built in the hillside to supply the city with water
pumped from the river. McGill is the principal Protestant educational
institution in the province of Quebec. Here Stephen Leacock teaches
political economy when he is not lecturing or writing his popular
humorous essays. Besides colleges of art, law, medicine, and applied
science, McGill has a school of practical agriculture. It also teaches
young women how to cook. It has branches at Victoria and Vancouver in
British Columbia. The medical school is rated especially high, and many
of its graduates are practicing physicians in the United States.
Now we are on the winding drive leading to the top of the hill. Steep
flights of wooden stairs furnish a shorter way up for those equal to
a stiff climb, and we pass several parties of horseback riders. All
this area is a public park, and a favourite spot with the people of
the city. See those three women dressed in smart sport suits, carrying
slender walking sticks. They seem very English. Over there are two
girls, in knickers and blouses, gaily conversing with their young men.
They have dark eyes and dark hair, with a brunette glow on their cheeks
that marks them as French.
Step to the railing on the edge of the summit. If the day were clear we
could see the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Like a
broad ribbon of silver the St. Lawrence flows at our feet. That island
over there is called St. Helene, bought by Champlain as a present for
his wife. Since he paid for it out of her dowry, he could hardly do
less than give it her name.
That narrow thread to the right, parallel with the river, is the
Lachine Canal, in which a steamer is beginning its climb to the
level of Lake St. Louis. The canal has a depth of fourteen feet,
and accommodates ships up to twenty-five hundred tons. The shores
of the lake, which is really only a widening out of the river,
furnish pleasant sites for summer bungalows and cool drives on hot
nights. Nearer the city the canal banks are lined with warehouses and
factories. Montreal’s manufactures amount to more than five hundred
million dollars a year.
There below us is Victoria Jubilee Bridge, one and three quarters
miles long. Over it trains and motors from the United States come into
the city. Another railroad penetrates the heart of Montreal by a tunnel
under Mount Royal that has twin tubes more than three miles in length.
The Canadian Pacific Railroad has bridged the St. Lawrence at Lachine.
Most of Montreal lies between Mount Royal and the river, but the
wings of the city reach around on each side of the hill. The French
live in the eastern section. The western suburbs contain the homes
of well-to-do English Canadians. One of them, Westmount, is actually
surrounded by the city, yet it insists on remaining a separate
municipality.
Mark Twain said that he would not dare throw a stone in Montreal for
fear of smashing a church window. If he could view the city to-day he
would be even more timid. Almost every building that rises above the
skyline is a church, and the largest structures are generally Catholic
schools, colleges, hospitals, or orphanages.
In the heart of Montreal’s Wall Street is the huge Church of Notre
Dame. It seats twelve thousand people, and in its tower is the largest
bell in America, weighing about twenty-nine thousand pounds. That dome
farther over marks the location of the Cathedral of St. James. It is a
replica, on a reduced scale, of St. Peter’s at Rome. It seats several
thousand worshippers; nevertheless, when I went there last Sunday
morning hundreds were standing, and within fifteen minutes after one
service was concluded it was again filled to capacity for the next.
Downtown Montreal is built largely of limestone. It has a massive
look, but skyscrapers are barred by a city ordinance. Erection of
modern steel and concrete office buildings is now under way, and they
stand out conspicuously against the background of more old-fashioned
structures. Big as it is and important commercially, Montreal seems
a city without any Main Street. St. Catherine Street has the largest
retail stores and the “bright lights” of theatres and cafés, but I have
seen more impressive thoroughfares in much smaller places at home. This
is essentially a French city, though less so than Quebec. The French
do not naturally incline toward “big business.” They seem content
with small shops, which since the days of their grandfathers have
grown in numbers rather than in size. They are by nature conservative,
and though they make shrewd business managers, they care little for
innovations in either public or private affairs.
I have visited the biggest market, the Bonsecours. It is quite as
French as those I have seen in southern France. This market takes up a
wide street running from the heart of Montreal down to the wharves. The
street is the overflow of the market proper, which fills a church-like
building covering an acre of ground. When I arrived the open space was
crowded with French farmers, who in the early morning had driven their
cars and light motor trucks loaded down with fruits and vegetables into
the city. Fully half of the wagons were in charge of women, who looked
much like those in the Halles Central in Paris. As I pressed my way
through the throng many of them called out to me in French and some
thrust their wares into my face and urged me to buy.
The mayor of Montreal is always a French Canadian, and he is usually
reëlected for several terms. I talked with His Honour and found him a
most pleasant gentleman. Discussing his city, he said:
[Illustration: In the French market one feels he is indeed in a foreign
land, and among a people of alien tongue. When he buys, however, he
discovers that the farmers understand perfectly when money does the
talking.]
[Illustration: Kipling did not endear himself to Montreal when he
called Canada “Our Lady of the Snows,” yet the people are really proud
of their facilities for winter sports, which include a toboggan slide
down Mt. Royal.]
“Montreal is thriving as never before. Our population is rapidly
increasing and we expect soon to have more than a million. We have
taken in some of the suburbs, as your great cities have done, and our
increasing opportunities are constantly attracting new people.
“I believe we are one of the most cosmopolitan communities on the
continent,” continued the Mayor. “About seventy per cent. of us are
French, and a large part of the balance are English Canadians. We have
also Americans, Germans, Belgians, Italians, and Chinese, besides large
numbers of Irish and Scotch, and some of the peoples of southeastern
Europe. We are the Atlantic gate to Canada, so that a large portion of
our immigrants pass through here on their way west. Many of them go no
farther, as they find employment in our varied industries.
“It costs us more than twenty million dollars a year to run Montreal,
but we feel that we can afford it. The value of our taxable buildings
amounts to nearly seven hundred and fifty millions, and is increasing
at the rate of fifteen millions a year. We have more than one million
acres of public parks, or in excess of an acre for every man, woman,
and child in the city.”
Montreal is one of the great sport centres of Canada. In the warm
months, the people play golf, baseball, football, and lacrosse. The
latter is a most exciting game, borrowed from the Indians, with more
thrills and rough play than our college football. It is a cross between
hockey and basketball. A light ball is tossed from player to player by
means of a little net on the end of a long curved stick, the object of
each side being to get the ball into the opponents’ goal. In the game I
saw, the players were often hit on the head and shoulders, and before
the afternoon was over there had been a good deal of bloodshed from
minor injuries. I was told, however, that this match was exceptionally
rough.
In the winter, hockey is the great game of Canada. Every large city has
its hockey rink, and, where there are many Scotch, curling rinks as
well. In curling, great round soapstones are slid across a designated
space on the ice toward the opponents, who stand guard with brooms. By
sweeping the ice in front of the approaching stone, they try to veer it
out of the course intended by the player who started it toward their
goal.
As far as the masses of the people are concerned, skiing, snowshoeing,
and coasting are the chief winter sports, and in them nearly everybody
takes part. In Montreal, toboggan slides are built on the sides of
Mount Royal, and its slopes are covered with young men and women on
snowshoes and skis.
Montreal used to build an ice palace every winter. Then the business
men feared the city was acquiring an antarctic reputation that would
discourage visitors. Consequently, organized exploitation of winter
sports fell off for a time, but this fall a fund of thirty thousand
dollars is being subscribed to finance them on a large scale.
CHAPTER X
CANADA’S BIG BANKS
There are more than eight thousand national banks in the United States,
but Canada has only sixteen. While new ones are organized in our
country every month, the number in Canada tends constantly to grow
less, and to-day is not half what it was twenty years ago. The banking
system of the Dominion is patterned somewhat after the Scotch, and was
worked out largely by men of that shrewd, hard-headed race. The people
think it suits their conditions better than any other. Certainly it
is true that while Canada has had its ups and downs, the people have
suffered far less than we from bank failures and panics.
One might think that with all the banking business of Canada
monopolized by only sixteen institutions, they might make fabulous
profits. However, such is not the case. I have before me the current
monthly statement which the government publishes regarding the
condition and operation of each bank. This shows that all are making
money, but their dividends range from six to sixteen per cent., and the
Bank of Nova Scotia is the only one that paid the highest rate. Nine of
the banks paid twelve per cent. on their capital stock last year, while
the shareholders of five got less than ten per cent.
In the United States a handful of business men can start a bank on a
few thousand dollars. Here it is not so easy a matter. Canadian law
requires a minimum capital of five hundred thousand dollars, half of
which must be paid in, before a bank can be chartered, and there are
other conditions to be met that make the establishment of a new bank a
big undertaking. The smallest bank in Canada, at Weyburn, Saskatchewan,
is the only one with a capital of less than one million dollars, while
the largest, the Bank of Montreal, has paid-up stock amounting to
twenty-seven and one quarter millions. The total combined capital of
all the banks is one hundred and twenty-three millions.
The great banks extend their service throughout the Dominion by means
of branches. These now number nearly five thousand, and new ones
are being constantly added. The branch plan is the most striking
difference between Canada’s banking system and ours, which prohibits
the establishment of branches except within a bank’s home city, and,
under certain regulations, in foreign countries. The larger Canadian
banks are represented by their own branches in every city, from coast
to coast, while the Bank of Montreal alone has more than six hundred
agencies. Nearly all the banks have their head offices in Eastern
Canada. Six of them are located in the province of Quebec, seven in
Ontario, and one each in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Three
of the banks in Quebec are controlled by the French Canadians. Their
combined capital is just under nine million dollars, or not quite half
that of the Royal Bank of Canada, the second largest in the Dominion.
An official of the Canadian Bankers’ Association has explained to me
some of the advantages of this system. He said:
[Illustration: When the discoverers sailed up the St. Lawrence to what
is now Montreal they thought these rapids just above the city blocked
their passage to China, and so named them “La Chine.”]
[Illustration: Montreal’s rise as a great port began a century ago when
the Lachine Canal was built around the rapids, and gave the city a
water passage to the upper St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.]
[Illustration: Many homes have the Rideau Canal and its fringe of park
at their front door. Built originally for military reasons, the canal
now makes possible a boat trip through the Rideau Lakes to the St.
Lawrence.]
“Our plan of branch banks is based partly on the principle that there
is more strength in a bundle of fagots joined together than there is
in the same number of sticks taken separately. Poor management or bad
times, under your system, may bring disaster to a single bank, whereas
with us losses in any branch would be easily absorbed in a great volume
of business covering the whole country, and the shock hardly felt at
all. Under our system it is a simple matter for a bank to concentrate
its funds in the districts where they are most needed, and money flows
easily into the channels where there is the greatest demand. This is
of the utmost importance to Canada, for we have limited capital, and
therefore must keep it liquid at all times.
“Canada is still a young country, not yet done with pioneering, and
its banks must lend a hand in promoting its development. When a branch
bank is opened in a tent or shack in a new mining camp, the people know
that the manager is there to give them service, and that he represents
a strong institution with millions in assets. A remote fishing village
or new paper-mill town is thus provided with banking facilities quite
as effective as those of Montreal or Toronto. The difference in rates
of interest charged is never more than two per cent., no matter how
remote from the money centre a branch bank may be. The only reason
it is ever higher is that where the operations of a branch bank are
small, the overhead expenses are proportionately greater, and must be
compensated for by the bank’s customers. In recent years our wheat
farmers of southern Saskatchewan have been getting money cheaper than
have the farmers of your North Dakota, just over the border. The banks
represented in our three prairie provinces frequently have more money
on loan in that territory than the sum total of the deposits in all
their branches in the same area.”
The banks of Canada all obtain their charters from the Dominion
government, and their operations are strictly defined by law. This
law, known as the Canadian Banking Act, dates from 1870, and it
automatically comes up in Parliament for revision every ten years.
Under the act, the banks are permitted to issue paper money, which
ordinarily must not exceed the amount of their capital. Shareholders
are made liable for the redemption of bank notes up to the amount
of twice the value of the capital stock. In addition, each bank is
required to keep on deposit with the government a sum equal to five
per cent. of its note circulation. This goes into what is called the
redemption fund, which was created to make it absolutely certain that
in case of the failure of a bank, all its notes will be redeemed at
face value. During the period from September to February, when the
crops are moving to market, the banks may issue notes to fifteen per
cent. in excess of their capital, but must pay a tax of five per cent.
on all such extra circulation.
Canada’s banks are not audited by government examiners, as with us,
but each bank must submit a monthly statement of its condition to the
Minister of Finance. These reports are more detailed than our bank
statements and are regularly published by the government. They show,
among other things, the amount each bank has loaned to members of its
board of directors, or to firms in which they are partners. The banks
are not allowed to lend money on real estate; this service is confined
to loan and mortgage companies. Nearly all the chartered banks of
Canada conduct savings banks and many of them also operate trust
companies. The activities of the latter are almost exclusively confined
to acting as trustees and as administrators of estates.
In the relations between the banks and the government, the Canadian
Bankers’ Association plays an important part. It has a semi-official
status, in that it was incorporated by special act of Parliament, and
is recognized as the joint representative of all the chartered banks.
It establishes clearing houses, supervises the issues of bank notes,
and manages the central gold reserves. The chief executive officers of
the Association are frequently consulted by the government on financial
questions.
During my stay in Montreal I had an interview with Sir Frederick
Williams-Taylor, president of the Association and general manager of
the Bank of Montreal, the oldest and largest financial institution in
Canada. In the Dominion, the chief executive of a bank is called the
manager. While the president occupies an important position as chairman
of the board of directors, he has not the same relation to the daily
transaction of business as is usually the case with us. Canada’s banks
are likewise distinguished for the long service of the men in charge of
their affairs. At the Bank of Montreal, for example, the president and
manager have put in, between them, nearly one hundred years with the
one institution. In all the banks, as a rule, the men in authority have
risen from the ranks to their present positions.
The Bank of Montreal is one of the great banks of the world. It was
founded more than one hundred years ago, about the time that James
Monroe was beginning his first term as President of the United States.
In those days, there was still fresh in the minds of the Canadians
knowledge of disastrous financial methods that had been common in
both the American colonies and Canada. In the time of the French, for
example, one of the governors, not receiving funds expected from home,
cut playing cards into small pieces, and wrote thereon the government’s
promises to pay. These he distributed among his unpaid soldiers, and
“card money,” as it was called, continued to circulate for a great many
years. Our own colony of Massachusetts, learning of this easy method
of “making” money, produced a similar currency which later led to the
phrase “not worth a continental.” Even after banks were established
in Canada, their notes had different values in various parts of the
country.
The home of the Bank of Montreal in St. James Street faces the old
Place d’Armes, a large square where formerly stood the stockade built
for protection against the Indians. Now it is the centre of the
financial district of Montreal, and, indeed, of all Canada. Of the
total capital of Canada’s banks, considerably more than half is held by
institutions having their main offices in this city.
When I went to call upon Sir Frederick, I passed through a doorway
supported by huge Corinthian pillars. Once inside, I found a banking
room larger than any I have ever seen in the United States. Its great
size, and the rows of counters and wicket windows reminded me somewhat
of the New York railroad stations and their batteries of ticket
offices. The roof, more than one hundred feet above the floor, is
supported by columns of black granite from Vermont, each as big around
as a flour barrel and as bright as polished jet. The building has not
the shine and new look of some of our great banks, but everything
about it is stately, and the servants are as imposing as those of the
Bank of England. A sleek, black-haired attendant, who looked like Jerry
Cruncher, wearing a blue suit trimmed with red and a bright red vest
with brass buttons, ushered me into Sir Frederick’s office.
In speaking about Canadian banking, Sir Frederick said:
“By means of our branches in all parts of Canada we have our hand
on the pulse of the whole country. Every one of the great banks
receives constantly from its own representatives accurate information
of the state of business in his locality. We do not have to depend
upon friendly correspondents or outside agencies, but know promptly
and at first hand just what is going on. In this way we can always
anticipate the needs of a particular section, and act accordingly. We
can see the signs of any trouble ahead, and adopt measures to prevent
disaster. The managers of our branches are responsible directly to us,
and are therefore not likely to be influenced so much by purely local
considerations as might be the case under a different system. On the
other hand, it is our practice to include in our board of directors men
who reside in western and central Canada, and are therefore in close
touch with conditions in those sections.”
“With such sources of information,” I said, “you should be in a
position to judge of the condition of Canada as a whole. I wish you
would tell me, Sir Frederick, just how you see her situation?”
“Canada is suffering from three great disadvantages,” he replied. “I
don’t wish to emphasize our troubles, but there is no country without
them, and we have our share, just as does the United States. Our
handicaps are the high cost of living, high taxation, and loss of
population.”
“But is Canada losing population?” I asked.
“I have mentioned these difficulties in the inverse order of their
importance,” said Sir Frederick. “Our loss of population is not only
the most serious problem, but it grows out of the other two. Here we
are, a nation of some eight million people. To the south of us is your
country, with a population twelve times as great. You are the richest
country in the world to-day. Canada occupies the north end of the
continent, and while she is larger than the United States in area, and
can match you in some of her natural resources, there are some things
that we lack. For example, we cannot grow cotton. We have no hard coal.
Most of our soft coal lies on our coasts, while a great part of our
industry and population is located in the eastern and central sections
of the country. This year, I believe, our bill for coal from the United
States will be something like one hundred and twenty-five million
dollars, or nearly thirteen dollars per capita of our total population.
“We used to be a country of low costs and low taxes,” continued Sir
Frederick. “Now we are nearly up to you with regard to both the cost of
living and high taxes. On the other hand, you have created a partial
vacuum in the United States by your restrictions on immigration. These
do not, however, apply to Canadians. Just as great bodies exercise a
certain power of attraction upon smaller ones, so your one hundred and
ten millions draw upon our eight millions. You are admitting fewer
immigrants than your country could easily absorb, with the result that
you afford opportunities to our people to better their condition.
Strange as it may seem to you, there are many of us who prefer, no
matter what happens, to live our lives under the British flag, but
there are also others to whom this does not seem so important. It is
they who drift over to you.”
While Sir Frederick thus outlined the problems confronting his country,
his further remarks made it quite clear that he firmly believes in her
future and is proud that he has a part in her development.
In talking with business men, I find that they consider that Canada
has been especially fortunate in the extension of her banks abroad.
The Royal Bank of Canada and others have branches in the United States
and Great Britain, as well as in France and Spain. The branch banks of
Canada furnish the entire banking system of Newfoundland, and I have
myself done business with their branches in the course of my travels
in South and Central America, the British and other European West
Indies, Cuba, and Mexico. Canada’s branch banks have gone to those
countries with which the Dominion has the largest foreign trade, and
are an important factor in promoting Canadian business abroad. They
furnish Canadian exporters with first hand data on markets, tariffs,
and credits in foreign countries. They help to finance exports and also
aid the importers to secure materials they need from other lands. An
American banking expert has made the statement that with the exception
of Great Britain, Canada has the best banking facilities for foreign
trade of any country in the world.
I find that the Dominion is gaining in financial strength. In the last
ten years the assets of her banks have increased seventy per cent., and
the bank deposits have practically doubled. At the same time the value
of her production, both in agriculture and industry, has mounted far
above what it was before the World War. There is much evidence to show
that the people themselves are better off than they used to be. For one
thing, they have nearly two thousand million dollars on deposit in the
chartered banks, an average of one hundred and eighty-eight dollars per
person. They are buying more life insurance than ever before, the total
value of the policies now in force in Canada amounting to over three
thousand five hundred millions of dollars. If they continue to increase
at the present rate, by 1947 the lives of Canadians will be insured
to the amount of more than twelve thousand millions. This insurance
represents a sum that will be sufficient to buy three million homes,
to keep in comfort sixteen hundred and eighty thousand people, or to
educate about four million Canadian children.
[Illustration: “From my window overlooking the wooded ravine through
which the Rideau Canal descends in locks to the Ottawa River. I can see
the towers of the university-like quadrangle of government buildings.”]
[Illustration: The library of Parliament stands on the high bank of the
Ottawa River, a bit of old England in the Canadian capital. It survived
the fire that destroyed the House and Senate chambers.]
CHAPTER XI
OTTAWA--THE CAPITAL OF THE DOMINION
I have come to Ottawa to get a “close-up” of the government of Canada,
and to see for myself if the city deserves its name, the “Washington
of the North.” Ottawa gives one an impression of vigour, youth, and
energy. It seems up to the minute, and not hanging on the coat-tails of
the past like Quebec. It has some of the English flavour of Halifax,
but is more modern. Like Washington, it is built on plans that, as they
are developed, will emphasize its natural beauties.
Ottawa is becoming a centre of intellectual life as well as of
political activity. The city is attracting people of wealth and
leisure who find it a pleasant place of residence for all or a part
of the year. The government service includes men and women of unusual
attainments, who are less likely to lose their places on account of
politics than those holding similar offices in the United States.
Ottawa is also becoming the headquarters for scientific and other
organizations, and is developing rapidly as an educational centre.
Washington has the Potomac, but this capital is on the banks of two
rivers, the Ottawa and the Rideau. Its site was chosen only after a
bitter struggle between rival cities. Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, and
Toronto each wanted the honour, but in 1859 all gracefully accepted
the arbitration of Queen Victoria, who chose Ottawa. It was then a
town of less than ten thousand people. It now has more than one hundred
thousand. It lies in the province of Ontario, but is separated from
Quebec only by the Ottawa River.
In contrast with our national capital, Ottawa is an important city
in its own right aside from the presence of the Dominion government.
It is one of the chief lumber centres of all Canada, and besides saw
mills and paper mills, has a match factory that is among the largest in
the world. These industries are run by water-power. Ottawa is at the
head of navigation of the Ottawa River, which here is broken by the
Chaudière Falls. When Champlain saw these falls the tumbling waters
presented a beautiful spectacle. Now they are reduced and obscured
by mills and power stations. There is about two million horse-power
available within fifty miles, one twentieth of which is developed.
Many of the industries based on the water-powers and the lumber of
the Ottawa district are in Hull, across the river. Hull has about
thirty thousand people, nearly all French Canadians. Its population
is temporarily increased each evening, as streams of Ottawans cross
the bridges from the bone dry province of Ontario to the beer and wine
cafés of the adjoining territory.
To appreciate all the beauties of the capital one must ride over its
thirty miles of boulevards and park drives. The Rideau Canal flows
through the heart of the city, giving a picturesque appearance to its
business districts, and lending a delightful aspect to the streets
and homes in the residential sections. There are block after block of
attractive houses that have the canal at their front doors, and others
with the canal in the rear. I noticed more than one canoe moored, so
to speak, in a backyard.
Indeed, the city seems entirely surrounded by water and parks. Besides
the Rideau Canal, there is the river of the same name, with well-kept
parks along its banks. The most commanding sites on the hillsides
overlooking the rivers are occupied by fine public buildings and
millionaires’ residences. There are numerous yacht and canoe clubs,
while on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, above the Chaudière
Falls, are several golf courses. In their clubs the Canadians seem to
be content to do things on a less elaborate scale than is common in the
States, thus making it possible for men and women of moderate means to
belong without feeling extravagant. In fact, though none know better
than the Canadians how to entertain elaborately whenever they choose to
do so, they live more simply than we, and spend more time in outdoor
recreations.
Imagine yourself at my side as I write these words, and look with me
out of my hotel window. We are in the Château Laurier, a modern hotel
built of light-coloured stone in the design of a French chateau. It
was erected by the Grand Trunk Railroad, but now, like the railroad,
is operated by the government. It faces Connaught Square, opposite the
Union Station, with which it is connected by an underground passage.
If we were to fall from our window, we should land on the bank of the
Rideau Canal as it comes out from under Connaught Square. The canal
divides Ottawa into two parts. East of the canal is Lower Town, where
most of the French residents live. To the east also is Sandy Hill, a
fine residential quarter. Just below us the canal descends through
a ravine down to the level of the Ottawa River. Here there are six
locks forming a water stairway. The canal connects the Ottawa River
with Kingston, on Lake Ontario. It was constructed chiefly for military
purposes. After the War of 1812, the Canadians felt that they needed
an inland waterway between Montreal and the Lakes that would not be
exposed to attack from the American side. For many years Ottawa bore
the name of Bytown, after a military engineer, Colonel By, who built
the canal.
Now look across the ravine through which the canal drops down to the
river. There are the government buildings, arranged in a quadrangle.
They are massive structures of rough stone and Gothic architecture
that crown the bluff one hundred and sixty feet above the water. They
look more like one of our universities than any of our capitols. The
Parliament building, with its back to the river, forms one side of the
quadrangle. In front of it are several acres of lawn that slope gently
down to Wellington Street. Facing the Parliament building are other
government offices, business buildings, and the white marble home of
the Rideau Club, where politicians from all Canada gather during the
legislative sessions.
The government has bought several city blocks near the Parliament
quadrangle, on which it will some day erect appropriate structures
to house its various departments. Some of them, meanwhile, are
accommodated in all sorts of office buildings and remodelled dwellings,
a condition that also reminds me of Washington. This fact shows,
too, that in the face of the continual cry for greater economy the
government machine in Canada is, like our own, getting bigger every
year.
The present Parliament house is a new building that will have cost,
when complete, nearly twelve million dollars. It is on the site and
about the size of the one burned in 1916, except that it has one story
more, and its square Gothic tower will be within two feet as high
as the dome of the United States Capitol. The entrance hall, which
forms the base of this tower, is a veritable forest of pillars that
uphold Gothic arches. The arches and walls have a dappled gray-white
appearance, due to fossils in the Selkirk limestone. Arched corridors
lead to the Senate wing on the right, to the House of Commons on
the left, and straight ahead into the library, the only part of the
original building not destroyed by the fire.
I found the Senate chamber a beautiful room, handsomely appointed.
Its walls are lined with large paintings of Canadian troops in action
in the World War. The ninety-six senators who represent the various
provinces are appointed for life by the government in power whenever
vacancies occur. Seats in this body are often handed out as political
plums. The Canadian Senate has not nearly as much power in national
affairs as the upper house of our Congress, but a seat in it means both
honour and a living.
The House of Commons, the real arena of Canadian political life, is a
long, high-ceilinged room, with a broad aisle extending from the door
to the speaker’s dais. On each side of the aisle are rows of double
desks behind which sit the two hundred and thirty-five members. Those
belonging to the majority party are on the speaker’s right, and those
of the opposition on his left. The speaker’s big chair is patterned
after the one in the English House of Commons. I sat in it and found it
very uncomfortable. Above it is the coat of arms of Canada, carved in
wood from Westminster six hundred years old. All around the chamber are
galleries for visitors.
The members of the Canadian Congress are not as generously provided
for as ours. They get salaries of four thousand dollars a year, with
nothing extra for secretaries. Instead of cash mileage allowances they
receive railroad passes. The Parliament must meet every year, and the
sessions usually last from early in January until May or June. Because
of the tendency of members to go home before the adjournment, the House
passed a law imposing fines of twenty-five dollars a day for absences
during the final two weeks. Our Congress might do well to enact a
similar law.
Yesterday morning I drove out to Rideau Hall, a big gray stone mansion
in park-like grounds overlooking the Rideau and Ottawa rivers. It is
the residence of the Governor-General of Canada, the representative of
His Majesty, the King of Great Britain, and the nominal head of the
Canadian government. The Canadians pay him a princely salary, furnish
him this palatial country residence, and make him a generous allowance
for entertainment and travel. They sincerely desire that he enjoy his
five years among them, provided that he does not interfere in the
conduct of their affairs.
“Just consider,” said a Canadian statesman to me to-day, “that the
position of the Governor-General in Canada is identical with that of
the King in Great Britain. He is a symbol of the unity and continuity
of the empire, but his executive duties are purely formal, as he
must not take the initiative and must always get the advice of his
ministers. Control of the government may shift from one party to
another here as in England, but the Governor-General, like the King,
continues undisturbed in his office. When his term expires the King
names his successor, but no government in London dreams of making the
appointment until it has consulted with Ottawa and ascertained that the
man chosen is acceptable to us.”
The speaker was a man who has frequently held high offices in the
government. Like other Canadians I have met, he believes his country
has a more democratic form of government than that of the United States.
“You know,” said he, “we in Canada marvel at the strange spectacle you
sometimes have in Washington of a president of one party confronted by
a majority in Congress of another party. To us, responsible popular
government under such conditions is unthinkable. The majority in the
House of Commons always forms our government, or administration, as
you call it, and the majority leader becomes premier and head of the
cabinet. As long as it is supported by a majority of that house, the
cabinet is the supreme power of the land in federal affairs. As soon as
it ceases to be supported by the majority, it loses the right to govern
and a new ministry comes in. Under our system an election must be held
every five years, but it may be held oftener. For example, a prime
minister who has met defeat in the Commons may advise a dissolution of
Parliament and appeal at once to the people in a general election. You
Americans vote by the calendar, every two or four years; we vote on
specific issues as the need arises. Every one of our cabinet ministers
is an elected member of the House of Commons or a member of the Senate,
and must answer for all his official acts on the floor of the House.”
I asked as to the present attitude toward the United States.
“It seems to me,” was the reply, “the relations between Canada and
the United States were never better than they are to-day. The ancient
grudges on our side of the border, and the loose talk of annexation or
absorption on yours, are now happily things of the past. While we have
an area greater than yours, and vast wealth in natural resources, the
fact that our population is only one twelfth of yours means that you
will for years to come exercise a strong influence upon Canada.
“When you consider that the two countries have a joint border more than
three thousand miles long, on which there is no armed force whatsoever;
that they have created one joint commission that settles all boundary
disputes and another that disposes of questions concerning waters
common to both countries; that we are your second best customer and
that you are a large investor in our enterprises; that many of our
wage-workers have gone to you and many of your farmers have come to
us--taking all these things into consideration, one may say that the
two peoples have managed to get along with one another in pretty good
fashion.
“By closing your markets to us, through high tariffs, you sometimes
make things a bit difficult for some of our people. On the other hand,
we have erected some tariff barriers of our own. Our fisheries, fruit
industries, and manufactures now demand protection, just as your
farmers and others insist on having tariffs against some Canadian
products. Our people are divided by sectional interests, just as yours
are, and both governments have difficulty, at times, in reconciling
conflicting desires. But I think Washington and Ottawa will always
understand one another, and will work out successfully their mutual
problems of the future.”
[Illustration: Canada’s half million acres of timber contain fifty per
cent. of the forest resources of the entire British Empire. The revenue
from lumber and wood pulp ranks next in value to that from agricultural
products.]
[Illustration: It takes a woodpile as big as a large apartment house to
carry one of Ottawa’s pulp mills through the winter. These logs will
make enough news print to paper two roads reaching around the world.]
[Illustration: With the United States as a “horrible example”, Canada
is trying to safeguard her forest from destruction by fire or wasteful
cutting. Airplanes are frequently used by some of the provincial forest
patrols.]
Few Americans realize how independent Canada is. She pays not a
dollar in taxes to the British, nor does she receive any funds from
the Imperial Treasury. The relations between the Dominion and the
Empire are not fixed by law, but, like the British constitution, are
unwritten and constantly changing. Canada maintains a High Commissioner
in London, concedes certain tariff preferences to Great Britain and the
other dominions, and her premier takes part in the imperial conferences
in London. In all other respects she goes along in her own way and
does exactly as she pleases. She played a great part in the World War,
and would undoubtedly fight again, but only of her own free will. The
people regard the Dominion as a member of a “Commonwealth of Nations”
united under the British flag, and care little for talk of empire. They
have even passed a law putting an end to the system whereby the Crown
conferred titles on distinguished Canadians.
CHAPTER XII
THE LUMBER YARD OF AN EMPIRE
I am in the heart of one of the great timber producing districts of
Canada. Every year millions of feet of logs are floated down the
Ottawa River. This stream is eight hundred miles long, and, with its
tributaries, taps a vast area of forests that feed the maws of the
paper and the saw mills of the city of Ottawa. I have watched the
latter at their greedy work, which they carry on at such a pace that
the cry is being raised that the woodlands of the Dominion are being
denuded, and that conservation measures must be adopted.
I have seen great tree trunks squared into timbers so fast that it was
only a matter of seconds from the moment they came wet out of the river
until they were ready for market. My neck aches from looking up at log
piles as high as a six-story apartment, waiting to be converted into
matches in one of the world’s greatest match factories. You can imagine
the size of its output when I tell you that in one year it paid the
government nearly two million dollars in sales taxes. At other mills
piles of pulpwood, nearly as big, are soon to become paper, and in one
I watched huge rolls of news-print taken off the machines and marked
for shipment to the United States.
Canada is cutting down her forests at the rate of about three thousand
millions of feet a year. Still this is only a fraction of one per cent.
of the estimated timber resources of Canada, and the cutting can go on
for a century before the supply is consumed. In the area of her forests
the Dominion is exceeded only by Russia and the United States and she
is second to us in the amount of lumber produced. The British Empire
reaches around the globe, but half of all its forest wealth is in
Canada. Not only the United Kingdom, but South Africa, the West Indies,
Australia, and New Zealand depend on this country for a good part of
their lumber supply.
The Canadians are now getting from their trees a per capita revenue of
about seventy-five dollars a year, and this income their government
is trying to safeguard. They see in us a terrible example of the
extravagant use of natural resources. Of our eight hundred and
twenty-two million acres of virgin forest, only one sixth is left,
which we are cutting at a rate that will exhaust it in twenty-five
years. This does not allow for new growth, which we are eating up four
times faster than Nature produces it.
More than nine tenths of all the forest lands of Canada are owned by
the government, so that she is in better position than we to control
the cutting and provide for the future. In practically every province,
lands good only for trees are no longer sold, and one fourth of the
forest areas have been permanently dedicated to timber production. Each
province administers its own forests, and there is much similarity in
their conservation measures and other restrictions. The usual practice
is to sell cutting rights to the highest bidders, under conditions that
yield substantial revenues to the government and make it possible to
supervise operations.
It is estimated that two thirds of the original stands of timber have
been destroyed by forest fires, which are still causing enormous
losses. Large sums collected monthly from the timber users are being
spent for fire protection. Every railroad is compelled by law to
maintain extensive patrols on account of the sparks from locomotives.
Several of the provinces use airplanes equipped with wireless
telephones or radios to enable their observers to report instantly any
blaze they discover. Some of these planes are large enough to carry
crews of eight or ten men, who swoop down upon a burning area as soon
as it is sighted. In Manitoba an airplane recently carried firefighters
in thirty-two minutes to a forest that was three days’ canoe journey
from the nearest station.
Suppose we go up in one of these patrol planes, and take a look at the
forests of Canada. We shall have to travel over one million square
miles, for that is their area. One fourth of the land of the Dominion
is wooded. The forests begin with the spruces of the Maritime Provinces
and the south shore of the St. Lawrence and extend across the continent
to the Pacific slope, and northward to the sub-arctic regions. There
is still much hardwood left, especially north of the Great Lakes, but
the conifers, or evergreens, make up about eighty per cent. of the
standing timber, and furnish ninety-five per cent. of the lumber and
the pulpwood. In passing over southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta, we shall see a vast area of prairies, the lands which now form
the great wheat belt. The foresters say this land once had forests but
that they were destroyed by fire in ages past.
We see the finest trees near the end of our air journey. This is in
British Columbia, a province that contains the largest, most compact,
and most readily accessible stand of merchantable timber in all the
world. It has more than half the saw timber of Canada. In this area,
which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Douglas fir is the predominant
type. The trees are sometimes forty, fifty, and sixty feet thick, and
a single log will make a load for a car. A whole tree may fill a train
when cut into boards. Here sixty-foot timbers that will square two or
three feet are nicknamed “toothpicks.”
Twenty years ago the chief commercial wood of Canada was white pine.
It was then the aristocrat of the north woods, and was cut from trees
between one hundred and fifty and three hundred years old. Its place
has now been taken by the spruces, of which there are five varieties.
The spruces form about one third of all the standing timber of Canada.
The annual cut amounts to something like two thousand million feet,
or enough to build a board walk sixteen feet wide all the way around
the world. Notwithstanding this the government foresters estimate that
within the last twenty years insects and fires have destroyed twice as
much spruce as the lumberjacks have cut down.
Canada’s supply of spruce is of enormous interest to us, for it feeds a
great many of our printing presses. In one single year Canada has cut
as much as four million cords of pulpwood, and four fifths of this goes
to the United States in the form of logs, pulp, and finished paper. We
Americans are the greatest readers on earth. We consume about one third
of the total world output of news-print paper. Our presses use more
than two million tons in a year, or nearly twice as much as Europe,
which has five times our population.
A generation ago Canada had not a dozen pulp mills, and only ten years
ago its product was but one sixth that of the United States. Since
then our production has hardly increased, but the Canadian output has
so grown that it will soon exceed that of the States. Indeed, the
industry now ranks second in the Dominion. I have before me estimates
showing that machines already ordered for new mills and additions will
add to the Canadian capacity something like four hundred thousand tons
a year. Canada now has more than one hundred paper mills, and if all
were run full time at full speed, they would turn out nearly two and
one half million tons of paper in a year. The world’s largest ground
pulp mill is at Three Rivers, in Quebec, the great paper-making centre
I have mentioned in another chapter. That province has also the largest
single news-print mill, with machines that are turning out a continuous
sheet of paper more than nineteen feet wide, at the rate of about
eleven miles an hour, or eighty thousand miles a year. Not long ago one
hundred tons of paper a day was the largest capacity of any mill. Now
this is almost the standard unit in the industry. A four-hundred-ton
mill is operating at Abitibi, and plants of five-hundred-ton daily
capacity are already planned for.
It takes about a cord of wood to make a ton of news-print, or enough,
if rolled out like a carpet, to paper the pavement of a city street
from curb to curb for a distance of three and one half miles. A year’s
output of a hundred-ton mill would make a paper belt six feet wide
reaching four times around the waist of old Mother Earth. Take a big
Sunday newspaper and spread its sheets out on the floor. You will be
surprised at the area they cover. Now if you will keep in mind that it
sometimes takes more than a hundred tons of paper to print a single
issue you will realize how fast the forests of Canada are being
converted into paper sufficient to blanket the earth.
It is several centuries since Shakespeare found
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.
It remained, however, for our age, and especially North America, to
make these tree tongues speak. The world never had enough paper until
the process of making it from wood was discovered, and even now it
can hardly cut down its forests fast enough to satisfy the insatiable
demand of the printing press. I have visited paper mills in both the
United States and Canada, and have watched the miracle of transforming
a log into the medium of paper that carries the messages of our
presidents, the doings of Congress, the news sensations of the times,
or the strips of comic pictures we see every morning. Let me tell you
how it is done.
Most of the Canadian paper mills are located on rivers. The trees are
cut during the winter, and hauled on sledges over ice and snow to the
banks of the nearest stream. In the spring the logs float down with the
freshets, and the only transportation expense is the crews of men who
follow the “drive” and keep the mass of logs moving. Sometimes jams or
blocks occur that can be loosened only by dynamite. As the logs move
down stream the mills catch them with booms strung across the river.
Each mill picks out its own logs and releases the rest to continue
their journey.
Labour agents in Montreal, Quebec, and other cities are now recruiting
gangs of lumberjacks for this season’s operations. A single firm of
this city employs six thousand men and has two thousand at work in the
woods every winter. The lumberjacks live in camps, which each year are
pushed farther north as the forests diminish. The work is hard, but
the men are well fed and have no expenses, so that they can, if they
choose, come out of the woods in the spring with a good sum in cash.
At a mill, the logs are fed into the machinery by means of conveyors,
and they hardly stop moving until they come out as paper. The first
step is to cut them into two-foot lengths and strip off the bark. Then
they are ready for grinding. This is done in batteries of mills, each
containing a large grindstone making two hundred revolutions a minute.
Several of these two-foot lengths are put into a mill at a time, and
pressed against the grindstone in such a way that they are rapidly torn
into fine splinters. As the wood is ground up it falls into the water
in the lower part of the mill and flows off. I asked a workman to open
a mill I was watching to-day. As he did so I reached in and drew out a
handful of the dry pulp. It was hot, and I asked if hot water was used.
He replied that the water went into the mill almost ice cold, but that
the friction of grinding was so great that it soon boiled and steamed.
[Illustration: The increasing demands of our printing presses are
pushing Canada’s lumberjacks farther and farther into the forests to
cut the spruce logs with which the paper mills are fed.]
[Illustration: Some of the money voted the Toronto Harbour Commission
to prepare the port for the shipping of the future has been spent in
providing the people with a great beach playground at Sunnyside.]
[Illustration: Although Ontario leads all other provinces in its
industries, it is essentially an agricultural region, well adapted to
mixed farming. The farmers have many coöperative organizations that
also go in for politics.]
The wet pulp passes through various mixing and bleaching processes,
until it becomes a gray-white mush that looks like chewed paper. It is
then ready for the paper machines. It flows first on to a broad belt
of woven copper wire screening, many times finer than anything you
use in your windows. As it passes over this moving belt, some of the
water is sucked out, and a thin coating of pulp remains. This passes
on to a cloth belting that carries it over and under a series of huge
cylinders, heated by steam. These take out the rest of the water, and
the pulp has become a sheet of hot, moist paper. Shiny steel rollers
give the paper a smooth, dry finish. It is then wound on great
spindles, and made into the huge rolls that every one has seen unloaded
at newspaper offices.
In making paper, it is necessary to mix with the ground pulp a certain
proportion of sulphite pulp, made by a chemical instead of a grinding
process. For the sulphite the logs are cut into chips and put into
great vats, where they are steam cooked with sulphurous acid. The acid
disintegrates the wood, just as the stomach digests food, but it does
not destroy the fibre. The result is that sulphite pulp has a longer,
tougher fibre than the pulp obtained by grinding, and for this reason
it is mixed with the ground pulp to give the paper greater toughness
and strength.
Though it has not been very long since Canada discovered that her
pulpwood forests are worth more than her gold mines, she is far from
satisfied with the present situation. There is a growing movement in
favour of stopping the export of pulpwood to the United States and
insisting that it shall be manufactured into paper within the Dominion.
It is claimed that this will not only check depletion of the forests,
but will bring more paper mills to Canada. Those who support the plan
have calculated that Canada now gets ten dollars out of every cord of
pulpwood exported, half of which goes to the railroads. If all the wood
were milled before leaving the country, they say, Canada would get
five times as much, or fifty dollars instead of ten out of each cord.
The government has authority to enforce the prohibition demanded, but
the proposal meets with considerable opposition. The small farmers
especially say that they can now get better prices for the spruce cut
on their wood lots than if their market was confined to Canada only.
At the present time the total investment in Canadian paper and pulp
mills is about four hundred million dollars, and the wages and salaries
paid amount to over forty millions a year. To manufacture all the
pulpwood now cut every twelve months would require one hundred and
fifty million dollars additional capital, the erection of more than
thirty new mills with a capacity of one hundred tons a day each, and
eight thousand employees earning in excess of eleven million dollars a
year.
As a matter of fact, our own paper business has already moved to Canada
to a far greater extent than is commonly realized. Many of our largest
newspapers have not only their own mills in Canada, but they own also
the timber on thousands of square miles of forest lands. One estimate
says sixty per cent. of the timber resources of Canada are now owned or
controlled by Americans. The other day, while I was in Halifax, a group
of Americans bought the timber on a seven-thousand-acre tract in Nova
Scotia. There are many similar American holdings.
Canada’s water-power and her paper and pulp industry have been
developed together, and each is essential to the other. It takes
practically one hundred horse-power to produce a ton of paper a day,
and this means that the mills must locate near available water-power
or pay big bills for fuel. One of the water-power experts at Ottawa
tells me that on a recent date the paper and pulp mills were using more
than six hundred and thirty-seven thousand hydro-electric horse-power
every twenty-four hours, in contrast with only sixty-two thousand
horse-power in the form of steam. Some of the mills get their power for
only one tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour or one one-hundredth of what
residents of Washington, D. C, pay for their electric light.
CHAPTER XIII
TORONTO--THE CITY OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
Said an American whom I met in Toronto the other day:
“I don’t care for this place; it’s too much like home. When I travel I
want to see something different.”
I don’t know just what this man hoped to find here in the second
largest city in Canada. I fear that he expected to find Toronto so
inferior that he would be able to indulge in some boasting at the
expense of the Canadians. If so, he came to the wrong place, for,
judged by American standards, Toronto is thoroughly alive, first class,
and up-to-date.
Located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and the political and
commercial capital of Ontario province, Toronto is the “Chicago of
Canada.” It is larger than Buffalo or San Francisco, and nearly as big
as Los Angeles. It is the greatest live-stock market of all Canada,
and the chief butcher shop of the Dominion. Like Chicago, it is on
the route of the transcontinental railroad lines. It is the centre of
tourist travel to Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, and the vacation
lands of the North. It supplies the mines, the mills, and the farms
of a region rich in natural resources, and fast becoming as highly
industrialized as New England. Ontario does more than half of the
manufacturing of Canada, and one third of the factories of the province
are located in Toronto. Seven of the great chartered banks of the
Dominion have their home offices here, and the city is second only to
Montreal in its financial strength.
In Toronto, I find myself again in a city of twenty-story skyscrapers,
big department stores, and American “hustle.” It is, I suppose, because
it does not seem “foreign” that visitors from the States find this city
disappointing. The people are mostly of British extraction, and, unlike
Montreal, there are but few French, and comparatively few Catholics.
The city was founded by Tories from New York just after our
Revolutionary War, and it soon became the capital of Upper Canada. Our
soldiers burned it once and captured it twice during the War of 1812.
Its name Toronto, an Indian word meaning “place of meeting,” was chosen
about a century ago. Since then the city has doubled in population and
wealth every fifteen years.
In the residential districts, I saw scores of magnificent homes that
compare favourably with those of any of our large cities. The town is
built entirely of brick, and sixty-seven per cent. of the homes are
occupied by their owners. The residents, all of whom seem to belong to
a boosters’ club, tell me that they have the lowest death rate but one
of any city of five hundred thousand population in North America, and
that they have fewer deaths from tuberculosis than anywhere else on the
hemisphere.
I have been out to Queen’s Park to see the provincial government
buildings. Here also is Toronto University, the largest in the British
Empire, with several thousand students of both sexes. The park is
approached by University Avenue, a broad street with rows of elm
and chestnut trees on each side. There are many other schools and
colleges, making Toronto the educational centre of Ontario.
It was at the University of Toronto that Dr. F. G. Banting discovered
insulin, the new treatment for diabetes obtained from the pancreas of
cattle. Doctor Banting and his associates have since received many
honours. The Dominion government gave him seventy-five hundred dollars
a year for life, so that he might continue his investigations, while
the provincial government has established him in a chair of medical
research at Toronto University paying ten thousand dollars a year.
Instead of commercializing his discovery, the doctor had it patented in
the name of the university, and the royalties are devoted to research.
Toronto is about equidistant from New York and Chicago, and nearly
midway between Winnipeg and Halifax. It is only three hundred and
thirty-four miles from Montreal, but between the two cities are the
rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, which so far have prevented the lake
port from becoming accessible to large ocean-going vessels. The present
canals along the St. Lawrence can accommodate ships up to twenty-five
hundred tons, but Toronto has a plan for bringing ten-thousand-ton
steamers to her front door. She proposes to overcome the rapids and
shallows with lakes and canals, and at the same time utilize the fall
of water, which exceeds two hundred feet, to generate electricity.
The locks of the new and larger Welland Canal around Niagara Falls
have been built thirty feet deep and eight hundred feet long. When
this work is completed, the improvement of the St. Lawrence will be
the only thing needed to make possible the passage of deep-water ships
from the Atlantic to Lake Superior. The St. Lawrence project has the
enthusiastic support of the people of middle Canada, who see their
grain of the future going direct to Liverpool in steamers loaded at the
lake ports. This will cut down the freight charges on every bushel and
add millions to the farmers’ profits.
Our own middle western states also want this Lakes-to-the-Atlantic
waterway, but New York and Buffalo, which have grown fat on handling
freight from the Great Lakes, oppose it. So does Montreal, for fear
that her port might suffer, just as Quebec did when the St. Lawrence
was dredged out from that city to Montreal.
Since the St. Lawrence, for part of its course, borders the state of
New York, the project requires the coöperation of the United States.
The International Joint Commission, representing both Canada and
the United States, after investigation, unanimously approved it.
It recommended the construction of nine locks, thirty-three miles
of canals, forty miles of lake channel, and one hundred miles of
river channel improvements. It also recommended the construction
of a hydro-electric power plant near Ogdensburg, New York, which,
it is estimated, would produce sixteen hundred and forty thousand
horse-power, to be divided between the United States and Canada. To
do all this is comparable to the building of the Panama Canal. It is
estimated that the job will take about eight years and will cost more
than a quarter of a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, Toronto is so sure that the project will be carried out
that she has already spent more than twenty million dollars in getting
her harbour ready for the business she expects in the future. Her port
to-day is like a newly built palace, awaiting the birth of an heir to
the throne, with the king still a bachelor.
An island lying about a mile offshore from the city gives Toronto
a natural harbour. The Harbour Commission has built breakwaters,
channels, and anchorages, and erected piers and berthing spaces to
accommodate fleets of large tonnage vessels. So far, however, these
improvements are used mostly by passenger steamers handling the summer
tourist travel to points on the lakes and along the St. Lawrence. In
part the work of the Harbour Commission has already paid for itself. It
has reclaimed a large tract of marshland along the eastern shore of the
harbour and converted it into industrial sites, equipped with docks,
railroad tracks, and other facilities. There are now more than eight
million dollars’ worth of buildings and machinery in operation on this
area.
The Harbour Commission has developed the lakeside not only for
commercial purposes, but also for the use of the people. West of
the city it has built Sunnyside beach, a half mile long, with
accommodations of all kinds for seventy-five hundred bathers. Across
the harbour is Island Park, another great playground.
Toronto was the first city in the world to establish a municipal
athletic commission to promote sports and outdoor games. Though
baseball is not native to Canada, six thousand Toronto boys played in
regularly organized leagues last summer, and eight thousand soccer or
association football players were listed with the commission. The city
maintains two public golf courses, and there are country clubs, canoe
clubs, and yacht clubs.
Another publicly owned institution in Toronto is an _abattoir_, built
and operated by the city. Here any cattle dealer or local marketman
may have his animals killed under the most sanitary conditions. The
city owns also its waterworks and has a Hydro-Electric Commission
which furnishes power to its factories and homes at low rates. It has
invested more than two million dollars in grounds and buildings for
the Canadian National Exhibition, held here every September with an
attendance of over a million.
Its street railway system is Toronto’s latest and largest venture in
public ownership. Both the cars and the service are by far the best I
have seen anywhere in Canada, and few of our cities can show better.
The city paid forty-five million dollars for the property, and within
two years it had doubled the single fare area, increased the mileage
twenty-five per cent., built extensions out to the suburbs, replaced
antiquated cars with the newest and best, and speeded up service. On
the main lines, the cars are very large and during rush hours they
are run in twos, coupled together. In the newer cars the conductor
sits perched in a cage in the middle. Passengers enter by the front
door, and if they pass down the aisle to sit in the rear they pay the
conductor as they go by. If they take seats in the front half, they
do not pay their fares until they get up to leave by the door in the
middle. It is interesting to know that the first electric street car in
America was operated in Toronto.
Conservative Montreal looks upon Toronto’s plunges into public works
as the height of folly, and sometimes gives her sister city a lecture.
Replying to such criticism, a local paper said the other day it
supposed Montreal would have every Torontoan go to bed at night saying
these verses:
Oh, let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.
[Illustration: Unlike Montreal and Quebec, Toronto is a city of
sky-scrapers, and the Yonge Street canyon makes the American visitor
feel much at home. Toronto has hustle, enterprise, and the courage to
do whatever it pleases.]
[Illustration: Flax raising has become important in southwestern
Ontario. The crop competes with the best Russian product. The Canadians
use labour-saving devices to keep costs down to European levels.]
But Toronto comes honestly by its independent spirit and bold
experiments for the public welfare. The entire province of Ontario is
imbued with the same tendency. With an area eight times that of New
York, it is, next to Quebec, the largest province of Canada, and with
three million people, mostly of British extraction, excels them all in
population. It is richer in mineral wealth, agricultural resources,
and industrial development than any other province. The people believe
in their future and they show the courage of their convictions when it
comes to going in debt to back public enterprises.
The province owns a railroad that taps the Cobalt silver mining
district and the northern agricultural lands. The main line of the road
extends from the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National lines at North
Bay two hundred and fifty-three miles northward to Cochrane, where it
meets the northernmost of the three transcontinental routes.
A few years ago Ontario increased its expenditure for good roads from
two million dollars a year to nine millions. It created the Ontario
Hydro-Electric Commission, which generates and distributes more
electric power at lower rates than any other similar body in the world.
The province pensions needy mothers, and its public health service
furnishes serums and toxins free to the public.
The Ontario parliament has no upper house, but only a single chamber
to which members are elected by the votes of both men and women. Not
long ago the farmers’ organizations captured enough seats to give them
control of the government.
In Toronto I have seen so many familiar names on the factory buildings
that I have had to ask myself whether I was in a British Dominion or
back in the United States. These are the “branch plants” of American
firms, established here to be inside Canada’s tariff wall and to get
the benefit of the preferential tariffs conceded by Great Britain and
her dominions to Canadian products. From automobiles to silverware, and
from bridge steel to fountain pens, many of our best known American
goods are not only used but made in Canada. Some of the branch plants
bear the same names as at home, but many adopt for Canadian use
designations that give no trace of their American origin. For example,
world-famous corporations that use “United States” or “American” as
part of their names, are the “Dominion” this or the “Imperial” that in
Canada. This policy caters to the growing movement among the people
to buy only goods “made in Canada.” The American branch-plant system
accounts in part for the resemblance of Toronto to American cities.
On every hand I see electric signs, window displays, and bill-boards
bearing the same appeals to buy the goods that are so extensively
advertised at home.
No one knows just how many American branch factories Canada has,
but their number is well over one thousand. There are more than two
hundred in Toronto alone, and as many more elsewhere in southern
Ontario. Montreal has many American branch plants and American owned
enterprises. Its largest hotel belongs to an American syndicate, and so
does my hotel in Toronto.
Americans control nine tenths of the automobile accessory business
of Canada, and in their branch plants they make three fifths of the
Dominion’s automobiles. Practically all of our well known firms devoted
to low and moderate priced cars have big factories in Canada, and they
do practically all their exporting to Australia, New Zealand, Great
Britain, and South Africa through their Canadian branch plants. This
export business amounts to more than twenty-five million dollars a
year, while the cars made here for the Canadian market represent a
value three times as great.
In other lines American capital is conspicuous. Half of the Canadian
rubber factories are owned by Americans, and nearly half of the meat
packing, paint, brass, condensed milk, car construction, and electrical
apparatus industries represent American money. American controlled
concerns do more than half of all the oil refining, while two hundred
and fifty million dollars of our money is invested in the pulp and
paper industry.
Altogether, it is estimated that American investments in government
loans, corporation bonds, land mortgages, and industrial enterprises
amount to two thousand five hundred million dollars. Our stake in
Canada has been increasing rapidly ever since 1914, and now it nearly
equals that of the British. Within a few years it will probably be much
greater. Nearly one sixth of all the money we have invested in foreign
countries is in Canada, and in return for the capital Canada is now
buying from us more than three fifths of her annual thousand million
dollar purchases abroad. In fact, her people are our best customers;
their purchases of us amount to eighty-three dollars per capita a year
as compared with five dollars for all Europe and fifty cents for China.
CHAPTER XIV
WATERFALLS THAT WORK FOR THE PEOPLE
How much do you pay for the electric current that lights your home and
runs your heater, vacuum cleaner, and washing machine? In Washington
I am charged ten cents a kilowatt hour, and unless you are especially
favourably located I venture your bills are figured at about the same
rate. To be sure, the monthly expense is not great, but wouldn’t you
feel free to use more electricity if your bills were cut down one half
or two thirds?
That is just what has happened to hundreds of thousands of people in
southern Ontario, and I have been devoting the last couple of days to
finding out how it was done. I have made a special trip from Toronto
to Niagara Falls, and am now writing almost in sight of those mighty
waters. I have visited the world’s biggest power station and talked
here also with the engineers of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power
Commission, which sells the current to the public at cost. Again I am
impressed with the enterprise and the courage of the people of this
province, and the way they use their government to get what they want.
Canada’s water-power is, as you know, among her chief assets, and
the Dominion is one of the greatest water-power countries on earth.
Although the United States has more hydraulic power available for
development, yet in proportion to her population Canada actually uses
three times as much as we do. She has in her rivers and streams a
total of about eighteen million low-water available horse-power, of
which about one sixth is now being used. Quebec and Ontario possess
between them nearly two thirds of the total water-power resources, of
which Ontario has the larger amount developed, and Quebec the more
in reserve. These two provinces, like the eastern United States,
contain also the greater part of Canada’s industries, seventy per
cent. of which are now run by water-power. This cheap power is one
of the principal reasons why Ontario and Quebec do most of Canada’s
manufacturing and have so many American branch plants.
Ontario’s biggest single water-power is in the waters of Niagara Falls.
As you know, the Niagara River connects Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It
forms also a part of the boundary between the United States and Canada.
For many years commercial power companies have operated on both sides
of the Falls. By treaty, Canada and the United States have limited the
commercial use of the Falls, and have fixed the amount of water that
can be diverted from them at twenty thousand cubic feet a second on
the American side, and thirty-six thousand feet on the Canadian side.
This apportionment was made because the major part of the Falls is on
Canada’s side of the boundary, and much power is imported by the United
States from Canada. The engineers say that if the governments will let
them they can divert much more of the water in such a way that the
beauty of the Falls will not be impaired.
The Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission has revolutionized the
situation on the Canadian side. The Falls have been put to work
directly for the people, private corporations and profits have been
eliminated, and, through the building of a giant new power station,
the mighty forces of the falling waters have been made more productive
than ever before. The Commission is distributing Niagara power to
points two hundred and fifty miles away, and in addition is operating
more than twenty additional power producing stations. It has built up a
super-power system that covers southern Ontario. It also supplies power
at the head of the Great Lakes. Through it more than three hundred
cities, towns, and smaller municipalities are supplying themselves with
power “at cost.”
The Commission is the world’s largest publicly owned power enterprise,
having assets worth two hundred and fifty million dollars. It is
claimed that nowhere else on earth do so many people, spread over so
large a territory, enjoy such low-cost electricity as is the case
under Ontario “Hydro.” It distributes six hundred and fifty thousand
horse-power in electrical energy, and, when all its present projects
are in full operation, the daily output will be more than a million
horse-power. Canada’s coal bill would be three hundred million dollars
a year more if “Hydro” power were produced by fuel from mines.
I can make you see in a flash just what all this means to the people.
Below the mists of Niagara Falls the river is crossed by the Railway
Arch Bridge. Half this bridge is lighted by an American company, and
the other half by the current from the Canadian side. The lighting
load for the lamps is the same in both sections, yet the cost last
year of lighting the Canadian portion was one hundred and ten dollars,
while the American company charges at its regular rates totalled two
hundred and forty. Now you know why citizens in Ontario go to the polls
and vote their municipalities into partnership with “Hydro,” as the
Commission is popularly called.
The “Hydro” was created because the towns of southern Ontario felt
that they were not getting the full benefit of Nature’s great power
station at their doors. They then secured a charter from the provincial
legislature at Toronto to form a partnership for the purpose of
buying power and selling it to themselves. The Ontario Hydro-Electric
Commission was created to handle the business. In 1910 it began
operations by distributing one thousand horse-power, purchased under
contract from a commercial company at Canadian Niagara. Four years
later it was selling seventy-seven thousand horse-power, and in 1917 it
purchased outright the company from which it had been buying current.
Meanwhile, more and more cities and towns were joining the partnership,
additional power stations were being bought and built to supply the
growing demand, and as consumption rose rates went down. The provincial
authorities are now talking about a shortage of power in the near
future unless the scheme for building dams and canals along the St.
Lawrence is started at once.
I am told the operations of “Hydro” have not cost the taxpayers of
Ontario a cent in interest charges or capital investment. The whole
scheme actually pays for itself as it goes. This is how it is done:
The provincial government acts as banker for the Commission, loaning
it money with which to build power stations and transmission lines.
These loans are covered by the pledges, in the form of bond issues,
of the cities, through the Commission, to meet the interest and make
repayment of the capital investment. Each city issues twenty-year bonds
for its local central station and distributing system. Payments on both
interest and principal are met out of each year’s receipts, so that
eventually the entire power system will be free of debt. Nearly fifty
cities, in fact, are already in the clear on their investment, and each
year brings others to the same situation.
The basic principle of “Hydro” is a partnership of municipalities
to obtain power at cost. The Commission makes all the expenditures
necessary to develop power and deliver it to the cities. It determines
the rates at which the cities may re-sell the power to local consumers.
Each year the probable cost of power is estimated for each city, with
allowances for interest, depreciation, reserves, and contingencies.
This fixes the rates for the next twelve months. At the end of the
year, the actual cost is calculated. If the expense has been more than
the rates previously fixed, the cities are called upon to make up the
difference; if the cost has been less, the partners get rebates on the
year’s bills.
When I looked for the directing mind behind all this amazing
development, I quickly found it. It is in the person of Sir Adam
Beck, formerly a box manufacturer of London, Ontario, and the only
chairman the Commission has ever had. He is one of the most popular
figures in all Ontario, and it is largely to the organizing genius and
driving power of his personality that the success of “Hydro” is due.
He sits in Parliament, where he keeps on the alert for the welfare of
the Commission’s work, and manages in person its relations with the
provincial government.
[Illustration: The Niagara Peninsula, along the north shore of Lake
Erie, is one of the finest fruit-growing districts in the world. Among
other advantages the farmers here have cheap power from the Ontario
“Hydro”.]
[Illustration: The big ditch that feeds the giant power station was cut
through solid rock for miles and carries a stream of water thirty-nine
feet deep and fifty feet wide, or more than the flow of a river.]
[Illustration: A bucket of water dropped down this cliff to the Niagara
River would strike with the force of thirty horse-power. Imagine 20,000
buckets dropped every second and you have the capacity of this 600,000
horse-power station.]
The cold facts about “Hydro” make it easy for Sir Adam to demonstrate
its achievements. In his home town of London, for example, where
formerly the monthly consumption of electricity averaged less than
twenty kilowatt hours for each household, seventy-five kilowatt hours
are now used. To an extent formerly undreamed of, power has been put
into the homes of the people, and they are using electric appliances in
far greater number than persons of similar circumstances in the United
States. Electric cooking stoves are being installed in southern Ontario
at the rate of one thousand a month. Workingmen’s wives have toasters,
electric washers, electric fans, electric heaters, curling irons, and
everything else the appliance companies can devise.
The Commission is especially proud of the way it has taken electricity
out to the farms. Private companies usually find rural extensions too
expensive, on account of the long distances between installations, and
the relatively small volume of current used. The Commission has now
enough rural lines to reach from New York to Atlanta, and it serves
as many country homes as there are people living on farms in Rhode
Island. Although the rates are higher than in the cities, I find that
a farmer can light his house and barns, run an electric stove and
household appliances, and a three-horse-power motor besides, for from
six to eight dollars a month. The farmers of Ontario can afford to use
electricity to run their pumps, separators, churns, milking machines,
saw-mills, choppers, and threshers--not because they are richer than
other farmers, but because of low-cost power.
I have before me a schedule of the rates charged in the twelve largest
cities of the province. For domestic service the average net cost
ranges from 1.3 cents per kilowatt hour to 2.8 cents per kilowatt
hour. The rates vary chiefly with distance. Toronto, ninety miles from
Niagara, pays 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour, while Windsor, two hundred
and fifty miles to the west, opposite Detroit, Michigan, is charged
2.6 cents. Commercial users, such as stores and office buildings, pay
slightly higher rates, while factories are charged from $11.75 to
$28.66 per horse-power per year. As with commercial companies, the
“Hydro” rates decrease with the amount of power used. For households
the secondary or larger-user rate is nowhere more than 1.8 cents, and
in most places it is less. In Toronto, the average household electric
light bill is less than a dollar and a quarter a month. At Windsor
it is less than a dollar and three quarters. In the city of London,
Ontario, the household consumption of electricity has under “Hydro”
increased more than four hundred per cent. and the average cost has
been reduced to less than one fourth of the former charges.
CHAPTER XV
NIAGARA’S GIANT POWER STATION
“Hydro’s” biggest feat in physical construction is the great
development, known as the Queenston Chippewa plant, on the Niagara
River. This station is designed to produce six hundred thousand
horse-power, or about one sixth as much as all the electrical energy
now generated in Canada. Suppose we visit it with one of the engineers.
Stepping into an automobile, we drive first toward the falls, now
partly obscured in the clouds of mist from the tumbling, roaring,
boiling waters. Our way lies through the park the Canadians have made
so that the people may enjoy for all time the approaches to this
monarch among the wonders of Nature.
We stop at Chippewa, at the mouth of the Welland River. This stream
used to empty into the Niagara River above the falls, but to-day its
channel carries the water diverted from the Niagara for the supply of
the power station. The river was deepened and widened for a distance of
four and a half miles, and then a canal was dug through the remaining
eight and a half miles to the site of the plant. Now we turn back,
and as our car passes over one of the numerous bridges across the big
ditch, we look down upon a miniature Panama Canal, fifty feet wide
at water level, and thirty-nine feet deep. In many places it was cut
through hills of rock to a depth of more than one hundred feet. When
the station is operated at full capacity, the flow of water through the
canal is more than twice that of the Connecticut River.
Seven miles below the falls we come to the power plant. If your nerves
are steady, walk out to the cliff and see where we are. Look first
across the great gorge. Those hills over there are in the state of New
York. See their steep, rocky sides, with van-coloured strata exposed by
the wearing action of the Niagara River through millions of years. To
our left, and hardly a mile away, the high plateau suddenly drops off;
below it are the glistening waters of Lake Ontario. We are near the end
of the escarpment over which Niagara Falls once plunged into the lake.
Now look straight down; the Niagara River is three hundred feet below
us. From this height it looks like an innocent stream. It is really a
raging torrent in the final throes of its mad struggle to get into Lake
Ontario. The workmen clinging to the sheer, rocky face of the cliff
under our feet, and boring into it with their drills, seem like huge
insects using their stingers. That big block of concrete, resting on a
shelf carved out of the rock and washed by the current, is the power
station. It has the dimensions of an eighteen-story office building,
and part of it is lower than the surface of the river.
The huge steel penstocks, or pipes, through which the water rushes to
the waterwheels below, are set in grooves cut in the rock. Each of them
is twice the diameter of a big dining-room table. The water enters the
penstocks from a great pool fed by the canal and, dropping, creates
this mighty stream of electrical energy, which surpasses any that can
be produced right at the Falls. The reason for this is that while the
total drop in the Niagara River is three hundred and twenty-seven
feet, the height of the Falls is only one hundred and sixty-seven feet.
That is the maximum “head” of water available to the power stations
located right at the Falls. But from where we stand the drop to the
waterwheels is exactly three hundred and five feet, or nearly twice as
great as that at the falls. This station, in other words, utilizes all
except about twenty feet of the difference in level between Lake Erie
and Lake Ontario. It does this by taking in the water of the Niagara
River at Chippewa and carrying it for thirteen miles nearly to the end
of the Niagara escarpment. There is a fall of only twelve feet in the
whole length of the canal.
Every cubic foot of water per second that flows through the penstocks
generates thirty horse-power, as compared with about sixteen
horse-power per foot per second developed by the stations nearer the
falls. The Canadians are thus making the water of Niagara work for the
people at almost twice the efficiency ever obtained from its waters
before.
Let us see just what this means. An ordinary pail holds about one
cubic foot of water. Suppose, as we stand on the brink of the gorge,
I hand you pails full of water, and that you let them fall, one every
second, to the river below. If the force of this fall could be applied
to a machine as efficiently as flowing water, each pailful would
generate electricity to the amount of thirty horse-power, or an amount
about equal to the energy of a five-passenger touring car when run at
full speed. Imagine twenty thousand such pailfuls being fed into the
penstocks every time your watch ticks, and you will then understand
what the six hundred thousand horse-power capacity of this station
means.
Step with me into the electric elevator that goes down the face of the
cliff to the power house. At the bottom we find the offices of the
engineers and experts in charge. There is, also, a restaurant for the
workers. One huge room is filled with the switches and recorders which
keep these men constantly informed of conditions in all parts of the
plant and enable them to control every detail. We descend still farther
to the lower levels, where are the giant waterwheels and generators.
We prowl around in vast subterranean chambers and gaze at one of the
sixty-thousand-horse-power generators. There is no visible motion and
almost no sound, yet it is producing enough power to move at high speed
a procession of two thousand motor cars, or to drive two Majesties or
Leviathans across the ocean.
The generators are of the vertical type. They are mounted above the
waterwheels, each nine feet in diameter, which keep them turning at
the highest permissible speed. The wheels are encased in steel, and we
can see nothing but their outer shell. A muffled roar is the only sign
of the mighty force they are creating. It is difficult to realize that
such tremendous energy can be completely tamed and working in harness,
and we shiver as we wonder what would happen if one of these mechanical
Titans should suddenly break loose.
Each generator is a huge affair, as tall as a four-story house, and
a rope eighty feet long would hardly reach around it. Its largest
portion weighs more than three hundred tons. It reminds us somewhat
of a merry-go-round, only in this case the whirling portion is all
inside, and turning so fast that it seems to be standing still. It
is so big that it would take thirty men, standing close together,
to encircle it, and it is making one hundred and eighty-seven and
one half revolutions a minute. We look through a little window in
the bearing case and see a miniature lake of two hundred gallons of
frothing oil that furnishes lubrication. So much heat is developed in
the operation of the generator that cold air must be fed to it. In warm
weather, it requires thirteen hundred and eighty thousand pounds of
air every two hours and a half, or exactly as much as the total weight
of the generator itself. In winter the air warmed by the generators is
utilized for heating the power station.
On the trip down to Niagara Falls from Toronto I had an opportunity to
see something of what cheap power has done for southwestern Ontario.
I passed through Hamilton, a place of more than one hundred thousand
inhabitants, with plants operated by Niagara. Here are a large number
of American branch factories using electric current that costs them
less than fifteen dollars per horse-power per year. As in London,
Windsor, Brantford, Kitchener, and other towns, the manufacturing
establishments of Hamilton are increasing in number and size, and the
people say that one of the chief reasons for their prosperity is the
“Hydro” power system. In riding over the country I was struck with
the well-cultivated farms and the attractive homes. I passed through
the heart of the Niagara fruit district, which yields rich crops of
grapes, apples, peaches, and other fruits. Most of the farmers now
have electricity to help them with their outdoor work and lighten the
labours of their wives as well.
One of the engineers I talked with has given me a new appreciation
of what development of water-power means to Canada. He tells me that
each thousand horse-power developed brings an ultimate investment
of eighteen hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which provides work
for twenty-two hundred persons and pays them wages amounting to five
hundred seventy-one thousand dollars a year. The cost of building and
operating the power station itself represents only thirteen per cent.
of all this; it is the application of the new energy in shops, mines,
and mills that is responsible for the bulk of the investment. A new
power development attracts industries; these in turn attract workers
and their families; the latter bring in their train the tradesmen and
the professional people needed to serve them. In this way new towns
come into being, and old ones start to grow. Water-power is sometimes
called “white coal.” It should be called “white magic.”
[Illustration: Canada is one of the richest countries in the world
in its water-power. Engineers calculate that every thousand electric
horse-power developed from her waterfalls eventually provides
employment for more than two thousand people.]
[Illustration: Since their discovery in 1903, the Cobalt mines have
yielded silver bullion worth more than $200,000,000. These huge piles
of tailings were formerly thrown away as waste. They are now being
worked over again at a profit.]
CHAPTER XVI
THE SILVER MINES OF NORTHERN ONTARIO
Take up your map of North America and draw a line from Buffalo to the
lowest part of Hudson Bay. Divide it in half, and the middle point will
just about strike Cobalt, the centre of the world’s richest silver
deposits. I have come here via North Bay from Toronto, more than three
hundred miles to the south, and am now clicking my typewriter over
ground that has produced upward of one million dollars an acre in
silver-bearing ore. For a long time it has turned out a ton of silver
bullion every twenty-four hours.
There are said to be only two real silver-mining districts in the
world. One is at Guanajuato, Mexico, where the veins are of enormous
extent but yield a low grade of ore. The other is here at Cobalt, where
the deposits, though comparatively small, are almost pure silver.
In practically all the other great silver districts the metal is a
by-product. The Anaconda mine in Montana and the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho
are both famous silver producers, but in the former it is a by-product
of copper, and in the latter, of lead.
Twenty years ago, when I visited Cobalt shortly after the discovery
of its underground wealth, I rode all day on the Ontario government
railway through woods as wild as any on the North American continent.
The road wound its way in and out among lakes, sloughs, and swamps.
The country was covered with pine and hardwood, and so cut up by water
that one could have gone almost all over it in a canoe. Even along the
railroad it was so swampy and boggy that the telegraph poles had to be
propped up. Outside the swamps it was so rocky that deep holes could
not be made, and in such places great piles of rock were built up about
the poles to support them.
Some of the country was covered with bogs known as muskeg. This is a
bottomless swamp under a thin coating of vegetation, through which one
sinks down as though in a quicksand, and, if not speedily rescued, is
liable to drown. Hunters in travelling over it have to jump from root
to root, making their way by means of the trees that grow here and
there. There is said to be still much of this muskeg in the region of
Hudson Bay and almost everywhere throughout this northland. Much of it
has been drained, leaving a land somewhat like that of northwestern
Ohio, which was once known as the Black Swamp.
Reaching Cobalt, I had to rely on the miners for living accommodations.
Log cabins and frame buildings were going up in every direction and a
three-story hotel was being started, but many of the people were still
living in tents or in shacks covered with tar felt. Even the banks
hastily established to take care of the rapidly growing wealth of the
settlement were in tents, and the bankers slept at night beside their
safes with a gun always within reach. Streets were yet to be built,
and the wooden and canvas structures of the town straggled along roads
winding this way and that through the stumps. In the centre of the
settlement was a beautiful little lake that one could cross in a canoe
in a few minutes, and the mining properties extended back into the
woods in every direction.
To-day, although still possessing many of the characteristics of the
typical mining camp, Cobalt is a busy little city of six or seven
thousand inhabitants. The tar shacks and tents have been replaced by
modern buildings--banks, churches, stores, and homes--many of them
erected since the big fire in 1912. There are good schools, including
a school of mines, and the muddy roads have long since given way to
sidewalks and streets. Even the lake has gone, its waters having been
pumped away to allow mining operations, and where it once rippled
peacefully some of the richest veins in the district are now being
worked. Kerr Lake, a short distance from the town, has also been
drained to allow safer underground workings. The place reminds one of
the mines of the Bay of Nagasaki, Japan, where coal has been taken out
of fifty miles of tunnels under the Pacific Ocean. I have visited those
tunnels, and have also ridden by electric car through the coal mines
under the ocean off the coast of south Chile.
The discovery of silver at Cobalt marked the first finding in the
Dominion of any precious metal in important quantities between the
Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Two railway contractors,
employed in the building of the line northward from the town of North
Bay, were idly tossing pebbles into the lake when they found some
that they believed to be lead. An analysis showed almost pure silver.
Shortly afterward a French blacksmith named La Rose stubbed his toe
upon a piece of rock where the railway route had been blasted out,
and upon picking it up saw the white metal shining out of the blue
stone. He conferred with his friends and sent it down to Toronto to
be assayed. The report was that it was very rich in silver. La Rose
thereupon filed a mining claim, selling the first half of his property
to the Timmins corporation for five hundred dollars. Later he disposed
of the balance to the same parties, receiving for it twenty-seven
thousand dollars, which seemed a fortune to him. It was also a fortune
to the purchasers, who took out more than a million dollars’ worth of
pure silver.
Owing to the general tendency of the people to doubt the existence
of precious metals in large quantities in Ontario, and the efforts
of those who had made the “strike” to keep their discoveries secret,
it was more than two years before excitement over the find reached a
climax, and work on a large scale was begun. Since then these mines
have produced nearly fourteen thousand tons of silver bullion, worth
more than two hundred million dollars. Think what this means! Loaded
into cars of thirty-five tons, the total output would fill sixteen
trains of twenty-five cars to the train! Made into ten-cent pieces and
laid side by side, it would make a band of solid silver twice around
the world at the Equator! Manufactured into teaspoons, it would furnish
one for every person in the United States, England, and France, with
many to spare!
The height of the silver production at Cobalt was reached in 1911,
when thirty-one million ounces of the metal was refined. Since then
the yield has declined, but mining engineers say that the district
will produce silver in commercial quantities for another half century.
Eight mines are still each shipping a quarter million ounces or more of
silver a year, and one of them, the Nipissing, is producing annually
an average of four million ounces. Its huge mills, where the ore is
crushed and the silver taken out, can be seen across the lake bed from
the railway station, with gigantic overhead conveyors carrying the
rock from the mine to the mill. Silver is now being extracted in paying
quantities from what was once considered waste ore, and the tailings
previously dumped into the lakes have been treated in the mills,
yielding a net profit of three dollars’ worth of silver a ton. In the
meantime, the original three-mile radius of the silver-producing area
has been extended twenty miles to the southeast and sixty miles to the
northwest.
The entire Cobalt region seems to be one vast rock covered with a thin
skin of earth. I have visited the chief silver regions of the world,
but nowhere have I seen the metal cropping out on top of the ground as
it does here at Cobalt. The veins run for hundreds of feet across the
country, and often show up on the surface. I saw one mine where the
earth had been stripped off to the width of a narrow pavement for a
distance of a thousand feet. The rock underneath, which had been ground
smooth by glaciers, looked when cleaned much like a flagged sidewalk.
Winding through it was a vein of almost pure silver, so rich that I
could see the metal shine as though the rock were plated. I walked
over this silver street for hundreds of feet, scouring the precious
metal with my shoes as I did so. These veins are not regular in width
nor do they run evenly throughout. Here and there branches jut out
from the main one like the veins of a leaf, and the ore has everywhere
penetrated into the adjoining rocks.
For a long time the work here was more like stone quarrying than
mining. The country about is cut up by long trenches from ten to twenty
feet deep and five or more feet in width, which have been blasted out
of the rock to get the ore. The sides of the hills are now quarried
where the silver breaks out, and the veins are followed down into
the ground for long distances. One mining company has sunk a shaft
to a depth of four hundred and fifty feet, and has excavated about
thirty-seven miles of tunnels. So far, no one knows how deep the veins
go. The geologists say that the silver will lessen in extent as it
descends, and it is claimed that this has been the case with many of
the mines.
The discovery in 1923 of the largest silver nugget ever found renewed
interest in the Cobalt deposits, and has led to the reopening of
several old mines with profitable results. This gigantic find, which
tipped the scales at more than two thousand pounds, was about ninety
per cent. pure silver, and was valued at twenty thousand dollars.
The discovery was made by Anson Clement, a carpenter, in the Gillies
Timber Limit about five miles from Cobalt, and a team of horses with
a block and tackle was needed to haul the giant nugget out of the
ground. Nuggets of silver eighty and ninety per cent. pure and weighing
three and four hundred pounds each are not uncommon, and I have seen
chunks of silver ore the size of a paving brick that I could not lift.
Indeed, much of the ore reminds one of the rich copper nuggets that
are found in the Lake Superior region. Recently a vein of almost pure
silver, which in one place was between four and five feet in width, was
uncovered in the Keeley Mine, eighteen miles from Cobalt.
Before the discovery of the Cobalt deposits, British Columbia led in
the production of silver in Canada, and still has an output about
one third that of Ontario. Silver is mined also in Quebec and Yukon
Territory, a new silver district of promise having been discovered at
Keno Hill in the Yukon. Three thousand tons of ore has been taken from
one of the Keno Hill mines in one season. This has to be carried on dog
sleds and wagons forty-five miles to the Stewart River and then sent
down the Stewart and the Yukon to the Pacific, where it goes by ocean
steamer to the nearest smelter. Only an unusually high grade of ore can
be handled profitably with so long a freight haul before smelting.
The Cobalt mines produce not only silver, but also four fifths of
the world’s supply of cobalt. Cobalt and silver are frequently found
together, but nowhere in such quantities as here. Cobalt is a mineral
somewhat like nickel in its properties, and is also used instead of
nickel for plating steel. It is used to make paints and pigments,
and is often known commercially as cobalt blue. Silicate of cobalt
furnishes the colour for all the finest blue china. Practically the
entire Canadian output, most of which is smelted at plants in southern
Ontario, is exported to England and the United States.
The cobalt can be plainly seen in the ore when the rock is exposed to
the weather. It is of a steel-gray colour tinged with rose-pink, and
where it occurs in the form of a powder it looks exactly like rouge.
When heated it turns a beautiful blue. Arsenic and other elements
are often found mixed with the cobalt-silver ore, and the region has
deposits of nickel, copper, and lead.
A hundred miles to the north of Cobalt is the Porcupine gold district.
The gold output ranks first in value among the metals produced in
Canada, and four fifths of all that is mined in the Dominion comes
from the Porcupine and Kirkland Lake districts of Northern Ontario.
The Hollinger mine in the Porcupine area is the largest gold mine in
North America and one of the richest in the world. It began operations
in 1910, and within ten years after it was opened had produced almost
a hundred million dollars’ worth of gold, and had paid dividends of
thirteen millions. The Hollinger shaft goes down into the earth fifteen
hundred feet or more and there are about thirty miles of underground
tunnels.
There is no telling what minerals may not be discovered in this section
of Ontario, which seems to be a part of the great mineral belt that
extends from Lake Superior northward toward Hudson Bay. There is iron
on the Canadian side of Lake Superior, and some of our richest mines of
iron and copper are found on the western and southern shores of that
lake. Petroleum, natural gas, and salt are produced in the peninsular
region of the province between lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario to the
amount of more than three million dollars’ worth a year. About a
hundred miles from Cobalt lies Sudbury, which has the richest nickel
deposits of the whole world, and prospectors say that there are
minerals all the way north to James Bay, which juts down into Canada at
the lower end of Hudson Bay.
[Illustration: The silver deposits around Cobalt crop out on top of the
ground in veins of almost pure metal hundreds of feet long. Millions of
dollars’ worth have been mined without any underground workings.]
[Illustration: The prospector in northern Ontario, the richest mineral
region in Canada, safeguards his claim by erecting “discovery posts”
bearing his name, number of his mining license, and date of his find.]
CHAPTER XVII
NICKEL FOR ALL THE WORLD
Canada has a nickel mine out of which has been taken so much ore that
if it were put all together the pile would be larger than the National
Capital at Washington. About ten million tons have already been dug
from it and there are still millions left. Indeed, it is apparently
inexhaustible. It is known as the Creighton, and is situated about
eight miles from Sudbury in the province of Ontario not far north of
Georgian Bay. The International Nickel Company of Canada, Ltd., which
owns it, is the largest nickel producer in the world, and supplies most
of that metal used in the United States.
There are only two places so far discovered where nickel exists in
large quantities. One is in the little island of New Caledonia off the
eastern shore of Australia on the opposite side of the globe. About
ten per cent. of the total world production comes from there. The
other is here in Canada, in a region that yields eight times as much
as New Caledonia. A small amount of nickel is obtained also by the
electrolytic method in the refining of copper and other ores.
The ore near Sudbury is a combination of nickel, copper, sulphur, and
iron. It is found in mighty beds or pockets going down no one knows how
deep. On one side of the deposit is granite and on the other a black
formation known as diorite.
At first the ore was quarried rather than mined, and a huge pit was
formed that looks like a volcanic crater. It reminds me of the Bromo
volcano, which I visited in the mountains of eastern Java. Later a
shaft was sunk, and the vast body of nickel I have mentioned has
been taken out by running tunnels into the ore at different levels.
The lowest level of the shaft is now fourteen hundred feet below the
earth’s surface. There hundreds of workmen are drilling and blasting.
They load the ore on cars, which carry it to an underground storage
chamber, where the large pieces are crushed. It is then hoisted to
the top of the shaft house, a structure as high as a fourteen-story
building. After descending through rock crushers and screens, it is
ready for smelting.
Through the kindness of one of the officials of the International
Nickel Company, I have been able to go through its smelters at Copper
Cliff, which cover many acres. The country about is as arid as the
desert of Sahara. Before the mines were discovered, it was a green
forest and one may still see here and there charred stumps standing
out upon the barren landscape. In the town itself there is not a green
leaf, a blade of grass, a bush, or a flower to be seen at any time of
the year. It makes me think of the nitrate fields about Iquique in
northern Chile, where all is sand and rock and there is no fresh water
for hundreds of miles. All this is due to the sulphur that comes from
the ore. It so fills the air about Copper Cliff that no vegetation will
grow.
After being crushed and screened the ore is roasted. Hundreds of tons
of it are piled upon beds of cord wood and the fine ore dust is spread
over the top. A fire is started and burns day after day for a period of
two months or more. This drives out fifteen or twenty per cent. of the
sulphur, which rises in a smoke of a light yellow colour. The smoke is
almost pure sulphur. It smells like burnt matches and it fills the air
about the furnace to such an extent that the men use rubber nose caps
to protect their lungs from the fumes. These caps are for all the world
like the nipples on babies’ nursing bottles, save that they are as big
as your fist, and each has a sponge inside it soaked with carbonate
of ammonia. This counteracts the effect of the sulphur and makes it
possible for the men to work. I had one of these nipples over my nose
when I went through the works, but nevertheless my lungs became filled
with sulphur. I coughed until the tears rolled down my cheeks, and as
I did so I thought if some of our preachers could get such a taste
of brimstone their word pictures of the lower regions would be more
realistic.
One might suppose that the miners would be injured by these sulphur
fumes. They are, on the contrary, as healthy as any people in the
world. The children have rosy cheeks and the men are more rugged in
appearance than those about Pittsburgh, or Anaconda, Montana.
Even after the roasting there is still about seven per cent. of sulphur
left. Most of this is removed in the smelting, which reduces the ore to
a crude metal known as matte. Matte is the form in which the nickel is
sent to the refineries.
Formerly most of the refining was done in the United States or Europe,
but during the World War the International Nickel Company built a
refinery at Port Colborne, Ontario, and most of the Sudbury ore is
now refined there. A large quantity goes also to Huntington, West
Virginia, for making what is known as monel metal, an alloy of nickel
and copper that possesses great strength, does not corrode easily,
and is impervious to electrical currents. It is used in hotel kitchen
equipment, in dyeing and pickling vats, and in many kinds of electrical
apparatus.
The mineral deposits of Sudbury were discovered by the Canadian Pacific
Railway, which was responsible also for the finding of silver at
Cobalt. However, no attention was paid to the nickel in the ore, which
for years was considered valuable only for the copper it contained.
Part of the ore was sent to New Jersey for smelting and refining, and
part to Wales. The reduction works at New Jersey looked upon the nickel
as of no account and let it run off with the slag, while the Wales
smelters paid only for the copper and kept the nickel as a private
rake-off. Later the mine owners discovered that the nickel was far more
valuable than the copper, and since then nickel has been the principal
source of profit.
Although the largest, the Creighton is by no means the only nickel mine
here. The British American Nickel Company owns and operates the Murray
mine, where nickel was first found in Canada. It formerly belonged
to the Vivians of Wales. This company has a large smelting plant at
Nickelton, not far from Sudbury, and a refinery at Deschennes, near
Ottawa. A half dozen mines are owned by the Mond Nickel Company, which
ships practically all its matte to Clydach, Wales, for refining. The
copper in this matte is recovered as copper sulphate, which is exported
largely to Italy and other grape-growing countries for spraying the
vines. The matte exported by the Mond Company is shipped in oaken
casks, which are refilled in Wales with the copper sulphate and sent to
Italy. The Italian peasants insist on the chemical being received in
such containers, not only to keep the sulphate crystals unbroken, but
also because after emptying, they saw the casks in two and use them as
washtubs.
The production of nickel reached its height in 1918, when five thousand
tons of ore a day were mined. This was due to the many uses of the
metal in the World War. After the Armistice, the nickel market was so
over-stocked that a severe slump in prices occurred, and the nickel
production fell from forty-six thousand tons in 1918 to eight thousand
tons in 1922. There were large quantities of the metal in all the
belligerent countries, and these had to be absorbed before the Canadian
industry could return to normal. The end of 1922 found a more active
demand, and this was followed by an increase in production and sales.
During my stay at Copper Cliff I have had a talk about nickel and its
uses with one of the metallurgists of the International Nickel Company.
This man has been working successfully in nickel for thirty years or
more, and he knows as much about the metal, perhaps, as any one in
the country. Among the first discoverers of nickel, says he, were the
German miners of old, who found this metal in their copper ore. Its
hardness and the difficulty they experienced in smelting it led them to
associate it with “Old Nick”--hence its name. This hardness is one of
the most valuable characteristics in its present-day uses.
“Most of the nickel goes into nickel-steel,” said the metallurgist,
“although it enters also into many other manufactures. The value of
nickel-steel is due to the fact that it combines exceeding toughness
with great strength. Copper wire has great toughness. A steel needle
or pen-knife has great strength. But it is only nickel-steel that has
both toughness and strength. This makes it the best metal we know for
armour plate. A battleship with a hull covered with steel or iron would
be shattered to pieces if it were hit by one of the modern shells. If
the armour plate is made of nickel-steel, the largest projectile makes
only a dimple, such as you would in a pat of butter by sticking your
finger into it. This property of toughness is added to the steel by
putting in three and one half per cent. of nickel during the process
of manufacturing. All the big warships of to-day have a belt of
nickel-steel armour plate about eighteen inches thick. Nickel is also
alloyed with copper for making army field kitchens and bullet casings.”
Nickel-steel rails are used largely where there are curves at the
bottom of steep grades. When a heavily loaded freight train strikes
such a curve, the only things that hold it on the track are the flanges
of the wheels and the heads of the rails. In winter the rails are apt
to become brittle, and when a heavy train, rushing down hill, strikes
them they sometimes break and there is a wreck. The Horseshoe Curve of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, for instance, is made of nickel-steel rails.
The metal is employed also in bridge building. It is going into many of
our large apartment houses and other tall buildings. It is fifty per
cent. stronger than ordinary steel and the result is that less metal
can be used, or with an equal weight the building can have double the
strength. Nickel-steel does not expand or contract as much as common
steel, and for this reason it is made into clock pendulums, which must
be of the same length the year round in order to keep the right time.
As nickel does not rust in air or water, and resists the action of
many acids, it is much used in plating other metals. It is in demand
for cooking utensils, household articles, and plumbing equipment, as
well as for automobile parts. Practically all the nickel contained in
our five-cent pieces is from the Canadian mines. They are only one
quarter nickel, however, the remainder being copper. Indeed, there is
but a fraction of a cent’s worth of nickel in a five-cent piece. A few
countries, however, use pure nickel for their coinage.
Do you know that nickel-steel and meteorites have practically the
same composition? Indeed, the process for making nickel-steel was
suggested by a meteor found in Greenland. This meteor was an immense
mass that had fallen from the skies ages ago and was venerated by the
Greenlanders as a god. The natives were wont to hammer splinters from
it and make them into spear heads and hammer heads, accompanying their
work by prayers to the god. Explorers found that such spear heads were
harder and finer than any others. An Englishman named Riley heard of
these discoveries, and they gave him the idea that ended in the new
metal.
CHAPTER XVIII
SAULT STE. MARIE AND THE CLAY BELT
I am at the “Soo,” where Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of
fresh water, has been harnessed and is being made to work with a force
of sixty thousand horses all pulling at once. The St. Mary’s River,
through which Lake Superior empties into Lake Huron, has a fall of
about twenty-two feet in one mile, and power plants have been installed
which are generating electricity for industries on both the American
and Canadian sides of the river.
A large number of the industrial plants here belong to Americans. The
main buildings of these works look like mediæval castles rather than
modern factories. They are equal in beauty to any of the ruins of the
Rhine or the Danube. Indeed, they remind me of the mighty forts of
Delhi, the capital of India. They are made of a rich red and white
sandstone, with crenellated walls, and, notwithstanding their beauty,
are said to have been built at a remarkably low cost. The blocks of
sandstone were taken out of the canal dug for the power plant.
[Illustration: The “Soo” Canal not only has the heaviest freight
traffic of any artificial waterway in the world, but is also on the
route of the passenger steamers that carry thousands of tourists
through the Great Lakes.]
[Illustration: The longest bascule bridge in the world is operated by
the Canadian Pacific Railway at Sault Ste. Marie. Each section is 169
feet long, and is raised by electric power to permit vessels to pass
through the canal.]
[Illustration: The moose in the thick forests of Canada feed off the
trees and smaller shrubs. The moose have such short necks and long
front legs that they cannot browse on grass without getting down on
their knees.]
[Illustration: Ontario has so many lakes that canoes can be paddled for
hundreds of miles with practically no portages. Since the days of the
French explorers, these lakes have formed part of the water route from
the East to Hudson Bay.]
It is interesting to go through these factories and see the work of
Lake Superior in harness. In the pulp mills, where more than a hundred
huge truck loads of news-print are turned out every day, I saw the logs
ground to dust, mixed with water, and made into miles of paper to feed
printing presses. The output is so great that every three months
enough paper is made to cover a sidewalk reaching all the way round the
world.
In the saw-mills millions of feet of lumber are being cut into boards
for the markets of the United States, and in the veneering works birch
logs as big around as a flour barrel are made into sheets, some as thin
as your fingernail, and others as thick as the board cover of a family
Bible. Here we see that the logs are soaked in boiling water and then
pared, just as you would pare an apple, into strips of wood carpeting
perhaps a hundred feet long. These strips are used for the backing of
mahogany and quartered oak sent here from Grand Rapids and other places
where furniture is made. One often thinks he is getting solid mahogany
or solid oak, whereas he has only the knottiest of pine or other rough
wood on which is placed a strip of birch, with a veneer of mahogany or
oak on top. The thick birch strips are used also for chair and opera
seats.
Near the saw-mills is the Clergue steel plant, with its smoke stacks
standing out against the blue sky like the pipes of a gigantic organ.
The works cover acres and turn out thousands of tons of metal products
every day. They are supplied by the mountains of iron ore lying on
the shores of Lake Superior not far away, with great steel unloaders
reaching out above them.
Sault Ste. Marie is one of the oldest settlements in the Dominion of
Canada. Here in 1668, Father Marquette established the first Jesuit
mission in the New World, and the priests who followed him were the
first white men to travel from lower Canada to the head of the Great
Lakes, where now stand Port Arthur and Fort William. The town of to-day
is a bustling place of almost twenty-five thousand population. It is
connected with its American namesake on the opposite bank of the river
by a mile-long bridge of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
On both sides of the Saint Mary’s River are the locks of the famous
“Soo” Canal, where the Great Lakes freighters and passenger boats are
lowered and raised twenty feet between the levels of Lakes Superior
and Huron. The first canal was built around the rapids in 1798, to
accommodate the canoes of the Indians and fur traders. Along it ran a
tow-path for the oxen that later pulled the heavier loads. That canal
was destroyed by the United States troops in the War of 1812.
The present canal was opened in 1897, providing a new link in the
chain of waterways from the head of the Lakes to the Saint Lawrence.
The Canadian lock is nine hundred feet long and when finished was the
longest in the world. Since then it has been surpassed by one eleven
hundred feet in length on the American side. The United States locks
handle about ninety per cent. of the freight traffic, which has so
increased in the last twenty years that it has been necessary to add
three more locks to the original one on our side of the river. Two of
these locks are longer by three hundred feet than the famous Panama
locks at Gatun or Pedro Miguel. Each is big enough to accommodate two
ships at one time. Nevertheless, during the open season one can often
see here a score of steamers, some of them of from twelve to fifteen
thousand tons, waiting to go through.
The “Soo” is noted for having the heaviest freight traffic of any
artificial waterway in the world. The tonnage passing through it in
one year is three times as large as that of the foreign trade shipping
of the port of New York, four times as great as the freight passing
through the Suez Canal, and five times as great as that of the Panama
Canal. For six months of the year an average of more than one steamer
goes through every fifteen minutes. The chief freight commodity is ore
from the iron mines of Lake Superior, which often comprises seventy per
cent. of the total. Coal and wheat are next in importance.
In coming to the “Soo” from Cobalt and Sudbury, I have been travelling
through the new Ontario, the “wild northwest” of the Ontario we know
on the shores of Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron. The land near those
bodies of water is about as thickly settled as Ohio. It has some of the
best farms of North America, producing grain, vegetables, and fruits
worth millions of dollars a year. At every few miles are modern cities.
The whole country is cut up by railways, and one can go by automobile
through any part of it. The cities and town hum with factories, and the
entire region is one of industry and thrift.
This new Ontario is the frontier of the province. It is the great
northland between Georgian Bay and Hudson Bay, extending from Quebec
westward through the Rainy River country to Manitoba. This vast region
is larger than Texas, four times the size of old Ontario, and much
bigger than Great Britain or France. It is divided into eight great
districts. The Thunder Bay and Rainy River districts in the west are
together as long as from Philadelphia to Boston, and wider than from
Washington to New York. The Algoma district, in the southern end of
which the “Soo” is located, is almost as wide, extending from Lake
Superior to the Albany River, while the Timiskaming district reaches
from Cobalt north to James Bay, and borders Quebec on the east.
Until the first decade of the twentieth century this vast territory
was looked upon as valuable only for its timber, of which it had nearly
two hundred million acres. It was thought to be nothing but rock
and swamp, covered with ice the greater part of the year. Its only
inhabitants were Indian hunters, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, and
lumbermen who cut the trees along the streams and floated them down
to the Great Lakes. Then a new line of the Canadian Pacific Railway
was put through, the great nickel mines were discovered, the silver
and gold regions were opened up, and the Dominion and provincial
governments began to look upon the land as an available asset.
Exploration parties were sent out by the Ontario government to
investigate the region from Quebec to Manitoba. They reported that a
wide strip of fertile soil ran through the wilderness about a hundred
miles north of the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This land is
of a different formation from the rest of northern Ontario. It is a
clay loam, from which the region gets its name, the Great Clay Belt.
This belt is from twenty-five to one hundred miles wide, and it extends
westward from the Quebec-Ontario boundary for three hundred miles or
more. It is estimated to contain as much land as West Virginia.
The Clay Belt is just north of the height of land of the North American
continent, which divides the rivers flowing north from those that flow
south. The streams on the southern side of the ridge flow into the
Great Lakes, and some even to the Gulf of Mexico. On the north slope
they flow into Hudson Bay, or by the Mackenzie and other rivers into
the Arctic Ocean. The Clay Belt has seven good-sized rivers and is well
watered throughout.
[Illustration: If there is a moose within sound of the hunter’s
birch-bark horn, he will think it one of his brethren calling and be so
foolish as to come near and be shot. These animals are still plentiful
in Canadian forests.]
[Illustration: The trout-filled streams of interior Ontario and Quebec
are a Mecca for the fishermen of both the United States and Canada. In
the tributaries of the St. Lawrence the fresh-water salmon also provide
good sport.]
In midsummer the Clay Belt is as hot as southern Canada or the northern
part of the United States. As a matter of fact, Cochrane, its chief
town, is fifty miles south of the latitude of Winnipeg. Everything
grows faster than in the States, for owing to the high latitude the
summer days are fifteen or sixteen hours long, the sun rising a
little after three and setting between eight and nine. The clay loam
is particularly fitted for growing wheat, and certain districts have
yielded forty bushels an acre. Oats, barley, and hardy vegetables
are raised successfully. The country looks prosperous, and there are
well-filled barns and fine herds of livestock as evidences of its
productivity.
When the first settlements were made, Northern Ontario had no railroads
to market its produce. Four thousand miles of track have since been
built, including two lines now a part of the Canadian National. One of
these goes through the very centre of the Clay Belt and has settlements
all along it. At almost every river crossing is a lumber mill, for
Northern Ontario’s vast forest stretches and the water-power in its
streams have made it an important producer of lumber and wood pulp. The
trees of the Clay Belt are mostly of a small growth, therefore chiefly
valuable for pulp and easier to handle in clearing the land.
Ontario has set aside thirteen million acres of forest reserves, nine
tenths of which is in the northern part of the province. The Nipigon
and Timagami reserves are each larger than Rhode Island and provide
camping grounds unequalled in the Dominion. Lake Timagami is dotted
with hundreds of islands and is a favourite haunt of canoeists. Farther
west, near the Manitoba boundary, the beautiful Lake of the Woods is
another famous camping and hunting district.
Immense herds of caribou roam through Northern Ontario. They are to
be seen in droves of hundreds and sometimes of thousands. They have
cut their trails across the country, and a hunter to whom I have been
talking tells me that from his camp at night he can often hear the
rushing noise they make as they move through the woods.
In the forests farther south moose are found in great numbers. These
animals are browsers rather than grass eaters, their necks being
so short that they have to get down on their knees when they eat
grass. Deer and smaller animals also abound, wild ducks and geese are
plentiful, and the streams are filled with fish. Indeed, it is little
wonder that each year sees thousands of campers making their way to
this “sportsman’s paradise.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE TWIN LAKE PORTS
I am at the nozzle of the mighty grain funnel down which Canada’s wheat
crop is pouring into the boats of Lake Superior. The prairie provinces
of the Dominion produce in one year almost a half billion bushels of
wheat, and after the harvest a steady stream of golden grain rolls into
the huge elevators of Port Arthur and Fort William, its sister city,
three miles away.
These cities are on the north shore of Lake Superior, two or three
hundred miles from Duluth, and within four hundred miles of Winnipeg.
Port Arthur is situated on Thunder Bay, opposite the rocky promontory
of Thunder Cape, and Fort William is a short distance farther inland
at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River. Both towns have harbours deep
enough for the largest lake steamers, and during eight months of the
year a great caravan of boats is moving back and forth between here and
the East. By the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National railways,
Port Arthur and Fort William have connection with every part of the
wheat belt, and almost the entire amount of wheat exported, or about
seventy per cent. of the total production, is brought here for storage
and transportation.
The two cities are so full of the spirit of the breezy West that one
feels it in the air. The region is in step with twentieth-century
progress. The people look at the future through the right end of
the telescope, and most of them have microscopes in front of the
lenses. Everyone is building air castles--not in Spain, but upon
Lake Superior--and although he acknowledges that he has not yet got
far beyond the foundations, he can in his mind’s eye see cities far
surpassing those of the present.
Speaking of the enthusiasm of the Port Arthurites--the night I arrived
I walked up the street and entered a stationery store. While making a
purchase I happened to remark that the town was beautifully located.
“It is,” said the clerk, “and if you will come with me I will show you
one of the finest views in the world just behind this store.”
Supposing it to be a walk of a minute or so, I consented. The clerk
grabbed his hat and out we went. He tramped me two miles up the hills
back of Port Arthur, leading me on and on through one district after
another, until I wondered whether I was in the hands of a gold brick
agent or some other confidence man. At last, when we were out among the
real estate signs, he struck an attitude and exclaimed:
“Behold Port Arthur.”
It was moonlight and I could see the ghost-like buildings scattered
over the hills, while down on the shore of the lake was the skyline of
the business section with the mighty elevators on the edge of the water
beyond. It was a fine moonlight view of Thunder Bay, but being tired
out after my trip from the “Soo,” I was not enthusiastic.
[Illustration: The government-owned wheat elevator at Port Arthur is
the world’s largest grain storage plant. The greater part of all the
wheat grown on the western prairies comes to this city or to Fort
William for shipment down the lakes.]
[Illustration: The beautiful falls of Kakabeka are almost as high as
those of Niagara. They generate hydro-electric power that is carried to
Fort William, twenty-three miles away, to light the city and run its
factories.]
[Illustration: “The lake freighters are like no other craft I have
ever seen. Between the bow and the stern is a vast stretch of deck,
containing hatches into which wheat or ore is loaded. This boat is six
hundred feet long.”]
Fort William and Port Arthur are rivals. Port Arthur was built first.
Formerly the site of an Indian village, it was founded by the
Canadian Pacific Railway. Shortly after its birth the baby town decided
to tax that great corporation. This made the railway people angry, and
it is said that the then president of the line decided to discipline
the infant by moving his lake terminus to Fort William, which was then
a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. He thereupon shifted the railway
shops to Fort William, saying that he would yet see the grass grow in
the streets of Port Arthur. For a time the grass did grow, but later
the Canadian Northern road, now a part of the Canadian National, was
built through, and Port Arthur now has traffic from both roads. Most of
the business of the Canadian Pacific is still done at Fort William.
Fort William and Port Arthur are connected by a street-car line and the
land between them has been so divided into town lots that they may some
day unite the two cities. Both places believe in municipal ownership,
and each manages its own electric lights, telephones, and waterworks.
Fort William is the larger, Port Arthur having four or five thousand
less people.
During my stay here I have gone through some of the wheat elevators.
Fort William has twenty-two and Port Arthur ten, with a total storage
capacity between them of fifty-six million bushels. Plans are under
way to make this enormous capacity even greater. The terminal elevator
of the Canadian National Railways, built on the very edge of Lake
Superior, is the largest in the world. It consists of two huge
barn-like divisions between which are more than one hundred and fifty
herculean grain tanks. These are mighty cylinders of tiles bound
together with steel, each of which is twenty-one feet in diameter and
will hold twenty-three thousand bushels of wheat. This great tank
forest covers several acres, and rises to the height of an eight-story
apartment house.
The storage capacity of the elevator is eight million bushels of
wheat, which is more than enough to supply a city the size of Detroit
with flour the year round. The elevator can unload six hundred
cars of wheat, or about six hundred thousand bushels, in a single
day, including the weighing and binning. It has scales that weigh
forty-three tons at a time.
The wheat comes to the elevator in cars, each of which holds a thousand
or fifteen hundred bushels. By a car-dumping machine the grain is
unloaded into the basement of the huge buildings at the sides of the
tanks. From there it is raised to the top of the elevator in bushel
buckets on endless chains at the rate of six hundred and fifty bushels
a minute, or more than ten every second. It is next weighed, and then
carried on wide belt conveyors into the storage towers. The machinery
is so arranged that by pressing a button or moving a lever a stream of
wheat will flow to any part of the great granary. The grain runs just
like water, save that the belts conduct it uphill or down.
When ready to be transferred to a steamer, the wheat is drawn from the
bottom of a bin, again elevated to the top of the building, weighed,
and then poured into the vessel through spouts. It is not touched by
hand from the time it leaves the car until it is taken from the hold of
the ship, and the work is done so cheaply that it costs only a fraction
of a cent to transfer a bushel of wheat from the car to the boats. For
ten or eleven cents a bushel it can be carried a thousand miles or more
down the lakes and put into the hold of an ocean steamer that takes it
to Europe.
In one of the elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Fort William
a train of wheat is handled every twenty minutes during the season.
I timed the workers as they unloaded one car. It contained sixteen
hundred bushels of wheat, or enough, at twenty-five bushels an acre,
to equal the crop of a sixty-four acre farm. Nevertheless, it was
elevated, weighed, and put in the tanks within less than eight minutes.
The open navigation season on the Great Lakes lasts from May to
December, and during this time as much as five million bushels of wheat
a day have been put on freight boats at Fort William or Port Arthur
for trans-shipment to the East. Some of the freighters unload their
cargoes at Georgian Bay ports, on the east side of Lake Huron, from
where the wheat goes by rail to Montreal. Other ships discharge at Port
Colborne, Ontario, from where the grain is carried on barges through
the Welland Canal and thence down the St. Lawrence and its canals to
Montreal. Still other shipments go through United States ports. A few
small steamers take their cargoes all the way by water from the head of
the Lakes to Montreal; the grain carried in this way is only between
two and three per cent. of the total.
The all-water route and the combined rail-and-water route from the
head of the Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard are much cheaper than the
all-rail route, due to high railway freight rates in eastern Canada.
A bushel of wheat can be sent over the thirteen hundred miles between
Calgary and Fort William for about fifteen cents, while the overland
freight rate from Fort William to Quebec or Montreal, a distance of
only a thousand miles, is twenty-one cents. The rate on the all-water
route from Fort William to Montreal is ten cents cheaper, or eleven
cents. From Fort William to New York via Buffalo it is fourteen cents,
but vessels sailing from New York offer lower ocean rates and can get
cheaper marine insurance, so that more than half of Canada’s export
wheat is shipped abroad via the United States.
Whenever we have put a high tariff on Canadian wheat, the amount
exported to our country declines. We now admit Canadian wheat free of
duty on condition that none shall be consumed in the United States.
This does not mean that it may not be manufactured. At present fifty
per cent. of all that is imported is made into flour, and then
reëxported.
Some of the lake freighters in the Port Arthur and Fort William
harbours are like no other craft I have seen. They have an elevated
forecastle at the bow for the crew, with the engines and officers’
quarters in the stern. In rough weather one can pass from bow to
stern only by means of a life rope, and orders and reports are given
by telephone. In the stretch of deck between is a series of hatches,
sometimes thirty or more, through which the cargoes are loaded or
discharged. A single vessel will often carry three hundred thousand
bushels of wheat, or the equivalent of six or seven trainloads of forty
cars each. Among the boats in the lake grain trade this season were a
number of small ocean-going freighters from Norway, attracted here by
the cargoes available at profitable rates.
Besides the great fleet of grain-carrying ships, passenger steamers run
from Port Arthur and Fort William to Georgian Bay, touching at all the
important ports on the route. I steamed for eighteen hours through Lake
Superior coming here on one of the boats from the “Soo.” That lake is
so large that at times we lost sight of land and it seemed as though we
were in mid-ocean. At other times we could see the irregular coastline,
which is rock-bound and picturesque. The water of Lake Superior is as
clear as crystal; it is icy cold the year round.
CHAPTER XX
WINNIPEG--WHERE THE PRAIRIES BEGIN
Stand with me on the top of the Union Bank Building, and take a look
at the city of Winnipeg. You had best pull your hat down over your
ears and button your fur coat up to your neck for the wind is blowing
a gale. The sky is bright, and the air is sharp and so full of ozone
that we seem to be breathing champagne. I venture you have never felt
so much alive. The city stretches out on all sides for miles. Office
buildings and stores are going up, new shingle roofs shine brightly
under the winter sun, and we can almost smell the paint of the suburban
additions. Within fifty years Winnipeg has jumped from a Hudson’s
Bay Company trading post of two hundred people to a city of more
than two hundred thousand, and it is still growing. The value of the
buildings erected last year amounted to more than half that of the new
construction in Montreal.
Now turn about and look up Portage Avenue. Twenty years ago that street
hardly existed. To-day it has millions of dollars’ worth of business
blocks, any of which would be a credit to a city the same size in the
States. That nine-story department store over there is the largest
in western Canada. Farther down Main Street are the Canadian Pacific
hotel and railway offices, and beyond them the great terminals of the
Canadian National Railways. “Yes, sir,” says the Winnipegger at my
side, “you can see how we have grown. It was about the beginning of
this century that we began to build for all time and eternity. Before
that most of our buildings were put up without cellars and had flimsy
foundations. We had not realized that Winnipeg was bound to be the
greatest city of Central Canada.
“Look at those wholesale houses,” he continues. “Did you ever see
anything like them? Most of them started as two- or three-story
structures, but their business has grown so that they have had to be
pushed up to six stories or more. Winnipeg is one of the chief markets
of western North America. If you had a pair of long-distance glasses
that would enable you to look from here to the Pacific you could find
no city in western Canada that can approach it, and your eyes would
travel as far as Toronto before any city of its size could be seen.
“If it were now summer,” the Winnipegger continues, “your telescope
would show you that you are at the eastern end of the greatest
grain-growing region on earth. To the west of us are six million acres
of land that will grow wheat and other foodstuffs with little more
labour than scratching the ground. Western Canada raised in one year
almost a half billion bushels of wheat and almost as much oats, to say
nothing of millions of bushels of barley, rye, and flax seed.”
“Don’t you think it is a bit cold here on the roof?” I rather timidly
manage to ask.
“Well, perhaps so,” is the reply, “but when I talk about Winnipeg I
grow so warm that I could stand stark naked on the North Pole and not
feel uncomfortable.”
Leaving the Union Bank Building, we go for a motor ride through the
city. Main Street, the chief business thoroughfare, was one of the old
Indian trails that followed the course of the Red River past the old
Hudson’s Bay Company fort. And it still contains some of the city’s
best commercial properties. Along it real estate has been rapidly
rising in price and is said to be now fully as high as in Minneapolis
or Toronto. Portage Avenue, which we saw from the roof, cuts Main
Street almost at right angles. It also is part of an old Indian trail
that extended from here a thousand miles westward to Edmonton, a city
now reached by three great railroad lines.
Notice the banks! Winnipeg is one of the financial centres of Canada,
with branches of the chief banks of the Dominion. Now we are going
toward the river, past the Hudson’s Bay Company stores. Turning to
the right, we pass the Manitoba Club, the University of Manitoba,
and the parliament buildings. Like Washington, Winnipeg is a city of
magnificent distances. The main streets are one hundred and thirty-two
feet wide, and they stretch on and on out into the country. In the
residential districts they wind this way and that along the Assiniboine
River. Boulevards have been laid out on both sides of the stream in
such a way that every residence has a back yard running down to the
water, and nearly all have gardens and trees. There are miles of fine
houses in this part of Winnipeg. The chief building materials are white
brick and a cream-coloured stone found near by. This is, in fact, a
white city, and it looks as neat as a pin under the bright sunshine.
The boosting Winnipeggers say the sun shines here for thirteen months
or more every year. It is true that of the three hundred and sixty-five
days of the year, three hundred and thirty are usually cloudless.
[Illustration: Winnipeg grew within fifty years from a Hudson’s Bay
post of two hundred people to the third largest city in the Dominion.
It is the greatest grain market in Canada, all eastward-bound wheat
being inspected and graded here.]
[Illustration: Corn is cut by machinery in southern Manitoba. The land
is worked in such large tracts that it pays to use the most modern
labour-saving devices.]
[Illustration: Wheat growers on a large scale usually have their own
threshing machines, but the small farmer must stack his grain and wait
for the arrival of one of the threshing outfits that travel from farm
to farm through the wheat belt.]
Leaving the boulevards, we ride through street after street of
cottages, the homes of the well-to-do and of the poorer classes. We
see but few signs of “To Let” or “For Sale.” Winnipeg has almost no
tenement buildings. Even the dwellings of the labourers stand in yards.
Notice the double windows used to keep out the intense cold.
Winnipeg lies on a plain about midway between the Atlantic and the
Pacific and sixty miles from the United States boundary. The city is
built on the banks of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North,
which here come together. The confluence of the two rivers was the site
of numerous Indian camps and trading posts, and the scene of many of
the early struggles between the rival fur companies. Fort Garry was
finally established here in 1820 by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a
settlement that sprang up a half mile away was called Winnipeg, after
the lake of the same name about fifty miles to the north. The word is a
contraction of the Cree Indian “Ouinipigon,” meaning “muddy waters.”
In 1870, at the time of the Red River Rebellion against the creation
of Manitoba as a province of the Dominion and its occupation by the
Dominion government, Winnipeg, including Fort Garry, had two hundred
and forty inhabitants. Ten years later its population was seven
thousand, and in another ten years, following the coming of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, it had about thirty thousand people. Since
then it has grown steadily, until it is now the third city in Canada,
outranked only by Montreal and Toronto. It is an important industrial
centre, manufacturing more than one hundred million dollars worth of
goods in one year.
Situated at the gateway of Western Canada, and the vast wheatfields of
Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Winnipeg is the largest grain
market not only of the Dominion but of the whole British Empire. It is
the neck of the bottle, as it were, for practically the entire crop of
the prairie provinces. Every carload of wheat bound eastward for Fort
William or Port Arthur is opened here and sampled to determine its
grade, a report on which is sent on to the elevator as soon as the car
is reclosed and sealed. Hence, when the carload of wheat arrives at the
elevator it can be binned in its proper place without any delay.
Winnipeg is the distributing point for western Canada for immigrants
and settlers. There are people here of almost every nationality in
Christendom, and I am told that the Bible is circulated through a local
society in fifty different languages and dialects. Across the Red River
from the city is the town of St. Boniface, where live several thousand
French Canadians whose fathers came here years ago. For a long time
the settlement was typically and wholly French, but many new people
have come in, and not long since, for the first time in its history, an
English-speaking mayor was elected.
Some distance from the city, on the south shore of Lake Winnipeg,
is a colony of Icelanders. These people were among the first of the
immigrants to western Canada. They were brought in by commissioners
of the Dominion government when it was thought that none but those
accustomed to the cold of the arctic region could withstand the
climate. A colony of several thousand was settled along the shores
of the lake. For a time they made their living by fishing, much of
their catch in the winter being taken through holes in the ice. The
Icelanders intermarried with the Canadians, and they are now well
scattered over the province. Some of them are lawyers, others are
teachers, and many of the girls have gone into domestic service. The
largest Icelandic church in the world is in Winnipeg, and periodicals
are published here in the Icelandic language.
Winnipeg has many Mennonites and Russians. I saw a Russian church in
my drive about the city. The Catholic population is large, the French
Canadians belonging to that denomination. Outside the city are a
Trappist monastery and a Trappist nunnery. Almost every denomination of
Protestants has its meeting house, and the Jews have a synagogue.
I like the Winnipeggers. They are strenuous, enthusiastic, and happy.
They are “boosters,” claiming that their city has the best climate on
earth, and that they would not exchange the biting winter winds of the
prairie for the gentle zephyrs of Florida or California. Just now every
one who can afford it wears a fur overcoat, many of which are made of
coon skins. The fur of the coon is long and thick and the coat almost
doubles the size of the wearer. It makes him look at least a foot
broader. Some of the fur caps add six inches in height. Indeed, the
town seems peopled with furry giants, who just now are breathing out
steam, for the frost congeals the air from their nostrils so that it
rises like the vapour of an incipient volcano.
The women here also dress in furs. Their cheeks are red from Jack
Frost’s nipping cold, and the ozone in the air paints their eyes
bright. When they begin to talk one knows at once that they are the
wives and the daughters of the giants beside them, for they sing the
praises of Winnipeg as loud as the men.
Until 1912 Manitoba contained only half as much land as it does to-day.
It was almost a perfect square and was known as the “Postage Stamp”
province. Then a section of the Northwest Territories was added to it,
and now it is as large as North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, and
Indiana combined. From the Lake of the Woods and the Ontario boundary
it extends westward to Saskatchewan, while from the boundary of North
Dakota and Minnesota it stretches northward for a distance almost as
long as from New York to Chicago.
Although known as a prairie province, as a matter of fact, only five
per cent. of Manitoba is rightly included under this designation. This
is in the southern part, where the fertile Red River Valley grows some
of the finest wheat of all Canada. Three fourths of the province is
covered with forest, mostly second growth, which has sprung up since
the great forest fires in the past swept over the country. In the north
are also vast regions of barren land and muskeg, whose only value is in
their game and fish. Near The Pas, four hundred and eighty-three miles
north of Winnipeg, is a region of minerals, where deposits of copper,
gold, and silver are known to exist, but where the developments as yet
are of no great importance.
About five hundred miles north of Winnipeg is a belt of clay land
similar to that I have described in Ontario. This belt is level and
well adapted to mixed farming. The Winnipeggers tell me that the
railway built toward Hudson Bay has done much to open that part of
Manitoba to settlement. The climate is said to be warmer than that of
Winnipeg, owing to the absence of windswept plains and the proximity
of the waters of Hudson Bay, which have a temperature higher than
those of Lake Superior. Hardy grains and vegetables can be grown, and
strawberries have been raised at The Pas.
The first charter to build a railway to Hudson Bay was granted as far
back as 1880, and the project has been under discussion more or less
ever since. The various Canadian trunk lines at different times have
made plans for extensions to the Bay, and I am told that James J. Hill
once owned a concession to build such a line. The railway from Winnipeg
to The Pas on the Saskatchewan River was completed about 1906, and from
there it was planned to extend it on to Hudson Bay. Actual work was
held up a long time because of a controversy as to whether the northern
terminus should be at Port Nelson or farther north at Fort Churchill.
Port Nelson was finally decided upon in 1912 and work was resumed.
As there were no settlements along the route, and as the builders had
to carry with them all their supplies and food, the line was pushed
northward a short distance at a time, and progress was slow. The
plans included a harbour at Port Nelson and the erection there of
two four-million bushel wheat elevators. However, the ships loaded
with supplies for the new port met with disaster, and later it was
learned that the entire appropriation for the railway had been spent
leaving the line far from completion. The project was finally abandoned
in 1917, when three hundred and thirty-two of the four hundred and
twenty-four miles from The Pas to Port Nelson had been built. An
irregular service has been since maintained to Mile 214, mostly for the
accommodation of miners and hunters.
The Hudson Bay route would bring the wheat of the Northwest a thousand
miles nearer the ocean. Port Nelson is as near Liverpool as is
Montreal, and a carload of wheat from Regina in Saskatchewan could be
at the Hudson Bay port in the same time it would take to reach Fort
William. The distance from Winnipeg to Liverpool via Hudson Bay is
three thousand miles, whereas by Montreal it is 4228 miles. Passengers
to England from St. Paul and Minneapolis by using this route would
shorten their railroad journey by at least five or six hundred miles.
The chief objection to the completion of the Hudson Bay railway is the
difficulty of navigating, not the Bay itself, but Hudson Strait, which
leads into it. The strait opens out into the Atlantic a little below
Greenland. It is between four and five hundred miles long, and from
fifty to two hundred miles wide. From the middle of October until June
it is sure to be full of ice from the Arctic Ocean, and some parts of
it are usually blocked for a month longer. Moreover, it is not safe to
rely upon it being open later than the first week in October.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS
Can you imagine all the railroads of the United States divided into two
systems, paralleling each other from our Atlantic coast to the Pacific?
Think of them as north of a line drawn from Baltimore westward through
St. Louis to San Francisco. Let the distance between terminals be
nearly four thousand miles, and the total length of track ten times as
great. Finally, suppose that the larger of the two systems is owned and
operated by Uncle Sam, and the other by such a corporation as the New
York Central. If you can do that you will have the background of the
railroad situation in Canada to-day.
With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has more
railroads in proportion to her population than any other country on
earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total mileage.
Geographically, British America extends from our northern border to the
Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is mostly confined to
a strip of territory averaging less than five hundred miles wide from
north to south and more than three thousand miles long.
Our railroad development began in the East and extended westward,
but we have no system that reaches from coast to coast. Canada,
on the other hand, has two such systems. Neither have we any such
transportation service as the Canadian Pacific, which can take a
passenger on board ship at Liverpool, Hamburg, Cherbourg, land him in
Canada, carry him across the continent and across the Pacific, and set
him down in Japan or China, putting him up at its own hotels whenever
he wants to stop over.
Before the World War, the Canadian Pacific, with some fourteen thousand
miles of its own rails, and five thousand more under its operation,
was the world’s largest land and water transportation system under one
management. To go over all its lines would take nearly three weeks of
continuous travel behind a fast engine. Now it has been eclipsed on
land by the Canadian National lines, with twenty-two thousand miles of
track, owned and operated by the Dominion government.
I have ridden for thousands of miles over both of the present systems,
and have made trips in Canada when some of the lines were in the
process of building. I have talked with the pioneers of railroad
development in the Dominion and the officials of the great railway
organizations of to-day. I have watched the wheat trains pull out of
Winnipeg, one every half hour, all day and all night. Both the Canadian
National and the Canadian Pacific are doing their jobs well, and both
furnish excellent equipment and service on their main lines. As a rule,
the trains run at slower speed than the best expresses of the United
States, and, excepting the Trans-Canada Limited, they stop at places so
small that they would get only a shriek of the whistle from our fast
railway flyers. Most of the lines have only a single track, but this
is generally sufficient to handle the traffic. Both systems operate
almost exclusively their own sleeping and dining cars. Each has also
its own express service, and combined they have more than one hundred
thousand miles of telegraph lines open to the use of the public. The
food I have eaten on the dining cars here has averaged in quality above
that served on eastern trains in the United States. The prices are
about the same, though the portions, as a rule, are more generous.
[Illustration: With a population of less than two and one half persons
per square mile, strung out across a continent nearly three thousand
miles wide, Canada has had to make enormous investments in railroads to
bind the country together.]
[Illustration: “Selling the scenery” has become a great source of
revenue to Canada’s railroads, which are experts in exploiting the
natural beauties of the Dominion. Americans furnish the bulk of the
patronage over the scenic routes.]
The managements of both of these systems make strenuous endeavours
to cultivate the highest morale in their employees, and to win their
coöperation in the struggle for efficiency. Every man in the Canadian
railroad service understands that the Dominion needs more and more
people, and from managing vice presidents to dining-car stewards, each
seems to have constituted himself an entertainment committee of one.
I have never received anywhere more courteous treatment from train
men, and I notice that neither the brakemen nor the sleeper conductors
consider themselves above helping me with my numerous pieces of baggage.
The Canadian Pacific has a chain of thirteen hotels supplemented by
eleven bungalow camps extending from St. Andrews, New Brunswick, to
Victoria in British Columbia. The Canadian National lines operate
half as many between Ottawa and the Rockies. Both organizations are
most enterprising in selling not merely transportation, but all the
attractions, business opportunities, and resources of Canada. Either
one will cheerfully locate a newly arrived immigrant on the land,
take an American sportsman on a hunting trip, find a factory site or
lumber tract for a group of capitalists, or help a bridegroom plan his
honeymoon journey. Both are tremendous forces for advertising Canada.
Canada’s railroads have made the country. They have always been, and
still are, ahead of the population and the traffic. Settlement in
Canada has followed, instead of preceding, railroad construction, and
the roads themselves have had to colonize the territories served by new
lines. Uneconomic railroad building has been a part of the price the
Dominion has had to pay, not only for settlers, but also for political
unity. Both the Maritime Provinces and British Columbia refused to
become parts of the Dominion except on condition that the Ottawa
government build railways connecting them with central Canada. From
that day to this, political pressure has been the force behind much of
the railroad building in the Dominion.
The Canada that we know to-day may be said to have had its beginning
when the Canadian Pacific Railway was put through to the west coast.
In 1880 the job was turned over to a syndicate that soon became world
famous. Its contract called for completion of the line in ten years,
but it was finished within half that time. This saved British Columbia
to the Dominion, and gave the British Empire another link in its world
communications, including a direct route through its own possessions
to the Far East and Australia. Within two years after it reached the
western ocean, the Canadian Pacific began its steamship service to
Japan and China, and tapped the Orient for cargoes to furnish traffic
on its land line. Sixteen years later it bridged the Atlantic. It now
has on both oceans a fleet of more than thirty vessels, including
some of the finest passenger steamers afloat. In its lake, river, and
coastwise services it operates fifty additional ships. It offers now
a favoured route between London and the Far East. The distance from
Canton, China, to Liverpool, via Canada, is fifteen hundred miles
shorter than by way of San Francisco and New York, and the journey
takes much less time than that by the Suez or Panama all-water routes.
Much of the main line between Montreal and Vancouver is being double
tracked; the mountain grades are constantly being reduced; tunnels
are taking the place of construction exposed to the snows; branches
and connections have been extended northward into new country, and
southward to connect with United States lines. To pay its nearly
seventy-five thousand employees takes almost eight million dollars a
month. Its car shops at Angus, near Montreal, are one of the largest
works of the kind on the continent, and they employ more than six
thousand men. Its freight yard at Winnipeg is among the biggest in the
world. Though the company is not fifty years old, its total assets were
recently valued at a figure in excess of one billion dollars. It is,
next to the government, the most powerful single organization within
the Dominion, and its influence is felt in Europe and Asia.
The success of the Canadian Pacific, and the development that followed,
started in Canada the fever for railroad construction that burned
itself out only a few years ago. The provincial and the Dominion
governments and even municipalities eagerly backed almost any railroad
project that promised to open up new territory. Not only were charters
granted freely, but the obligations of the constructing companies were
guaranteed, and cash subsidies advanced to the promoters of new lines.
The actual transportation needs of large areas were discounted decades
in advance, and competing lines were built parallel to one another in
districts producing hardly enough traffic for a single railroad.
In 1903 the Grand Trunk, the oldest railroad system in Canada,
contracted with the government for the construction of a new
transcontinental line from Quebec to Winnipeg and from Winnipeg to
Prince Rupert, a new terminus on the Pacific Coast, a total of 3559
miles. In the meantime, another road, the Canadian Northern, starting
in Manitoba, spread itself through the prairie provinces, crossed the
Rockies, and entered into competition with the Canadian Pacific at
Vancouver. By 1914 it had bought and built a total of 9400 miles of
railway. The Grand Trunk also had grown, and it then had 7500 miles of
tracks, a chain of hotels, steamship lines on the Pacific coast, and
grain elevators and terminals in the Dominion and the United States.
Both roads crossed the Rockies at the same point, giving Canada two
transcontinental lines over the northern route where one would have
been plenty.
It was in 1914 that these railroad chickens came home to Ottawa to
roost, and the end of the World War found the government up to its neck
in the transportation business. This did not come about by anybody’s
choosing, but through the working of forces set in motion years ago.
The Dominion government was first led into running railroads by its
bargain with the Maritime Provinces. Out of this came government
operation of the Intercolonial Railways serving the eastern provinces
and joining them to the St. Lawrence basin. This system never earned
any profits. The government built the National Transcontinental from
Quebec to Winnipeg on the understanding that the Grand Trunk would
lease it for fifty years. When it was finished, the corporation
begged off, and the government was compelled to operate the line. In
1914, the owners of the Canadian Northern announced that unless they
received sixty million dollars at once they would have to suspend. They
got the money. Two years later it was the Grand Trunk Pacific that
appealed to Ottawa for financial aid. Sustaining these railroads was
such a drain on the public treasury that finally the government assumed
responsibility for all their obligations and absolute control of the
properties. It then began to weld them into the single system now known
as the Canadian National Railways.
For years the Canadian Pacific Railway has paid dividends regularly.
The lines making up the Canadian National have, for the most part,
never paid anything, and they were unloaded upon the government
because they were regarded more as liabilities than as assets. As the
largest taxpayer in Canada, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company must
contribute indirectly to the support of its competitor, unless the
government lines are able to earn their own way.
After the war, one year’s deficit on the government lines was
sixty-seven million dollars. In railroad subsidies, Canada has paid
out nearly three hundred million dollars. Bonds and other railroad
obligations to the total of four hundred and fifty-five millions have
been guaranteed, while four hundred and seventy millions of public
moneys were spent in building roads for the government. One student of
Canada’s railroad policy tells me that the national treasury would now
be four hundred millions to the good if the government had given the
National Transcontinental, the Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk
Pacific to some corporation, and had thrown in a cash bonus of two
hundred millions besides.
The government railroads now furnish a complete service to virtually
all parts of Canada, including the chief ports, from Halifax on the
east coast to Vancouver and Prince Rupert on the west. The Canadian
National Railways operate the Grand Trunk hotels and west coast
steamers, and also the sixty-five ships of the Canadian Government
Merchant Marine, which sail the seven seas. The curious situation
exists of railroads owned by the government of Canada using two
thousand miles of track in the United States. Nothing was thought of
the Grand Trunk having terminals at Portland, Maine and New London,
Connecticut, and Chicago, but the government ownership of these
properties raises the possibility of conflict between the two countries
in railroad matters.
The government is fortunate in having in charge of the Canadian
National lines Sir Henry Thornton, one of the great railroad men of
the time. To him all Canada is looking to find the way out of the
wilderness into which circumstances have brought the Dominion. Under
his administration duplicated services are being eliminated, and the
deficits have been greatly reduced. He is confident the lines can be
made self-supporting. He said the other day:
“The world expects the Canadian National Railways to fail. It does not
believe that we can make them succeed. I do. I believe that if the army
of workers lines up behind us, we shall achieve the greatest success
the annals of transportation have ever recorded.”
Though he is to-day a British subject, Sir Henry was born an American.
His boyhood home was in Lafayette, Indiana. From St. Paul’s School
in New Hampshire and the University of Pennsylvania, he went to
the Pennsylvania Railroad. He rose to be manager of the Long Island
Railroad, where he had much to do with the construction and operation
of the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York City. England sent for him
in 1914 to manage the Great Eastern Railway, which has the largest
passenger traffic of any railroad in the world, and during the war he
was in charge of all British army transportation in Europe.
Sir Henry is not the first railroad genius America has furnished to
Canada. Lord Shaughnessy, for many years the president and then the
chairman of the Canadian Pacific, was born in Milwaukee. When he was a
boy of fifteen he went to work for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul
Railroad. I once spent a morning with him in his office at Montreal,
where he told me of his early career and his vision of the future
of Canada and the great transportation system that he had raised up
from infancy. His successor, E. W. Beatty, is the first Canadian-born
president the Canadian Pacific has ever had.
Thomas Shaughnessy came to Canada at the invitation of William Van
Home, another American. Van Home became the manager of the project
after the government had given up hope of building a road across
western Canada. It was he who carried it through the early period of
desperate struggle with the wilderness and the equally desperate fight
for money with which to meet the payroll. Years ago he established the
present policy of courtesy to passengers, and placarded the system with
a demand for “Parisian politeness on the C. P. R.” During their régime,
both men had associated with them many other Americans whom they called
to Canada to lend a hand in one of the greatest transportation jobs the
world has ever known.
CHAPTER XXII
THE LAND OF FURS
For four hundred years furs from Canada have been warming the flesh
and enhancing the charms of feminine beauty. It is to-day the chief
breeding place of animals valued for their skins, and it is likely to
remain so for centuries to come.
When the settlement of North America was at its beginning, the French
adventurers making fortunes in furs did their best to discourage the
incoming colonists, for they knew that this meant the death of the
wilderness. If they could have had their way, all that is now Canada
would have been left to the Indian trappers and the white traders who
relieved them of their annual catches. As it is, improved methods
of transportation, trapping, and hunting are reducing the available
supply, and the demand is such that the furriers have had to popularize
skins formerly despised as too common, and many Canadians have gone
into the business of breeding fur-bearing animals.
[Illustration: The fur business of Canada has its beginning when the
company trader strikes a bargain with the Eskimo for his season’s catch
of the white fox of the arctic and other skins.]
[Illustration: The Hudson’s Bay Company has more than two hundred
trading posts where Indians, Eskimos, and white trappers exchange furs
for goods. Eighteen of the stations lie near or north of the Arctic
Circle.]
[Illustration: Most of the fine fox skins now marketed in Canada come
from animals raised in captivity on fur farms. Occasionally a cat may
act as a substitute mother for a litter of fox kittens.]
Winnipeg has long been an important city in the Canadian fur trade,
and here the world’s greatest fur organization has its headquarters.
I refer, of course, to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which for more than
two hundred and fifty years has been bartering goods for the furs of
British North America. It was founded when the British had scarcely a
foothold in Canada, and its operations won for them their dominion
over the northwestern part of our continent. In the beginning it was
but one of many trading enterprises of the New World. To-day it has
adapted itself to the tremendous changes in our civilization and it is
bigger, stronger, and richer than ever.
Massachusetts Colony was not fifty years old when the _Nonsuch_, loaded
to the waterline with the first cargo of furs, sailed for England
from Hudson Bay. The success of the voyage led the dukes and lords
who backed the venture to ask King Charles II for a charter. This was
granted in 1670, and thus came into existence, so far as the word of
a king could make it so, “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England Trading into Hudson’s Bay,” exclusive lords and proprietors of
a vast and but vaguely known region extending from Hudson Bay westward,
with sole rights to fish, hunt, and trade therein.
It remained for the Company to make good the privileges conferred by
the charter and maintain the profits, which at that period sometimes
amounted to one hundred per cent. a year. For nearly a century the
company’s ships and forts did battle with the armed forces of the
French. For another long period its factors and traders had to meet the
attacks of rival companies. At times the company was nearly wiped out
by the heavy losses it sustained. For almost two centuries it furnished
the only government of the Canadian Northwest, and without the use of a
standing army it administered a vast region, out of which provinces and
territories have since been carved.
The “Company of Adventurers” has now become a fifteen million dollar
corporation, paying regularly five per cent. on ten million dollars’
worth of preferred stock. A fleet of river, lake, and ocean steamers
has succeeded the _Nonsuch_. The early trading posts, stocked with
crude tools, weapons, and ornaments for the Indians, have been
supplemented by a chain of eleven department stores, extending from
Winnipeg to Vancouver, and at the same time the number of trading posts
exchanging goods for furs is greater than ever. There are about two
hundred of these posts, eighteen of which are near or north of the
arctic circle. The Company no longer actually governs any territory,
and it is selling to settlers the remainder of the seven million
acres in the fertile belt it has received from the Dominion since the
surrender of its ancient rights in the Northwest.
The story of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a large part of the history of
Canada. Many books have been written about it, and countless romances
built upon the lives of its men stationed in the wilds. Here at
Winnipeg the company has an historical exhibit where one may visualize
the life of the trappers and the traders, and gain an idea of the
adventures that are still commonplaces in their day’s work. The company
museum contains specimen skins of every kind of Canadian fur-bearing
animal. The life of the Indians and the Eskimos is reproduced through
the exhibits of their tools, boats, weapons, and housekeeping equipment.
The success of the Hudson’s Bay Company has rested upon its relations
with the Indians. The organization is proud of the fact that it has
never engaged in wars with the tribes. The business has always been on
a voluntary basis, and the Indians have to come to the Company posts
of their own free will. At first the traders’ stocks were limited, but
through centuries of contact with civilization the wants of the red
man have increased and become more varied. They now include nearly
everything that a white man would wish if he were living in the woods.
The first skins brought in from Hudson Bay were practically all
beavers. This led to the exchange being based on the value of a single
beaver skin, or “made beaver.” Sticks, quills, or brass tokens were
used, each designating a “made beaver,” or a fraction thereof. The
prices of a pound of powder, a gun, or a quart of glass beads were
reckoned in “made beaver.”
Early in its history the Company decided that Scotchmen made the best
traders and were most successful in dealing with the Indians. Young
Scotchmen were usually apprenticed as clerks on five-year contracts,
and if successful they might hope to become traders, chief traders,
factors, and chief factors. Men in these grades were considered
officers of the company and received commissions. Mechanics and men
engaged in the transport service were known as “servants” of the
company, and the distinction between “servants,” clerks, and officers
was almost as marked as in the various military ranks of an army.
To-day, Canada is divided into eleven districts, each of which is in
charge of a manager, and the old titles are no longer used.
A trader had to be a diplomat to preserve friendly relations with the
Indians, an administrator to manage the Company’s valuable properties
in his charge, a shrewd bargainer to dispose of his stock on good
terms, and at times soldier and explorer besides. The Company’s
charter authorized it to apply the laws of England in the territories
under its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently had to administer
justice with a stern hand. It early became the inflexible policy to
seek out a horse thief, incendiary, or murderer among the Indians and
impose punishment, and it was the trader who had to catch his man and
sometimes to execute him.
It was the activities of its rivals, and especially of the Northwest
Company, that resulted in the establishment of the inland stations of
the Hudson’s Bay Company. As long as it had a monopoly, the Company
was content to set up posts at points convenient for itself, and let
the Indians do all the travelling, sometimes making them go as much as
one thousand miles to dispose of their furs. The opposition, however,
carried goods to the Indians, and thus penetrated to the far Northwest
and the Mackenzie River country. This competition compelled the older
organization to extend its posts all over Canada, and finally, in
1821, led to its absorption of the Northwest Company. To-day the chief
competitor of the Hudson’s Bay Company is the French firm of Revillon
Frères.
The merger with the Northwest Company was preceded by years of violent
struggle. The younger concern was the more aggressive. It tried to keep
the Indians from selling furs to the Hudson’s Bay traders. Its men
destroyed the traps and fish nets, and stole the weapons, ammunition,
and furs of their rivals. Neither was above almost any method of
tricking the other if thereby furs might be gained. Once some Hudson’s
Bay men discovered the tracks of Indians returning from a hunt. They
at once gave a great ball, inviting the men of the near by post of
the rival company. While they plied their guests with all forms of
entertainment, a small party packed four sledges with trade goods and
stole off to the Indian camp. The next day the Northwest men heard of
the arrival of the Indians and went to them to barter for furs, only
to find that all had been sold to the Hudson’s Bay traders. At another
time two rival groups of traders met en route to an Indian camp and
decided to make a night of it. But the Northwest men kept sober, and,
when the Hudson’s Bay men were full of liquor, tied them to their sleds
and started their dog teams back on the trail over which they had come.
The Northwest traders then went on to the Indians and secured all the
furs.
The Hudson’s Bay Company sends all of its raw skins to London, where
they are graded and prepared for the auction sales attended by fur
buyers from all over the world. It does not sell any in Canada.
Nevertheless, the Dominion is an important fur-making centre. During a
recent visit to Quebec, I spent a morning with the manager of a firm
which handles millions of dollars’ worth of furs every year. It has its
own workshops where the skins are cured and the furs dressed and made
into garments. The name of this firm is Holt, Renfrew and Company. Let
us go back to Quebec and pay it a visit.
Imagine a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of furs under one roof!
Picture to your minds raw skins in bales, just as they were unloaded
from an Indian canoe, and then look again and see wraps and coats
made from them that would each bring five thousand dollars when sold
on Fifth Avenue. If your imagination is vivid enough you may see the
American beauties who will wear them and know how the furs will add to
the sparkle of their eyes and at the same time lighten the purses of
their sweethearts and husbands.
We shall first go to the cold storage rooms. Here are piles of
sealskins from our Pribilof Islands. Put one of these furs against
your cheek. It feels like velvet. In these rooms are beavers from
Labrador, sables from Russia, and squirrels from Siberia. There are
scores of fox skins--blue, silver, black, and white. Some of them come
from the cold arctic regions and others from fox farms not twenty
minutes distant by motor. Take a look at this cloak of silvery gray
fur. A year ago the skins from which it was made were on the backs of
hair seals swimming in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.
As we go through the factory, some of the secrets of fur making are
whispered to us. For example, this bale contains fifteen hundred skins
of the muskrat. The animals which produced them will change their names
after a trip to the dyers. They will go into the vats and when they
come out they will be Hudson Bay seals, and eventually will find their
way into a black coat with a wonderful sheen. Years ago the muskrat
skin was despised. Now it is made into coats that, under the trade name
of Hudson seal, bring nearly as much as those of real seal.
Here are two Russian sables, little fellows of beautiful fur, that
together will form a single neck piece. The undressed skins are worth
seven hundred dollars the pair. As we look, the manager shows us two
native sables that seem to be quite as fine. He tells us they can be
had for eighty-five dollars each, or less than a quarter of the price
of the Russian.
The most valuable fur in the world to-day is the sea otter, of which
this firm gets only three or four skins in a year. But, in contrast,
over there is a whole heap of Labrador otters, beautiful furs, which
will wear almost for ever and will look almost as well as the sea
otter itself. But you can have your choice of these at forty dollars
apiece. They are cheap chiefly because the Labrador skin is not in
fashion with women. Fashion in furs is constantly changing. Not many
years ago a black fox skin often brought as much as fifteen hundred
dollars. To-day, so many are coming from the fur farms that the price
has fallen to one hundred and fifty dollars. Scarcity is one of the
chief considerations in determining the value of furs, and fashion
always counts more than utility. The rich, like the kings of old,
demand something that the poor cannot have, and lose their interest in
the genuine furs when their imitations have become common and cheap.
The dyer and his art have greatly changed the fur trade. It is he
who enables the salesgirl to wear furs that look like those of her
customers. For example, here is a coat made of the best beaver. Its
price is four hundred dollars, and beside it is another made of dyed
rabbit fur, marked one hundred and fifty dollars. It is hard for
a novice to tell which is the better. All sorts of new names have
been devised by the furriers to popularize dyed skins of humble
animals, from house cats to skunks, in order to increase the supply
of good-looking and durable furs. Reliable dealers will tell you just
what their garments are made of, but the unscrupulous pass off the
imitations as the genuine article.
The business of dyeing furs was developed first in Germany, when that
country led the world in making dyes. Now that New York is competing
with London as a great fur market many of the best German dyers are at
work there. From the standpoint of the consumer, the chief objection to
dyed fur is that the natural never fades, while the dyed one is almost
certain to change its hue after a time.
Now let us go into the rooms where the furs are made up. It is like
a tailor shop. Here is a designer, evolving new patterns out of big
sheets of paper. There are the cutters, making trimmings, stoles, neck
pieces, and coats. Each must be a colour expert, for a large part of
the secret of fashioning a beautiful fur garment is in the skillful
matching of the varying shades to give pleasing effects. Were the skins
for a coat sewn together just as they come from the bale, the garment
resulting would be a weird-looking patchwork. Even before the skins are
selected, they must be graded for the colours and shadings which go far
to determine their value. There are no rules for this work; it takes a
natural aptitude and long experience. In the London warehouse of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, the men of a single family have superintended the
grading of all the millions of skins handled there for more than one
hundred years.
Turn over this unfinished beaver coat lying on the bench and look at
the wrong side. See how small are the pieces of which it is made and
how irregular are their shapes. It is a mass of little patches, yet
the outer, or right side, looks as though it were made of large skins,
all of about the same size and shape. A coat of muskrat, transformed
by dyeing into Hudson seal, may require seventy-five skins; a moleskin
coat may contain six hundred. But in making up either garment each
skin must be cut into a number of pieces and fitted to others in order
to get the blending of light and dark shades which means beauty and
quality.
[Illustration: The Eskimo woman and her children wear as every-day
necessities furs which if made into more fashionable garments would
bring large sums. Usually the whole family goes on the annual trip to
the trading post.]
[Illustration: As Saskatchewan was not made a province until 1904,
Regina is one of the youngest capital cities in Canada. It was for many
years the headquarters of the Mounted Police for all the Northwest.]
CHAPTER XXIII
SASKATCHEWAN
We have left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great Canadian
prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a distance of
eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer is in vast
fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on and on in
rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of it is cut
up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces one hundred
feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go almost anywhere on
the prairie, and everyone makes his own road.
Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near where
John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the prairies,
is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by
Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great
herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the comfortable
homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental railways have
brought it within a few days’ travel of the Atlantic and the Pacific
seaboards.
A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into
Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has an
area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and is as
large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the United States
boundary, rolling grain lands extend northward through more than one
third of its area. The remainder is mostly forest, thinning out toward
Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabaska at the north, and inhabited chiefly
by deer, elk, moose, and black bear. There are saw-mills at work
throughout the central part of the province, and the annual lumber cut
is worth in the neighbourhood of two million dollars.
Except at the southwest, Saskatchewan is well watered. The Saskatchewan
River, which has many branches, drains the southern and central
sections. This stream in the early days was a canoe route to the
Rockies. For a long time afterward, when the only railway was the
Canadian Pacific line in the southern part of the province, the river
was the highway of commerce for the north. It was used largely by
settlers who floated their belongings down it to the homesteads they
had taken up on its banks. Now the steamboats that plied there have
almost entirely disappeared. The northern part of the province is made
up of lakes and rivers so numerous that some of them have not yet been
named. The southwest is a strip of semi-arid land that has been brought
under cultivation by irrigation and now raises large crops of alfalfa.
A small part of southwestern Saskatchewan, near the Alberta boundary,
is adapted for cattle and sheep raising. The Chinook winds from the
Pacific keep the winters mild and the snowfall light, so that live
stock may graze in the open all the year round. Elsewhere the winters
are extremely cold. The ground is frozen dry and hard, the lakes and
streams are covered with ice, and the average elevation of about
fifteen hundred feet above sea level makes the air dry and crisp. The
people do not seem to mind the cold. I have seen children playing
out-of-doors when it was twenty-five degrees below zero. The summers
are hot, and the long days of sunshine are just right for wheat growing.
After travelling fourteen or fifteen hours from Winnipeg, we are in
Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on the main line of the Canadian
Pacific, about midway between Winnipeg and the Rockies. I visited
it first in 1905, when the province was less than a year old. Until
that time all the land between Manitoba and British Columbia, from
the United States to the Arctic Ocean, belonged to the Northwest
Territories. It had minor subdivisions, but the country as a whole was
governed by territorial officials with headquarters at Regina. As the
flood of immigrants began to spread over the West, the people of the
wheat belt decided that they wanted more than a territorial government
and so brought the matter before the Canadian parliament. As a result
the great inland provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed.
They are the only provinces in the Dominion that do not border on the
sea.
Regina was then a town of ragged houses, ungainly buildings, and wide
streets with board sidewalks reaching far out into the country. One
of the streets was two miles long, extending across the prairie to
the mounted police barracks and the government house. Regina was the
headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police until that organization
was amalgamated with the dominion force as the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, and the city is still a training camp for recruits.
Saskatchewan was not then old enough to have a state house, and the
government offices were in rooms on the second floors of various
buildings. Most of the provincial business was done in a little brick
structure above the Bank of Commerce.
The hotels of the town were then packed to overflowing, even in winter,
and in the spring and summer it was not uncommon to find the halls
filled with cots. I had to sleep in a room with two beds, and with a
companion who snored so that he shook the door open night after night.
It was of no use to complain, as the landlord could tell one to go
elsewhere, knowing very well that there was no elsewhere but outdoors.
To-day Regina is ten times as large as it was twenty years ago. It is
a modern city with up-to-date hotels, ten banks, handsome parliament
buildings, and twelve railway lines radiating in every direction. It is
the largest manufacturing centre between Winnipeg and Calgary, and an
important distributing point for farm implements and supplies.
The dome of the capitol building, which was completed in 1911, can now
be seen from miles away on the prairie. This is an imposing structure
five hundred and forty-two feet long, situated in the midst of a
beautiful park on the banks of an artificial lake made by draining
Wascana Creek. The city has many other parks, and the residence
streets are lined with young trees, planted within the last twenty
years. Forty miles to the east is a government farm at Indian Head,
where experiments are made in growing and testing trees suited to the
prairies. Fifty million seedlings have been distributed in one year
among the farms and towns. Out in the country the trees are planted
as windbreaks and to provide the farmers with fuel. They have greatly
changed the aspect of the prairies within the last two decades.
[Illustration: The grain lands of western Canada begin in Manitoba
in the fertile Red River valley, which is world famous for the fine
quality of its wheat. From here to the Rockies is a prairie sea, with
farmsteads for islands.]
[Illustration: American windmills tower over Saskatchewan prairie lands
that were largely settled by American farmers. The province is still
so thinly populated that it has only five people to every ten square
miles.]
[Illustration: The wheat harvest, like time and tide, waits for no
man and when the crop is ready it must be promptly cut. The grain
is usually threshed in the fields and sent at once to the nearest
elevator.]
While in Regina I have had a talk with the governor-general of
Saskatchewan in his big two-story mansion that twenty years ago seemed
to be situated in the middle of the prairie. When I motored out to
visit His Excellency, although I was wrapped in buffalo robes and wore
a coon-skin coat and coon-skin cap, I was almost frozen, and when I
entered the mansion it was like jumping from winter into the lap of
summer. At one end of the house is a conservatory, where the flowers
bloom all the time, although Jack Frost has bitten off all other
vegetation with the “forty-degrees-below-zero teeth” he uses in this
latitude.
From Regina, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs west to
Calgary. Were we to travel by that route, we should pass through Moose
Jaw and Swift Current, two important commercial centres for the wheat
lands. The story is told that Lord Dunsmore, a pioneer settler, once
mended the wheel of his prairie cart with the jaw bone of a moose on
the site of the former city, and thus gave the place its name. Moose
Jaw is a live stock as well as a wheat shipping point. It has the
largest stock yards west of Winnipeg. An extensive dairying industry
has grown up in that region.
North of Regina are Prince Albert and Battleford, noted for their fur
trade and lumber mills, and also Saskatoon, the second largest city of
the province, which we shall visit on our way to Edmonton. At Saskatoon
is the University of Saskatchewan, which was patterned largely after
the University of Chicago. It has the right to a Rhodes scholarship;
and its departments include all the arts and sciences.
As sixty per cent. of the people are dependent upon agriculture,
farm courses receive much attention. A thousand-acre experimental
farm is owned by the university and the engineering courses include
the designing and operation of farm machinery. Even the elementary
schools are interested in agriculture, a campaign having been carried
on recently to eradicate gophers, which destroy the wheat. The children
killed two million of these little animals in one year, thereby saving,
it is estimated, a million bushels of grain. A department of ceramics
has been organized at the university to experiment with the extensive
clay deposits of the province, the various grades of which are suited
for building brick, tile, pottery, and china. Saskatchewan’s only other
mineral of any importance is lignite coal, although natural gas has
been discovered at Swift Current.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE WORLD’S LARGEST WHEATFIELD
For the past two weeks I have been travelling through lands that
produce ninety per cent. of Canada’s most valuable asset--wheat. The
Dominion is the second greatest wheat country in the world, ranking
next to the United States. It is the granary of the British Empire,
raising annually twice as much wheat as Australia and fifty million
bushels more than India. The wheat crop is increasing and Canada may
some day lead the world in its production. These prairies contain what
is probably the most extensive unbroken area of grain land on earth. In
fact, so much wheat is planted in some regions that it forms an almost
continuous field reaching for hundreds of miles. The soil is a rich
black loam that produces easily twenty bushels to an acre, and often
forty and fifty.
The Canadian wheat belt extends from the Red River valley of Manitoba
to the foothills of the Rockies, and from Minnesota and North Dakota
northward for a distance greater than from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.
New wheat lands are constantly being opened, and large crops are now
grown in the Peace River country, three hundred miles north of Edmonton.
A man who is an authority on wheat raising tells me that the possible
acreage in the Canadian West is enormous. Says he:
“We have something like three hundred and twenty thousand square miles
of wheat lands. Divide this in two, setting half aside for poor soil
and mixed farming, and there is left more than one hundred-thousand
square miles. In round numbers, it is one hundred million acres, and
the probability is that it can raise an average of twenty-five bushels
to the acre. This gives us a possible crop of twenty-five hundred
million bushels, which is more than three times as much as the United
States produces in a year. I do not say that Canada will soon reach
that figure, but her wheat yield will steadily increase, and it will
not be long before it will equal yours.
“We were producing grain near Winnipeg long before your Western states
existed. Wheat was raised in Manitoba by Lord Selkirk’s colony as far
back as 1812. The settlers came in through Hudson Bay and worked their
way down to the prairie. They were so far from the markets that there
was no demand outside their own wants, and it was only when the United
States had developed its West that we began to farm in earnest. Even
then we had to wait for the railroads, which were first built through
early in the 80’s.”
More than half the total wheat crop of the Dominion is raised in
Saskatchewan, and still only one fifth of the fifty-eight million acres
of arable land in that province is under cultivation. Indeed, wheat
here is what coals are to Newcastle or diamonds to Kimberley. This
applies to quality as well as quantity, for at a recent International
Grain and Hay Show held at Chicago a farmer from Saskatchewan carried
off the first prize for the best wheat grown on the North American
continent.
[Illustration: Wheat is to Saskatchewan what coals are to Newcastle.
With only one fifth of its arable land being farmed, the province
raises more than half the total crop of the Dominion.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Farming is done on a largo scale on the great wheat
farms. Ploughs turning over twelve furrows at a time are pulled by
traction engines, and when the wheat is ripe a dozen binders are
started in one field.]
The principal wheat area extends from the southeast corner of the
province northwesterly along the valley of the Saskatchewan River to
the Alberta boundary. This belt is five hundred miles long and in some
places two hundred miles wide. Many of its farms contain thousands of
acres, and the average holding is three hundred and twenty acres, with
one hundred and fifty acres in wheat. When the land was first settled,
wheat was the only crop raised, but mixed farming is becoming more
important each year and there are now large crops of oats, hay, and
alfalfa.
The dry climate and hot summer days of the prairies are just right for
producing a hard grain, with the high gluten content that makes a big
loaf of bread. In that quality Canadian wheat ranks highest in the
world. It is mixed with even the finest of the United States product to
produce the best flour.
The chief varieties grown are red fife and marquis. Red fife was
discovered by a Canadian farmer and is the older. Marquis was
originated by a scientist of the Dominion Agricultural Department by
crossing red fife with an early ripening Indian wheat known as hard red
Calcutta. It was distributed among the farmers for general use in 1909,
and quickly became the most valuable wheat produced in America.
During various trips to Canada I have seen the wheat belt in all its
aspects. As soon as the snow has melted and the frost is out of the
ground the ploughs are started. The ploughing may be done by the
farmers, each on his own land, or by contractors who make a business
of preparing fields for planting, and who, later on, do much of the
threshing. The ordinary farmer uses a gang plough and from four to a
half dozen horses. With four horses he is able to plough more than
two acres a day. Much of the work is done by tractors, which pull
gang ploughs that turn over a strip of sod as wide as the average city
sidewalk.
The next process is back-setting. This means going over the field again
and throwing the furrows in the opposite direction. Where the land is
new, some of the farmers plough it in the spring and back-set it in the
summer, seeding it during the following spring. Others, who are anxious
to get quick returns, sow wheat the same year that they break up the
soil. Sometimes flax is planted as the first crop and wheat the next
year.
The old picture of the farmer going over the ploughed ground sowing the
grain broadcast is something one never sees in Canada. The wheat here
is planted with drills, usually pulled by four horses, although on the
larger farms several drills, drawn by tractors, sometimes follow one
another over the fields.
The busiest time of the year comes with the harvest, which usually
begins about the middle of August. The farmers now go to work with a
vim. In many instances the women and the girls join the men and the
boys in the fields. Nearly every man has his own harvesting machinery
and the girls sometimes drive the binders that cut the grain. At the
same time thousands of labourers are brought in from the United States,
eastern Canada, and even from England. They are transported at reduced
rates by the railroads and are sure of work at good wages until the
grain has been loaded upon the cars that take it to the head of the
Great Lakes.
Harvesting on the larger farms goes on from daybreak to dark, and
sometimes even by twilight and moonlight. After the wheat reaches a
certain point in ripening, it must be cut without delay. If it becomes
wet it will deteriorate, and if left too long it will hull during the
harvesting, or an untimely frost may ruin it. I have visited one farm
near Dundurn where sixteen hundred acres of grain all became ripe
overnight. The next morning the owner started a dozen harvesters at
work, keeping the machines going until every stalk was cut. Horses were
put on in relays every four hours and there was no stopping to rest at
the end of the field. In Alberta there is a farm five times as large,
where sixty binders, each pulled by a four-horse team, are used to cut
the crop.
Riding through the country in the fall, one is seldom away from the
sound of the threshing machine. Only a few farmers own these machines,
most of the threshing being done by contractors and their crews who go
from farm to farm.
Imagine yourself with me at threshing time, and let us see how the
work is done. The wheatfield we choose contains one thousand acres and
it is spotted with shocks, or stooks, as they are called here. Each
stook consists of a number of sheaves stood upon end on the ground with
others so arranged on top that it will shed rain. A half dozen teams
are moving over the field gathering up the stooks. As soon as a wagon
is loaded it is driven to the thresher, into whose greedy mouth the
sheaves are poured continuously from sunrise to sunset. At the same
time grain is flowing out of the thresher into the wagons or motor
trucks that carry it away.
In the United States wheat is often held by the farmers for a
favourable price. In Canada very few farms have their own granaries.
The wheat goes from the threshing machine to the local elevator, or, if
none is accessible, it is sent directly to the railroad and shipped
to Fort William and Port Arthur. There are now elevators at fifteen
hundred different places throughout the wheat region. Each of these
stations has from one to nine elevators standing out on the landscape,
indicating the productiveness of the surrounding country. The elevators
of Canada have a total capacity of two hundred and thirty-eight million
bushels. There are companies that have chains of such granaries. They
will either store the wheat for the farmer, handle it on commission, or
buy it from him directly at a price based on the current market value
of that in storage at Fort William.
The wheat begins to come to the elevators about the first of September,
and by the middle or latter part of October they are well filled. Each
has a license, and is inspected regularly by the government. In order
to maintain the high standard of western Canadian wheat, every shipment
must be weighed and tested by a Dominion weigh-master.
Many of the country elevators are owned by milling companies. The
flour industry is centred in Ontario, the largest mill in the Dominion
being at Port Colborne at the western end of the Welland Canal. Flour
is manufactured in large quantities also at Fort William, Toronto,
Montreal, and Winnipeg. Smaller mills exist throughout Canada, and for
many years the Hudson’s Bay Company operated one at Fort Vermilion, six
hundred miles northwest of Winnipeg. Ten million barrels of flour are
annually exported, almost half of which is taken by England.
What Canada gets for her wheat depends not only on her own crop and
that of the United States, but on conditions all over the world. Wheat
is raised in every part of the globe, and is harvested in one place
or another each month of the year. Therefore, a drought in Australia,
a frost in Argentina, monsoons in India, new tariff laws in a given
country, or a host of other reasons, may cause a drop or a rise in the
prices here. In any event, though the price in Canada may be no higher
than that paid in the United States, it represents a larger return
on the original investment. The Canadian farmer has the advantage of
raising his wheat on land that has cost him perhaps only a third of
what has been paid by his neighbour across the border.
CHAPTER XXV
THE OPEN DOOR IN CANADA
Wherever I go in Canada I find the people on tiptoe with eagerness
for the growth of their country. I do not mean that they are hungry
for territory; they already have more than they can use for a century
or two. The increases they are praying for are in population, in the
size of their towns, in the area of land under cultivation, and in the
number of families settling new farms.
For seventy-five years Canada has given a cordial welcome to immigrants
and during the last quarter of a century she has been conducting
recruiting campaigns to get settlers. But where formerly immigration
was only something to be desired, the situation to-day makes the coming
of new people an imperative necessity. They are needed not merely to
open up rich virgin lands, but to share the burden of carrying the
national overhead.
A single fact will make clear this situation. The interest on the
Canadian national debt is five times what the total revenues of the
government were before the World War. The people are faced with the
alternative of having less to live on after their increased taxes are
paid, or of dividing their heavier expenses among a larger number of
producers. Naturally they prefer the latter.
Canada’s per capita debt mounted from seventy-two dollars in 1914
to three hundred and twenty-two dollars three years after the war,
and the total stands to-day at just under three billion dollars. The
war has not only multiplied the public debt, but it has also greatly
reduced immigration. The population of Canada is now nearly nine
million, and if the high rate of increase that prevailed for the five
years preceding 1914 is regained it will soon be ten million and
more. The national production and revenues in that case will grow
proportionately, and the individual share of the burden of taxes and
debt will be considerably less.
The prediction of James J. Hill, many years ago, that Canada would have
fifty million people by 1950 seems unlikely to be fulfilled, but every
Canadian expects the population of his country eventually to reach
that figure. The Dominion has four hundred and forty million acres of
land suitable for cultivation. Only one fourth of this area is even
occupied, and but thirteen per cent. is being tilled. To get men and
women on the unoccupied lands is a national policy of the government
that enjoys the support of all the people.
Canada’s banner year was 1913, when more than four hundred thousand
immigrants settled in the Dominion. During the war not one eighth of
this number came in. The annual inflow is now only one fourth what it
was the year before the World War, and about as many more are added by
natural increase. If there is no radical change in conditions Canada
should gain at least a million about every five years. On the other
hand, she has lost population by emigration, especially to the United
States.
Two racial stocks--British and French--make up eighty-three per cent.
of the population. With our “melting pot” example next door, Canada
is determined to preserve her race character, and she controls
immigration accordingly. She tries to get settlers chiefly from the
British Isles, the northern countries of Europe, and the United States.
Labourers from Japan and China are no longer admitted, though for many
years the head taxes of five hundred dollars on each Chinese who came
in paid most of the expenses of promoting general immigration.
We might profit by the way Canada regulates her immigration. In the
first place, the government has wide discretion as to what kinds of
people shall come in. It can partially close the gates during dull
times, and open them wide when times are good. Immigrants are admitted
only as the authorities are satisfied that they are fitted to work on
the land and that they can become self-supporting. Government agents
in foreign countries start immigrants on their way, and others meet
them on their arrival. Canada does not allow hordes of foreigners to be
thrown into her cities. She guides them out to the land, and helps them
to establish themselves there. She has no fixed quota law such as ours,
but she is vastly more particular as to whom she admits.
Besides the government, both the Canadian National and the Canadian
Pacific railways maintain immigration offices abroad. The C. P. R. at
one time had practically all Europe covered with agents engaged in
drumming for immigrants, whom it brought across the Atlantic in its
own steamers, carried through Canada on its own trains, and located
on farms along its own lines. When that road was built the company
received a grant of twenty-five million acres of government land. Four
fifths of these have been sold, but the company still has five million
acres for settlers. At the present time, it is selling land for a
cash payment of only one seventh of the purchase price, the balance to
be paid within thirty-five years.
[Illustration: Canada feels acutely the need of more population. She
not only welcomes settlers from the British Isles, northern Europe,
and the United States, but gives them every assistance in establishing
themselves on the land.]
[Illustration: It is still possible for the immigrant to take up good
land in Canada with the reasonable hope of making it into such a ranch
as this. Many of the richest farmers of to-day came from the United
States.]
The government and the railroads spend large sums in advertising Canada
as the Land of Great Opportunity. Ottawa and each of the provincial
capitals produce literature by the ton. Information bureaus are
maintained that answer every conceivable question about the resources
and farming conditions in all parts of the Dominion. The government
regularly exhibits at fairs in the United States and also in the United
Kingdom. It distributes photographs and “movie” films, and sends out
lecturers to tell of the glories of Canadian life. It advertises in our
American farm journals and plasters the countries of northern Europe
with posters. The Canadian Pacific conducts publicity campaigns for the
purpose of attracting both tourists and settlers, and for forty years
it has been a great force for the settlement and upbuilding of the
Dominion.
For many years the bulk of the immigration from overseas has come
from the British Isles. During the periods of unemployment in England
thousands of jobless men have made a new start on this side of the
Atlantic. In one single summer, more than eleven thousand British young
men came here to help in the harvest, and all but four hundred decided
to stay. Relief societies in England have sent over several thousand
destitute boys and girls, who work with farmers for their board,
lodging, and schooling. In southern Alberta small parcels of land of
from five to ten acres are being reserved for farm labourers who,
though putting in most of their time working for others, may thus get a
start toward having farms of their own.
The government extended to all British soldiers who served in the
World War the same offer she made to her own men to set them up as
farmers, and within a few years thirty thousand of them were placed on
the land. It also loaned the former soldiers up to seventy-five hundred
dollars each, and employed farm experts to train them and to help them
get started. Eighty per cent. of them are regarded as making good.
As in the United States, domestic servants are at a premium.
Consequently, young unmarried women are urged to come to the country.
While in Toronto the other day I saw a party of fifty girls, Scotch,
Irish, and English, who had just arrived from overseas under the
wing of the Salvation Army. They were bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked.
Their average age was eighteen. As soon as it was announced that the
girls had arrived, the Salvation Army headquarters were surrounded by
fashionable motor cars and overrun with Toronto women seeking cooks,
maids, and governesses. Like the real bargains at a department store,
this supply disappeared within a few hours. Some of the girls admitted
privately that they were taking domestic employment only temporarily.
They hoped soon to get places in factories or stores, or perhaps to
find husbands.
Out in the farming country of Saskatchewan, girls are in as great
demand as in Toronto. A record was kept during a period of three years
of five hundred and twenty-six girls who were advanced their expenses
to Canada. All immediately found household positions, and only six gave
up and went home.
Canada estimates that each immigrant settler represents the addition
of one thousand dollars to her national wealth. The railroads consider
every man who takes up land along their lines worth seven hundred
dollars as a producer of traffic. An even higher valuation is placed
upon immigrants from the United States, because they usually bring in
more cash, farm equipment, and household goods than the Europeans.
During the height of the American invasion of Canada, from 1910 to
1914, more than six hundred thousand citizens of the United States,
most of them farm folk, came to this country. Many of them had several
thousand dollars in cash, realized from the sale of their high-priced
farms in the States. They used it to buy the cheap rich new lands of
the wheat belt. Allowing a minimum of only one thousand dollars for
each American, this immigration from over the border gave Canada more
than six hundred million dollars of new money for development. As a
distinguished citizen here once observed, this is the cheapest new
capital ever discovered; it carries no interest charge and is backed by
muscle and brains.
Within the last twenty-five years more than a million Americans have
come into Canada, and in the prairie provinces they form a large part
of the population. At one time, the government conducted campaigns to
persuade the agricultural population of our middle western states to
come in. Its land agents had groups of our farmers name committees of
their own number to visit Canada at government expense and see for
themselves that everything was as they represented. In those days,
western Canada enjoyed an old-fashioned land boom such as we had in
the States a generation earlier. Fortunes were made by individuals and
syndicates in dealing in Canadian lands.
Boom conditions no longer prevail, and the best lands now command a
good price, though still much less than equally fertile tracts in the
United States. Free lands are still to be had, but only on condition
that the settler become a naturalized Canadian citizen. If an immigrant
is not suited with the available free land, or if he chooses to retain
his nationality, he is given every assistance in the selection and
purchase of privately owned lands at a fair price.
Canada has had some curious experiences with colonization, especially
with certain European religious sects. Among these were the Mennonites
and the Doukhobors from Russia. The latter claimed to be descendants
of Shadrach, Meshac, and Abednego, whom Nebuchadnezzar threw into the
fiery furnace. They were an offshoot of the Greek Orthodox Church
and lived by themselves beyond the Caucasus Mountains. In the early
years of this century, when they were having trouble with the Czar’s
government, Quakers in the United States and England helped them to
emigrate. A grant of two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres of
land was secured from the Canadian government, and some seven or eight
thousand of these people were transported to Canada. They were located
near Yorkton, northwest of Winnipeg, where they established communistic
villages and patterned their existence on the life they had led in
far-away Russia.
[Illustration: Corn is now grown successfully far north of the United
States. Once thought to be suitable only for wheat growing and cattle
raising, the prairies of Alberta have become the centre of mixed
farming in the West.]
[Illustration: The part played by Canada’s railroads in colonizing
her prairie provinces can hardly be overestimated. They maintain
immigration agents abroad, and spend large sums in advertising the
Dominion’s attractions.]
[Illustration: In helping a settler get started, the Canadian Pacific
Railway may provide him with a house and barn built on some of the land
still available out of its grant of twenty-five million acres.]
All went well for a time, but the Canadians soon discovered that the
Doukhobors were subject to periodic outbreaks of religious fanaticism
that had many intolerable features. At times, they were seized with the
notion that it was a sin to utilize the labour of animals, and so they
turned off all their live stock. At other times, they had the idea that
it was wrong to use machinery, and they scrapped their farm tools. But
what brought them into most serious conflict with the authorities
were the pilgrimages they made to meet Christ on the prairie. It
was their notion that they must not appear before Him on his second
coming except in their natural condition of complete nakedness. At one
time seventeen hundred men, women, and children marched into Yorkton
stark naked. At another, six hundred Doukhobors wandered off naked in
midwinter. On each occasion of this sort, the police had to round them
up and confine them until they became sane enough to put on clothes and
conduct themselves normally. Later they moved some of their colonies
into British Columbia and many of them returned to Russia.
There are now more than thirty thousand Mennonites in Canada. They were
originally Lutherans from Poland and Prussia, who about 1787 accepted
refuge in Russia from religious persecution at home. They were favoured
for a time by the Russian government, and became prosperous farmers and
stock raisers, and also manufacturers. Just before the Canadian Pacific
Railway was built, a number of them emigrated to Canada, settling along
the Red River Valley in Manitoba. Their migration was financed to
the extent of a million dollars by the Canadian government. This the
Mennonites later repaid, and their communities thrived and prospered.
After the World War, the Mennonites in Russia suffered severely at
the hands of the Soviet government. Their lands, factories, and other
possessions were confiscated. Thereupon, with the aid of wealthy
Mennonites in Pennsylvania, a fresh emigration to Canada was financed.
These Mennonites were taken to southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan,
where they were located on desirable lands. Among them were some who
before the revolution in Russia owned farms of from ten to fifteen
thousand acres. One man had been worth a half million dollars, and was
one of the largest horse breeders in Russia. Of the Mennonites who
first came to Canada, some have since gone to Mexico, where they have
formed colonies similar to those established in the Dominion.
The immigration offices of Canada are filled with stories of settlers
who have made good. Many of these stories are in the form of letters
written by the men and the women who have fought and won their battles
with the land, some of whom are now wealthy and nationally prominent.
Canada is perhaps a generation nearer the pioneer stage than we are,
and on her farms of the frontier thousands are to-day laying the
foundations of fortunes, as our farmers did when they settled the
West. From the human documents I have examined I quote the advice to
prospective settlers given by a man who, twelve years after landing
from England with one dollar in his pocket, sold out his farm for
thirty-five thousand dollars. These, says he, are the secrets of
success in Canada:
1. Get a farm if it takes your last ten dollars.
2. If you are not married, get married, for successful bachelor
farmers are not plentiful.
3. Give your hired help, and the members of your own family, an
interest in the farm; whether it be a quarter section of land or
a setting of eggs. Get them interested.
4. Work with and for your neighbours. Coöperation is the A B C
of success. Always lend a hand to those in need, especially
newcomers, and you will be repaid a hundredfold. Above all,
value the good-will of your neighbours.
5. Lastly, be a true Canadian all the time, for no other country on
earth will appreciate it so much or give so much in return.
CHAPTER XXVI
EDMONTON--THE GATEWAY TO THE NORTHWEST
Come with me to Edmonton, the capital and second largest city of
Alberta. It is built on high bluffs on both sides of the Saskatchewan
River, and we can see standing out against the landscape the great
steel girders of the Canadian Pacific “high level” bridge, which
joins the north and south sections of the city. Edmonton has between
sixty-five and seventy thousand people. It is noted for its factories
and wholesale houses and as a distributing point for the Northwest.
There are several meat packing houses here, and the city’s creameries
supply forty per cent. of the entire output of butter in the province.
It owns its own street railway, and its water, light, power, and
telephone systems. It is an important educational centre, and in the
University of Alberta has the farthest north college on the continent.
It has eight hundred acres of parks and golf links belonging to the
municipality.
The city is not far from the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company fort built
in 1795. Near by was a trading post of the Northwest Fur Company, its
one time rival. When, in 1821, the two companies were amalgamated, a
new fort was erected. This was called Edmonton, which was the name of
the birthplace of the Hudson’s Bay official in charge. You remember how
the English town figures in John Gilpin’s famous ride:
To-morrow is our wedding day,
And we will then repair
Unto the Bell at Edmonton
All in a chaise and pair.
My sister and my sister’s child,
Myself and children three
Will fill the chaise, so you must ride
On horseback after we.
For a half century afterward Edmonton was an important trading and
distributing point for all western Canada. Furs were sent from here
down the Saskatchewan to York Factory on Hudson Bay, and supplies were
packed overland to the Athabaska and taken by canoe to the head waters
of that stream. Some were floated down the river to Lake Athabaska,
thence into Great Slave Lake, and on into the Mackenzie, which carried
them to the trading posts near the Arctic. Big cargoes of goods are
still shipped by that route every year, and hundreds of thousands of
dollars’ worth of furs are brought back over it to Edmonton, to be sent
on to New York or London.
After the transfer of this northern territory from the Hudson’s Bay
Company to the Canadian government, the town grew steadily. Its first
real land boom occurred in 1882, when it was rumoured that the Canadian
Pacific would build through here on its way to the Yellowhead Pass over
the Rockies. The excitement caused by this rumour was short lived,
however, as the officials decided to cross the mountains by the Kicking
Horse Pass farther south. It was not until 1891, or almost ten years
later, that the Canadian Pacific built a branch line to Strathcona,
just across the river. A year later Edmonton was incorporated as
a town, and in 1898 its growth was greatly stimulated by its
importance as an outfitting post for the thousands of gold seekers who
made their way to the Klondike by the overland route.
[Illustration: Four fifths of the coal reserves in the Dominion are
in Alberta. In addition to the big producing mines, there are many
“country banks,” where the settlers can come and dig out the coal for
themselves.]
[Illustration: Throughout central Alberta are many dairies that supply
the creameries of Edmonton and other towns. Butter is sent from here to
the Northwest and Yukon territories, and is even shipped to England by
way of the Panama Canal.]
In 1904, when its population was ten thousand, Edmonton became a city
and the capital of Alberta. It was then a typical frontier town of the
New West. Its main thoroughfare was a crooked street laid out along
an old Indian trail, and its buildings were of all shapes, heights,
and materials. The older structures were wooden and of one story, the
newer ones of brick and stone and often four stories high. The town
was growing rapidly and the price of business property was soon out
of sight. A fifty-foot lot on Main Street sold for twenty thousand
dollars, and there was a demand for land in the business section at
four and five hundred dollars per front foot.
That year the Canadian Northern transcontinental line reached Edmonton,
and four years later the Grand Trunk Pacific was put through. In 1913
the Canadian Pacific completed the bridge uniting the northern part of
the city with its former terminus across the river at Strathcona, which
had been made a part of Edmonton the year before. In addition to these
three transcontinental lines, Edmonton now has railway connection with
every part of central and southern Alberta, as well as a road built
northwesterly along the Lesser Slave Lake to the Peace River district.
The trains run over that route twice a week; they are equipped with
sleeping cars and a diner for most of the way.
The location of Edmonton is much like that of St. Louis. The city is
on a large river in the midst of a farming region almost as rich as
the Mississippi Valley. It is in the northern part of the wheat belt,
and the surrounding country is adapted to mixed farming as well as
wheat growing. It produces enormous crops of oats, barley, and timothy.
I have seen wheat near here so tall that it almost tickled my chin,
and oats and timothy as high as my head. The land will raise from
seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five bushels of oats to the acre,
and an average of forty bushels of winter wheat. The farmers are now
growing barley for hogs; they say that barley-fed pork is better than
corn-fed pork. They also feed wheat to cattle and sheep. Indeed, when
I was at Fort William I was told that thousands of sheep are fattened
there each winter on the elevator screenings.
I am surprised at the climate of Edmonton. For most of the winter it
is as mild as that of our central states. The weather is tempered by
the Japanese current, just as western Europe is affected by the Gulf
Stream. The warm winds that blow over the Rockies keep British Columbia
green the year round and take the edge off the cold at Edmonton and
Calgary.
Edmonton is an important coal centre, with thirty mines in its
vicinity. Indeed, Alberta’s coal deposits are estimated to contain
1,000,000,000,000 tons, which is one seventh of the total supply of the
world. It is eighty per cent. of Canada’s coal reserves. Coal is found
throughout about half of the province from the United States boundary
to the Peace River, and is mined at the rate of about five million tons
a year. Half of the product is lignite, about two per cent. anthracite,
and the remainder bituminous. Nova Scotia is a close second in the coal
production of the Dominion, and British Columbia ranks third.
Because of the long haul across the prairies, Alberta coal cannot
compete in eastern Canada with that from the United States. Even the
mines of Nova Scotia are farther from Canada’s industrial centres than
is our Appalachian coal region. Cape Breton is more than a thousand
miles from Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and about two thousand miles
from Winnipeg. Scranton, Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is only
four hundred miles from Toronto, and Pittsburgh but three hundred and
sixty-seven. Consequently, Alberta coal supplies little more than the
local demand.
Of the three hundred mines in operation, only about seventy are
important. Many of the others, some operated by only one man, are
known as “country banks.” In these the coal is dug out by the farmers,
who often drive thirty miles or more to one of the “banks.” At some
places bunk houses and stables have been erected to provide shelter for
settlers who cannot make the round trip in one day.
Alberta ranks next to Ontario in the production of natural gas, which
is found chiefly about Medicine Hat and in the Viking field, which
supplies Edmonton. Oil in small quantities is produced south of
Calgary, and new wells are being drilled in the southeastern part of
the province near the Saskatchewan border, and even north of Peace
River.
The Peace River Valley, the southernmost part of which is four hundred
miles above Montana, is the northern frontier of Alberta. It has
been opened up largely within the last ten years. Across the British
Columbia line, part of the valley has been set aside as the Peace River
Block, where the settlement is controlled by the Dominion government.
The basin of the Peace River consists of a vast region of level or
rolling land, much of which is thickly wooded with fir, spruce, pine,
tamarack, and birch. The forests are full of moose, deer, and bear,
and the beaver, lynx, marten, and muskrat are trapped for their furs.
There are vast stretches of rich black loam that produce annually about
a million bushels of wheat, three or four million bushels of oats,
and almost a million bushels of barley. Considering the latitude, the
winter climate is moderate, and in summer there is almost continual
daylight for the space of three months.
This district is dotted with settlements along the route of the
railway from Edmonton. It has telephone and telegraph connections with
southern Alberta, and a half dozen weekly newspapers are published in
its various towns. There are all together a hundred or more schools.
The largest settlement is Grande Prairie, near the British Columbia
border, but the oldest is the town of Peace River, which lies in a
thickly wooded region on the banks of the Peace. It is two hundred and
fifty miles northwest of Edmonton. The trip, which was formerly over
a wagon trail and took two or three weeks, can now be made by rail in
twenty-six hours.
Steamboats ply up and down Peace River for hundreds of miles, the route
downstream to Fort Smith being used by many trappers and prospectors
bound for the far Northwest. The trip takes one past the historic
old post of Fort Vermilion, two hundred and fifty miles beyond Peace
River town. To the northeast of Vermilion is said to be a herd of wood
buffalo, probably the last of their species roaming wild.
A shorter route from Edmonton to the Northwest, and one that has grown
in popularity since oil has been found along the Mackenzie, is down the
Athabaska River, through Great Slave Lake, and down the Mackenzie to
Fort Norman, the trading post for the oil region.
Let us imagine ourselves taking a trip over this route, which
penetrates to the very heart of the Northwest Territories. The train
leaves Edmonton only once a week. It usually starts Tuesday morning,
and we should reach “End of Steel,” on the bank of the Clearwater
River, the following day. Here we take one of the little motor boats
that push along the freight scows carrying supplies to the trading
posts during the open season, and chug down that stream for twenty
miles to its junction with the Athabaska at Fort McMurray.
At Fort McMurray we take a steamer and go down the Athabaska and across
the lake of that name. The river loses its identity when it empties
into the lake, the river that joins Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake
being known as the Slave. The latter stream at times flows through
land soaked in oil. This “tar sand,” as it is called, has been used as
paving material in Edmonton, and is said to have outlasted asphalt. It
is probable that when better transportation facilities are available it
will be commercially valuable.
Just before reaching Fort Smith, halfway between Lake Athabaska and
Great Slave Lake, we leave our boat and ride in wagons over a portage
of fifteen miles. Fort Smith is just across the Alberta boundary. It
is the capital of the Northwest Territories. Here the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police is all-powerful, and it must be satisfied that the
traveller going farther north has food and other essentials sufficient
for his trip. In this land, where supplies are brought in only once
a year, no chances are taken on allowing inexperienced prospectors to
become public burdens.
Two hundred miles north of Fort Smith we reach Great Slave Lake, the
fourth largest inland body of water on the North American continent. It
is almost three hundred miles long, and the delta that is being pushed
out at the mouth of the Slave River may some day divide the lake into
two parts. Great Slave Lake is drained by the mighty Mackenzie, down
which we float on the last lap of our journey. This river is as long as
the Missouri, and carries a much larger volume of water. It is like the
mighty waterways of Siberia.
We are several days going down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman. Fifty-four
miles north of here, and only sixty miles south of the arctic circle,
is the first producing oil well in the Northwest Territories. The well
was the cause of a miniature “oil rush” to this land that is frozen for
nine months of the year. At this time no one knows how much oil there
is here. The region may never be of any greater importance than it is
now, or it may be another mighty oil field such as those in Oklahoma
and Texas. But even if oil is found in paying quantities it will be
many years before its exploitation will be commercially profitable.
The nearest railway is twelve hundred miles away, and the river boats
are of such shallow draft that they cannot carry heavy freight. A pipe
line to Prince Rupert or Vancouver would mean an expenditure of almost
one hundred million dollars, and to make such a line pay it would be
necessary to produce thirty thousand barrels of oil daily.
In the meantime, prospectors have come in from at directions,
travelling overland as well as by river. One man made the
fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Edmonton with a dog team, and others
have mushed their way over the mountains from the Klondike. Two
aviators of the Imperial Oil Company attempted to fly to Fort Norman.
They were obliged to land several hundred miles to the south and both
planes were smashed. However, by using the undamaged parts of one
plane they were able to repair the other, except for a propeller. They
finally collected a pile of sled runners from a near-by trading post,
stuck them together with glue made by boiling down a moose hide, and
with a hunting knife carved out a pair of propellers that enabled them
to fly back the eight hundred miles to Peace River.
On every hand I hear stories of how the vast Canadian Northwest is
being opened up. Edmonton is at the gateway to the valleys of the
Peace, the Athabaska, and the Mackenzie rivers, and each year sees more
settlers penetrating the remote areas that once knew the white man only
through the traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Arthur Conan Doyle has
caught the spirit of this new Northwest in his “Athabaska Trail”:
I’ll dream again of fields of grain that stretch from sky to sky,
And the little prairie hamlets where the cars go roaring by,
Wooden hamlets as I saw them--noble cities still to be----
To girdle stately Canada with gems from sea to sea.
* * * * *
I shall hear the roar of waters where the rapids foam and tear;
I shall smell the virgin upland with its balsam-laden air,
And shall dream that I am riding down the winding woody vale,
With the packer and the pack horse on the Athabaska Trail.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE PASSING OF THE CATTLE RANGE
The story of southern Alberta is the story of the passing of Canada’s
great cattle ranches, the reclamation of millions of acres of dry land
by irrigation, and the growth of general farming where once the open
range stretched for hundreds of miles.
From Calgary I have ridden out to visit the mighty irrigation works of
the Canadian Pacific Railway. This corporation has taken over three
million acres, or a block of land forty miles wide and extending from
Calgary one hundred and forty miles eastward. It is divided into three
sections. The central division gets its water from the Saint Mary’s
River, and the east and west divisions from the Bow River, which does
not depend upon the rainfall for its volume, being fed by the snows and
glaciers of the Rockies.
At Bassano, about eighty miles from Calgary, is the great Horseshoe
Bend dam, where the level of the Bow has been raised forty feet. The
dam is eight thousand feet long, with a spillway of seven hundred and
twenty feet. From it the water flows out through twenty-five hundred
miles of irrigation canals and ditches. This dam has been the means
by which the semi-arid lands of southern Alberta, formerly good only
for cattle grazing, have been turned into thousands of farms, raising
wheat, alfalfa, and corn, as well as fruits and vegetables.
[Illustration: The dam at Bassano is the second largest in the world,
being exceeded in size only by the one at Aswan, which holds back the
waters of the Nile. The water stored here flows out through 2,500 miles
of irrigation canals and ditches.]
[Illustration: The riproaring cowboy with his bucking bronco was a
familiar figure of the old Alberta, but with the passing of the “Wild
West” he is now rarely seen except in exhibitions known as “stampedes.”]
[Illustration: Among the ranch owners of the Alberta foothills is no
less a personage than the Prince of Wales, who occasionally visits his
property and rides herd on his cattle.]
The ranching industry of Alberta was at its height during the thirty
years from 1870 to 1900. With the disappearance of buffalo from the
Canadian plains, cattle men from the United States began bringing their
herds over the border to the grazing lands east of the foothills of the
Rockies. The luxuriant prairie grass provided excellent forage, and
the warm Chinook winds kept the winters so mild that the cattle could
feed out-of-doors the year round. When the high ground was covered with
snow, there were always river bottoms and hollows to furnish shelter
and feed.
The United States cattle men were followed by Canadians and Britishers.
One of the first big ranch holders was Senator Cochrane of Montreal. He
owned sixty-seven thousand acres, and most of it cost him only a dollar
an acre. There were other immense holdings, and the grazing industry
continued to grow until it extended into southwestern Saskatchewan and
included horses and sheep as well as cattle.
Then the homesteaders began to take up their claims. In 1902 the first
tract of land for irrigation purposes was bought from the government by
the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, and in 1903 the Canadian
Pacific Railway’s big irrigation project was begun. In May of the same
year there occurred one of the severest snow storms in the history of
the plains. It lasted for a week, and fully half the range cattle in
what was then Alberta territory perished. The introduction of wire
fences dealt another hard blow to cattle ranching. Large herds can be
run all the year round only on an open range.
There are still a few big stock men in Alberta, but they have been
crowded into the foothills west of the old original “cow” country.
Small herds pasture on the open range also in the Peace River district.
As a matter of fact, Alberta still leads the Dominion in the production
of beef and breeding cattle. It has as much livestock as ever, each
mixed farm having at least a few head. There are a half million dairy
cattle in the province.
Most of the stock raised to-day is pure bred. There are cattle sales at
Calgary every year as big as any in the United States. The favourite
animal is the Shorthorn, but there are many Polled Angus and Galloways.
The best breeding animals come from England, and there are some
ranchmen who make a specialty of raising choice beef for the English
market. Within the last ten years the cattle in Alberta have tripled
in number, and their total value is now in the neighbourhood of one
hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
On my way from Edmonton to Calgary I passed through the famous dairying
region of Alberta. The cheese industry is still in its infancy, but the
province makes more than enough butter each year to spread a slice of
bread for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It supplies
butter for the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and is now shipping it
to England via Vancouver and the Panama Canal.
Sheep can exist on poorer pasture than cattle, and some large flocks
are still ranged in the higher foothills of southern Alberta. They are
chiefly Merinos that have been brought in from Montana. On the small
farms the homesteaders often raise the medium-fleeced English breeds,
such as Shropshires, Hampshires, and Southdowns. Some of the ranchers
are experimenting in raising the karakul sheep, a native of Central
Asia, whose curly black pelts are so highly prized for fur coats and
wraps.
Horse raising was another big industry of early Alberta. The bronco is
now almost extinct, and almost the only light-weight horse now reared
is a high-bred animal valuable chiefly as a polo pony. In Alberta,
as elsewhere in the Dominion and in the United States, the motor car
has taken the place of the horse as a means of transportation, and
nine tenths of the animals in the province to-day are of the heavy
Clydesdale or Percheron types, and used solely for farm work.
I have gone through Calgary’s several meat packing houses, and have
visited its thirteen grain elevators, which all together can hold
four million bushels of wheat. Calgary ranks next to Montreal and
the twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur in its grain storage
capacity. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat lands, not
in vast stretches such as we saw in Saskatchewan, but divided up among
the general farming lands of the province. The city is an important
industrial centre, and in some of its factories natural gas, piped from
wells a hundred miles away, is used to produce power.
Calgary is less than fifty years old. Nevertheless, it has
sky-scrapers, fine public buildings, and wide streets and boulevards.
Many of the business buildings are of the light gray sandstone found
near by, and nearly every residence is surrounded by grounds. The city
lies along the Bow and Elbow rivers, and the chief residential section
on the heights above these streams has magnificent views of the peaks
of the Rockies, one hundred miles distant.
Like many of the big cities of Western Canada, Calgary began as a fort
of the Mounted Police. That was in 1874. Its real growth dates from
August, 1883, when the first train of the main line of the Canadian
Pacific pulled into the town. Before that time much of the freight
for the ranch lands came farther south through Macleod, which, the
old-timers tell me, was the real “cow town” of southern Alberta. Goods
were brought up the Missouri River to the head of navigation at Benton,
Montana, and thence carried overland to Macleod in covered wagons drawn
by horse, ox, or mule teams.
The cattle town of Calgary is now a matter of history, and the old
cattle men who rode the western plains when Alberta was a wilderness
have nearly all passed away. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this
up-to-date place is the frontier town I found here some years ago.
Then cowboys galloped through the streets, and fine-looking Englishmen
in riding clothes played polo on the outskirts. The Ranchers’ Club of
that day was composed largely of the sons of wealthy British families.
Many of them were remittance men who had come out here to make their
fortunes and grow up with the country. Some came because they were
ne’er-do-wells or their families did not want them at home, and others
because they liked the wild life of the prairies. They received a
certain amount of money every month or every quarter, most of which
was spent in drinking and carousing. The son of an English lord, for
instance, could be seen almost any day hanging over the bar, and
another boy who had ducal blood in his veins would cheerfully borrow a
quarter of you in the lean times just before remittance day.
[Illustration: Calgary, chief city of the prairie province of Alberta,
is less than fifty years old. Beginning as a fur-trading and police
post, it now has sky-scrapers and palatial homes.]
[Illustration: At Macleod, in southern Alberta, the headquarters of the
Mounted Police are in the centre of an important live-stock region,
where, in the early days of open ranges, cattle thieves were a constant
menace.]
Others of these men brought money with them to invest. One of them,
the son of Admiral Cochrane of the British navy, owned a big ranch
near Calgary on which he kept six thousand of the wildest Canadian
cattle. Every year or so he brought in a new instalment of bulls from
Scotland, giving his agents at home instructions to send him the
fiercest animals they could secure. When asked why he did this, he
replied:
“You see, I have to pay my cowboys so much a month, and I want to raise
stock that will make them earn their wages. Besides, it adds to the
life of the ranch.”
“I went out once to see Billy Cochrane,” said a Calgary banker to me.
“When I arrived at the ranch I found him seated on the fence of one of
his corrals watching a fight between two bulls. As he saw me he told me
to hurry and have a look. I climbed up beside him, and as I watched the
struggle going on beneath, I said: ‘Why, Billy, if you do not separate
those bulls one will soon kill the other.’ ‘Let them kill,’ was the
reply. ‘This is the real thing. It is better than any Spanish bull
fight, and I would give a bull any day for the show.’
“We watched the struggle for more than an hour, Cochrane clapping his
hands and urging the animals on to battle. Finally one drove his horns
into the side of the other and killed it. To my protest against this
wanton waste of valuable live stock, Cochrane replied: ‘Oh! it doesn’t
matter at all. We must have some fun.’”
Another famous character of old-time Calgary was Dickie Bright, the
grandson of the man after whom Bright’s disease was named. Dickie had
been supplied with money by his grandfather and sent out. He invested
it all in a ranch and then asked for a large remittance from time to
time to increase his herds. He sent home florid stories of the money
he was making and how he was fast becoming a cattle king. Shortly
after writing one of his most enthusiastic letters he received a
dispatch from New York saying that his grandfather had just arrived
and was coming out to see him. The boy was in a quandary. He had spent
his remittance in riotous living and he had no cattle. Adjoining him,
however, was one of the largest ranch owners of the West. Dickie
confided his trouble to this man and persuaded him to lend a thousand
head of his best stock for one night.
“Granddad can stay but a day,” said he, “and I will see that they are
driven back to you the next morning.”
The rancher was something of a sportsman himself, and he finally
consented to help the boy. The cattle were sent over. Old Doctor Bright
duly arrived and was driven out to the herd, which Dickie said was
only a sample of his stock that had been brought in to be shown to
his visitor. The boy added, however, that it was not good to keep the
cattle penned up, and that they must go back upon the range right away.
The old doctor was delighted, and before he left he gave Dickie a check
for ten thousand dollars to develop the business.
Another young remittance man added to his income by pretending to have
a gopher farm. His father had never heard the word “gopher” before,
and supposed that the tiny ground squirrels were some kind of valuable
live stock. He was, therefore, quite pleased when his boy wrote an
enthusiastic letter saying that he had now seven hundred blooded
gophers on his range. When sonny added that the animals were in good
condition, but that it would take a thousand dollars more to carry
them through the winter for the market next spring, father sent on the
money.
CHAPTER XXVIII
OVER THE GREAT DIVIDE
Over the Great Divide and across the mighty ranges of the Rockies!
Hundreds of miles between ice-clad peaks and over snow-covered plains!
Up and down the ragged passes of towering mountains, their heads capped
with blue glaciers, and their faces rough with beards of frosty pines!
For the last week I have been travelling across the western highland of
Canada. I have gone over the backbone of the continent, which reaches
north to Alaska and south to the Strait of Magellan. Here in Canada
the Rockies extend in three ranges from western Alberta throughout the
entire width of British Columbia. The easternmost marks a part of the
boundary line between the provinces and the westernmost range rises
steeply from the Pacific Ocean. All between is high plateaus and broken
mountain chains spotted with glaciers.
This vast sea of mountains is said to be the equal of twenty-four
Switzerlands, and I can well believe it. It is only five hours by
rail across the Swiss Alps from Lucerne to Como, but the fastest
Canadian Pacific trains cannot make the trip from Cochrane, Alberta,
to Vancouver in less than twenty-three hours. Switzerland is noted the
world over for its glaciers, yet here in the Selkirk range alone there
are as many glaciers as in all the Alps thrown together.
I have visited the great mountain regions of the world. I have stood on
the hills of Darjiling and watched the sun rise on Mount Everest. From
the tops of the Andes, three miles above the level of the sea, I have
taken a hair-raising ride in a hand-car down to the Pacific. I have
looked into the sulphurous crater of old Popocatepetl, and I have stood
among the Alpine glaciers on the top of the Jungfrau. But nowhere have
I found Mother Nature more lavish in scenes of rugged grandeur than
right here in Canada not far from our own northern boundary.
The mountains change at every turn of the wheels of our train. Now they
rise almost straight up on both sides of the track for hundreds upon
hundreds of feet. They shut out the sun and their tops touch the sky.
Now we shoot out into the open, and there is a long vista of jagged
hills rising one above the other until they fade away into the peaks on
the horizon. We ride for miles where there is no sign of the works of
man except the gleaming track, the snow sheds here and there, and the
little mountain stations, where the shriek of our engine reverberates
and echoes throughout the valley.
Each mile we cover seems to bring a new wonder. It may be a majestic
waterfall, a towering peak, an over-hanging cliff, a glacier sparkling
under the rays of the winter sun, or a vast panorama of glittering
snow and ice standing out in bold contrast against the dark rocks and
forests. It takes my breath away, and I think of the Texas cowboy who
had made his pile and had started out to see the world. His life had
been spent on the plains, and at his first visit to these Canadian
mountains their grandeur so filled his soul that, unable to contain
himself, he threw his hat into the air and yelled:
[Illustration: In a region of beautiful lakes, the “Lake of the Hanging
Glaciers” is one of the most picturesque in the Canadian Rockies.
Behind it lowers the snowy crest of Mount Sir Donald, some two miles
high.]
[Illustration: Wainwright National Park has the largest herd of buffalo
in America. More than five thousand animals, the descendants of a herd
of seven hundred originally purchased from a Montana rancher, range
over a fenced-in reserve of one hundred thousand acres.]
“Hurrah for God!”
One gets his first view of the mountains at Calgary. As we travelled
through the foothills our train climbed steadily, and at Banff, eighty
miles to the west, we had reached a height of almost a mile above sea
level. The region about Banff has been set aside by the government as
Rocky Mountain Park. It is known as the Yosemite Valley of the North,
and has become the finest mountain resort of Canada. Here the Canadian
Pacific Railway has built a magnificent hotel. It stands high above the
confluence of the Bow and Spray rivers and affords a splendid view of
Mount Assiniboine.
In summer the attractions at Banff include hot sulphur baths, open-air
swimming pools, tennis courts, and golf links, and in winter there are
snow carnivals and ski-jumping contests. The surrounding country offers
mountain climbing of all kinds, from easy slopes for the inexperienced
tenderfoot to almost inaccessible peaks that challenge the skill of
the most expert climber. The region outside the park limits contains
some of the finest game lands on the continent, and is a Mecca for the
fisherman and the hunter.
In addition to the railway, Banff is reached by a ninety-mile motor
road from Calgary. In 1923 this road was extended southwesterly
across the Vermilion Pass to Lake Windermere in British Columbia. The
construction of that stretch completed the last link in the “circle
tour” motor route that now runs from Lake Windermere via Seattle to
southern California, thence through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone
and Glacier National parks, and back to the Canadian boundary.
Thirty miles west of Banff, and almost six thousand feet above the
level of the sea, is the gem-like Lake Louise in its setting of dark
forests and snow-clad mountains, and not far away is the famous Valley
of the Ten Peaks. A few miles farther on we reach the Great Divide,
which marks the boundary between Alberta and British Columbia. Here we
see the waters of a single stream divide, one part going west to the
Pacific and the other flowing to the east and eventually losing itself
in Hudson Bay.
Between Calgary and the Great Divide the railway track climbs three
eighths of a mile. It goes over the main range through the Kicking
Horse Pass, more than a mile above sea level, and then drops down to
the valley of the Columbia River. It rises again a quarter of a mile
where it crosses the Selkirks through the five-mile-long Connaught
tunnel, and then winds its way downward through the coast ranges to the
great western ocean.
The Kicking Horse Pass was so named from an incident that occurred
when the surveyors for the railway were searching for a route over the
mountains. At this point one of the men was kicked by a pack horse and
apparently killed. His companions had even dug a grave for him, but
just then the supposedly dead man showed signs of life. He soon was
fully recovered and the party proceeded onward. Later, his curiosity
led him to revisit the scene of his narrowly averted burial, and in so
doing he discovered this gap in the mountains.
The Kicking Horse was Canada’s first, and for years its only, railway
pass over the Rockies. The construction of the railway through it
was considered a great feat of civil engineering, but it has been
much improved. In 1909 two spiral tunnels were built for the descent
to the Kicking Horse River, twelve hundred feet below. Here the
track, sloping downward, makes two almost complete circles inside the
mountain, and the tunnels have so cut down the steep grade that the
number of engines required for a train has been reduced from four to
two.
Another line of the Canadian Pacific climbs over the mountains through
the Crow’s Nest Pass, not far north of the United States boundary. A
third gateway to the ocean is the Yellowhead Pass, west of Edmonton,
by which the Canadian National lines cross the Rockies. Beyond that
pass the tracks branch out, one section ending at Prince Rupert and
the other at Vancouver. The Yellowhead, though the lowest of the three
passes, is under the very shadow of some of the loftiest of these
mountains. Near it is Mount Robson, the highest peak in Canada, which
rises in a mighty cone almost two miles above the surrounding range and
more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea.
The Yellowhead route passes through Jasper Park, the greatest of
Canada’s western game and forest reserves. That park is almost four
times the size of Rhode Island, and much larger than Rocky Mountain
Park, which we saw at Banff. It contains the beautiful Lac Beauvert,
on the shores of which a hotel and several lodges are operated by the
Canadian National Railways. Mount Robson Park adjoins Jasper Park at
the west, and farther south are Yoko, Waterton Lakes, and other great
national playgrounds.
One of the most interesting of Canada’s twelve Dominion parks is that
at Wainwright, Alberta. I saw something of it on my way from Saskatoon
to Edmonton. There a hundred thousand acres of land is fenced in as a
reserve for the largest herd of buffalo in America. The seven hundred
and six animals of the original herd were purchased by the Canadian
government from a Montana rancher. That was less than twenty years ago,
but the herd increased so rapidly that it soon numbered between seven
and eight thousand. This was more than could be provided for on the
ranging grounds of the park, and it was found necessary to slaughter
two thousand of the animals. Some of the meat was sold as buffalo
steak, and the rest was dried and made into pemmican for the arctic
regions. An animal called the cattalo, a cross between buffaloes and
domestic cattle, which is noted for its beef qualities, has been raised
in large numbers at the Wainwright Park.
When a transcontinental railway to the Pacific coast was first
proposed, the objectors to the project sarcastically called British
Columbia and western Alberta a “sea of mountains.” To-day these same
mountains, once considered merely an expensive barrier in the path of
the railways, have proved to be one of the largest factors in building
up what is said to be the fourth industry of Canada--its tourist
traffic. The business of “selling the scenery” has been developed to
such a degree that it is estimated that the national parks of the
Dominion yield an annual revenue of twenty-five million dollars. In a
year, more than one hundred thousand people travel over the C. P. R.
route alone. It is interesting to note that eighty per cent. of them
are Americans, and that there are more from New York City than from the
entire Dominion of Canada.
The Canadian Pacific has for years led in exploiting the scenic wonders
of Canada. It carries tourists over the mountains in summer in open
observation cars, and adds to their comfort by using oil-burning
locomotives on its passenger trains. It has a half dozen resorts in the
Rockies where one may enjoy all the comforts of a modern city hotel
or the rugged pleasures of a wilderness camp. It has established a
colony of Swiss mountaineers brought from the Alps to act as guides for
mountain climbers. It has cut new trails through the country and has
sent out geologists to map the unexplored territory.
Even the names of scores of peaks and valleys originated with the
Canadian Pacific. Mount Sir Donald, one of the mightiest of the
Selkirks, was so called in honour of Lord Strathcona, who was a power
behind the building of the railway, and who drove the final spike
uniting the east and west sections of the transcontinental line. Mount
Stephen was named after the first president, and Mount Shaughnessy
after a later one. The Van Horne Glacier in the Selkirks and the Van
Horne Range have the same name as the famous builder of the Canadian
Pacific, and Mount Hector was named after the intrepid explorer who
discovered the Kicking Horse Pass.
Indeed, that railway has become so great a booster of the Dominion’s
natural show places that it has even been given credit for
supplementing nature in the matter of scenery. The story is told of a
woman who had just had her first view of the mighty crystal mass of the
Illecillewaet Glacier towering thousands of feet above the railway. She
stared in open-eyed and incredulous wonder. Then she exclaimed:
“It ain’t real! The Canadian Pacific put it there for advertising!”
CHAPTER XXIX
THROUGH BRITISH COLUMBIA TO THE COAST
British Columbia is the third largest province of the Dominion of
Canada. It has an area as great as that of France, Italy, Belgium, and
Holland combined. It extends from the United States boundary to Yukon
Territory and Alaska, and, except for the northeastern section, it
is all plateaus and mountains and valleys. The interior table-lands
have an average elevation of three thousand feet. They contain some
good farms and dairies, but the chief wealth of the province is in its
forests, fisheries, and mines.
I have crossed this great territory often on my way westward, and have
at times gone southward from Golden into the Kootenay country. This is
far below the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Another line
of the Canadian Pacific crosses the region from the Crow’s Nest Pass.
In the mighty hills of the Kootenays I saw the headwaters of the
Columbia River. Its source is only a few hundred feet from the Kootenay
River, which at this point is a good-sized stream. The Columbia flows
north for one hundred and eighty miles, and then makes a sharp bend and
turns to the south. The two rivers meet after each has completed about
four hundred miles of its course, the parent stream of the Columbia
crossing the United States border to the Pacific. Before meeting, the
two rivers wind in and out among the hills, now in narrow streams, and
now in long, winding lakes that make one think of Como and Maggiore
on the borders of Switzerland and Italy. They are walled in by peaks
that rise almost straight up for hundreds of feet. Their waters are so
clear that one can stand on the slopes high above them and see the fish
swimming in the streams far below. The sides of the hills are covered
with fir and tamarack, and their tops are often capped with snow.
The Columbia and the Kootenay, by their circling courses, have made a
mighty island in the interior of British Columbia. If you will imagine
two gigantic wish bones, the tips of which are touching each other,
enclosing a diamond of mountainous land larger than the state of Ohio,
you will have an idea of the curious formation that Nature has created
here. A short canal that connects the two rivers near the headwaters
of the Columbia makes the island complete. The valleys of these two
streams, containing a million acres or so, are growing in importance as
a mixed farming, fruit growing, and dairying region.
The Kootenay country has also some of the richest mineral deposits of
the Rockies. It has gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and lead. The
coal deposits near the Crow’s Nest Pass are said to contain thousands
of millions of tons, and near them are thousands of coke ovens blazing
away. Not far distant are deposits of hematite ore, upon which the
Canadians may some day build up a big iron and steel industry.
Coming farther on into British Columbia, I took a steamer through
Kootenay Lake and stopped at the town of Nelson, which is in the heart
of the mining country. There I talked with one of the men who opened
up some of the big silver and lead deposits more than two score years
ago. Said he:
“There had been a rush to this region, and I came in with five other
prospectors. When we got to the camp I suggested that our party see
what we could find in a mountain across the valley. We set out with
only two days’ provisions. Almost as soon as we started up the hill we
struck some float rock that showed signs of silver and lead, and on
the following day we discovered a great mass of galena, which was from
twenty-five to thirty feet wide. There were boulders of lead ore close
by, and we at once staked out our mine. It proved to be a rich one, and
was eventually sold for more than a million dollars.”
This whole region is a treasure house of minerals. Mining operations
were carried on for years near Phoenix in one of the biggest copper
beds of the world. The metal lay in a great mass two hundred feet wide
and more than a half mile in length.
The millions of tons of ore taken from the Phoenix mines were fed into
the smelter at Grand Forks, which stands on the banks of the Kettle
River, shadowed by mighty mountains. For years it annually produced
millions of pounds of copper, and in addition silver and gold worth a
million dollars or more. The smelter was closed in 1919 with a record
of having smelted fourteen million tons of ore, and the mines ceased
operations that same year.
In the meantime, the Granby Company, which owned the mines and the
smelter, had begun to take copper out of the Le Roi mine at Rossland,
a few miles to the east. Shafts there have been sunk more than two
thousand feet into the earth, and there are about ninety miles of
underground workings. This same company, which is owned largely by
American stockholders, operates the Hidden Creek copper mines at Anyox,
the biggest in British Columbia. They are located on the coast near the
Portland Canal, hundreds of miles to the northward and only a short
distance from Alaska. In one year they produced thirty million pounds
of copper. Other mines are worked on Vancouver Island and on Howe Sound
north of the city of Vancouver.
[Illustration: The Canadian Rockies, with three hundred peaks more
than ten thousand feet high, offer thrills aplenty for even the most
seasoned mountain climber. Alpine guides have been brought here from
Switzerland and have established a colony in British Columbia.]
[Illustration: The line of the Canadian National Railways through
Yellowhead Pass, the lowest gap in the Canadian Rockies, lies near Mt.
Robson, 13,068 feet high, and the tallest peak in all the Dominion.]
Although the deposits of the Boundary District have been practically
worked out after yielding twenty million tons of copper ore, British
Columbia still has more than half the copper output of the Dominion.
Its total annual mineral production is worth more than six hundred
million dollars. Of this, coal and coke make up about one third.
Silver, lead, zinc, and platinum are also mined.
Gold was first discovered in British Columbia on the Fraser River. That
was around 1857, just as the California placers had begun to play out,
and thousands of prospectors rushed here from our Pacific coast. Many
fortunes were made in a single season, and by 1863 the placer mines
had an annual yield of more than three million dollars’ worth of gold.
The total production to the present time has been valued at more than
seventy-five million dollars.
All of this gold was recovered by the pick and shovel and without
the aid of machinery. Hydraulic mining was not introduced until the
easily accessible gold had been washed out by primitive methods. The
lode mines were not worked to any extent until 1893, but these are now
producing more than the placers.
Northwest of the Boundary District we take a flying trip through the
Okanagan Valley, famous as a fruit-growing region. Apples from here
are shipped all over the Dominion. They are sold three thousand miles
away in eastern Canada in competition with those grown in the Annapolis
Valley in Nova Scotia. The region has been developed largely through
irrigation, and as we travel through it the green of the watered areas
stands out in sharp contrast to the sun-baked dry lands of the hills.
British Columbia has forty thousand acres in fruit, and it ships more
than a million boxes of apples a season. The interior valleys have been
found to be well adapted to raising peaches, plums, grapes, and small
fruits as well.
The chief city of British Columbia, as well as Canada’s most important
Pacific port, is Vancouver. It is beautifully situated on Burrard
Inlet on a site discovered in 1792 by Captain John Vancouver. In 1865
a lumber mill was started on the inlet and a settlement grew up here.
About twenty years later the town was entirely destroyed by fire, so
that the city of to-day was really founded in 1886.
Vancouver is about the same size as Omaha, and is the fourth largest
city of the Dominion. It is the terminal of the Canadian Pacific and
Canadian National railways, and of several roads from the States. It
has steamship lines to Hawaii and China and Japan and also to the
Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. There are coast lines to
Seattle, Victoria, Prince Rupert, and Alaska.
Let us go for a motor ride about the city. The Vancouver climate is
warmer and more moist than that of the south of England, and flowers
can be seen blooming in the gardens all the year round. On Shaughnessy
Heights are the beautiful homes of Vancouver’s millionaires, and
farther out is Stanley Park. Here, overlooking the Narrows through
which the ships enter the harbour, are thousands of giant cedars and
Douglas firs, some of them one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet
high.
We find Vancouver’s commercial districts busy and crowded. At the
wharves we see twenty ocean steamers loading lumber to be carried to
all parts of the world, and learn that sixteen million feet are shipped
from here in one month. Vancouver is increasing in importance as a
wheat-shipping port. It sends a million bushels or more to the Orient,
and twice as much to Europe by way of the Panama Canal.
Eighty miles across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver is Victoria,
British Columbia’s capital, noted for the architectural beauty of
the provincial government buildings. It lies at the southern end of
Vancouver Island, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the
snow-capped Olympic Mountains on the mainland. It is considered one of
the most English of Canadian cities, not only in climate and aspect,
but in the customs and traditions of its residents. It is the site of
the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, one of the largest of its kind
in the world.
CHAPTER XXX
PRINCE RUPERT
I am at the north terminal of the Canadian National Railways and the
port of the shortest Pacific route to the Orient. Prince Rupert is
located on an island in a beautiful bay five hundred miles north of
Vancouver and only thirty miles south of our Alaskan boundary. Its
harbour is open all the year round. It is fourteen miles long, is
sheltered by the mountains and islands about it, and large enough for
all the demands of travel. The town reminds me of Jaffa, the port of
Jerusalem. It is right on the sea, and the buildings climb up and down
the mountains of rock close to the shore. The chief difference is that
the hills of Jaffa are bleak and bare, while those of Prince Rupert are
wooded and clad in perpetual green.
Until 1912, when the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, now a part of the
Canadian National lines, chose this point for its western terminus,
this place was a forest. Pines and cedars covered the mountains above,
and the stumps still rising out of the vacant lots look like the black
bristles of an unshaven chin. The town has several thousand people, and
I venture it has thousands of stumps. They are rooted in the crevices
of the rock, and the ground between them is matted with muskeg, which
holds water like a sponge and makes it impossible to go across country
without thick boots or rubbers.
[Illustration: Southern British Columbia is a land of winding rivers
and lakes, towering mountains and sheltered valleys. Many of the little
cities along the Columbia and the Kootenay have been settled largely by
Britishers.]
[Illustration: Apples from the irrigated orchards of the Pacific slope
are sold in eastern Canada, three thousand miles away, in competition
with the famous Nova Scotia fruit. British Columbia often ships a
million boxes of apples a season.]
[Illustration: Victoria, in its appearance, its climate, and its
people, is like a section of the south of England transplanted to
Vancouver Island. It is noted for the beauty of its location and for
its handsome provincial parliament buildings.]
The muskeg was one of the difficulties that had to be overcome in
laying out and building the city. Another and still greater difficulty
was blasting the hills. Every bit of the town is founded on bed rock,
and many places have had to be levelled with dynamite for the business
streets and foundations of buildings. The streets in the residential
section are paved with three-inch planks. They look like continuous
bridges, but they are substantial enough for heavy teams, motor trucks,
and automobiles. In some places the planks are spiked to trestle-work
from ten to fifteen feet high, and in others they lie on the rock. The
steep hills that extend back to the wooded mountains behind Prince
Rupert are so rough that to cut roads through them would bankrupt the
city many times over.
It was in company with a member of the board of trade and the civil
engineer who laid out Prince Rupert that I took an automobile ride
through the town. The plank roads are so narrow that turning-out places
have been built at the cross streets and curves, and the inclines are
so steep that we had all the sensations of a giant roller-coaster as we
dashed uphill and down. I expected a collision every time another car
passed. Now we shot around a curve where a slight skidding might have
hurled us into a ravine; and now climbed a hill where the trestle-work
trembled beneath us. We rode for some distance through “Lovers’ Lane,”
a part of the ninety acres of forest in the public park, and later
climbed the steep slope of Acropolis Hill.
On top of Acropolis Hill we inspected the city’s waterworks. The supply
is carried to a reservoir here from Lake Woodworth, five miles away.
The reservoir, which has been dug out of the rock, contains a million
gallons of water more than the regular needs of the city.
On another part of the hill are the municipal tennis courts and
baseball park. The tennis courts are made by laying a level plank floor
upon the uneven surface of the rocks, and erecting about it fences of
wire netting so high that the balls cannot possibly fly over and roll
down the steep slopes of the mountain. The ball park was blasted out
of the rock. It is so situated that the hills about it form a natural
grandstand, and consequently admission is free. The players are paid by
passing the hat.
We have a good view of Prince Rupert from Acropolis Hill. In front of
us is the harbour, sparkling in the sunlight and backed by mountainous
islands of green. Behind us are forest-clad hills, lost in the clouds,
and below is the city, connected with the mainland by a great bridge of
steel. The business section is made up of two- and three-story frame
buildings, painted in modest colours. Here and there the spire of a
church rises above the other roofs; and should you take your spyglass
you might pick out the signs of banks, stores, and real-estate offices.
There are many comfortable one- and two-story wooden cottages rising
out of the muskeg. The people have blasted out the stumps in making the
foundations for their homes, and some have brought earth and stones
and built up level yards with lawns as green and smooth as those of
old England. All kinds of vegetation grow luxuriantly. There are many
beautiful flowers, and the town is green from one end of the year to
the other.
The climate here is milder than in Baltimore, Richmond, or St. Louis.
The mean temperature in summer is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and
in winter the thermometer seldom falls below eight or ten above zero.
There is but little snow in the winter. The rainfall reminds me of
that of southern Chile, where they say it rains thirteen months every
year. Because of the dampness the frosts are heavy, and they sometimes
cover the roads to a depth of three inches. Then the people have
tobogganing parties on these roller-coaster highways.
Prince Rupert started with a boom. The town was planned and partially
developed before a single lot was offered for sale. The Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway decided upon the site, named it after the first
governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who was the nephew of Charles I,
and sent its engineers to clear the land, level the hills, and lay out
the city. The railway owned twenty-four thousand acres of land and the
first sub-division covered one twelfth of that area. The future city
was advertised, and auctions were held in Victoria and Vancouver. The
first lots brought high prices, and the boom continued until the war
halted its progress.
The inhabitants believe this city will become a great port and that it
will some day have a population of one hundred thousand or more. With a
view to the future, the city has built the largest floating dry dock on
the Pacific coast. It has cost more than three million dollars and will
accommodate ships up to six hundred feet in length and twenty thousand
tons capacity. Nearly three thousand vessels enter the harbour in a
year, and this number is on the increase.
Prince Rupert lies so far north on the globe that it is five hundred
miles nearer Yokohama than are Vancouver and Seattle. Moreover, the
journey from western Canada to Europe is shortened by the railroad
route from here to the Atlantic. England is only about four days from
Halifax. The Canadian National runs from there to this port in one
continuous line across the continent. It crosses eastern Canada far
north of the Great Lakes and from Winnipeg goes through the wheat belt
to Edmonton. It climbs the Rockies by easier grades than any other
road. It has short cuts by various connections to all the United States
cities, and it promises to be the fast freight route for perishable
products between Alaskan waters and the rest of the continent.
The city is two days nearer Alaska by steamer than are the Puget
Sound ports, and travellers from the eastern parts of Canada and the
United States can reach there that much sooner by coming here over the
Canadian National.
The fisheries of British Columbia are the most valuable in the
Dominion. Prince Rupert has become one of the fishing centres of the
Pacific and the chief halibut port in the world. It has thirty-five
canneries and seven large cold storage plants, and scores of steam
vessels, sailing boats, and gasoline launches go back and forth between
here and the fishing grounds. About fifty American vessels land their
catches at this port every week, and every train that goes eastward
over the railway carries carloads of fresh fish to the cities of the
United States.
Halibut are caught for nine months of the year, twenty million pounds
being landed here in a single season. The moment they are taken from
the sea they are packed in ice for shipment or put into cold storage.
I am told that the fish can be kept perfectly fresh for a month by the
present method of packing. During the summer as many as a half dozen
carloads are shipped in one day. More than a quarter of a million
pounds were recently sent to New York and Boston in a single trainload.
[Illustration: Prince Rupert has miles of streets made of planks,
upheld by trestle work, or resting on the rock underlying the city.
Most of the streets and building sites were blasted by dynamite from
the sides of the mountains.]
[Illustration: British Columbia leads all Canada in the value of its
fisheries, of which Prince Rupert is the centre. More halibut is
brought here each season than to any other port in the world.]
[Illustration: The animals, birds, and fish surmounting the totem poles
are the family crests indicating the different branches of an Indian
tribe at Kitwanga, not far from Prince Rupert. The poles number a score
or more, and some are a hundred feet high.]
The chief salmon fisheries of the Pacific coast are farther north in
Alaska, but nevertheless British Columbia’s catch is worth ten million
dollars a year. At Vancouver I saw the fleets of salmon trawlers in the
mouth of the Fraser. There are many salmon fisheries near the mouth of
the Skeena, not far from Prince Rupert, and forty per cent. of all the
salmon packed in the province is put up in this city. The fresh fish
are shipped only during the summer months, but they are exported in a
frozen state from the cold storage plants throughout the winter.
CHAPTER XXXI
BY MOTOR CAR THROUGH THE WILDERNESS
I have come into the Yukon Territory from Alaska. The trip from the
land of Uncle Sam to that of John Bull was made over the route followed
by thousands of gold seekers in the first great Klondike rush in the
winter of 1897, when the prospectors made their way on foot over that
frozen pass. It is now summer, and I have come from Skagway to White
Horse, where I am now writing, on the White Pass Railway.
My first journey into the interior of the Yukon has been a motor trip
of a hundred miles on the overland trail that runs from here to Dawson.
The car was of American make, the chauffeur was “Caterpillar Ike,”
and the time was yesterday from midday to midnight. We dashed through
virgin forests, climbed mountains, flew around dizzying curves, and
skidded along narrow cliffs until my heart was in my throat but my soul
was full of thrills.
The overland trail begins at White Horse and runs through the
wilderness for a distance of three hundred and fifty miles to Dawson at
the mouth of the Klondike. It is more than one hundred miles shorter
than the river trip to the gold mines, and it is used to carry mail,
passengers, and freight during the cold winter months when everything
in this region is locked tight by Jack Frost.
The road through the forest climbs over ranges of mountains, winds its
way through the valleys, and crosses swamps, bogs, and sloughs of mud
that sticks like cement. In many parts of its course it twists about
like a corkscrew, as though the surveyors had laid their lines along
the trail of a rabbit, and a drunken rabbit at that. Here it is bedded
on rock, and there it half floats on a quicksand covered with corduroy
logs. In the spring of the year the six-horse teams of the mail stage
are often mired to their bellies, and have to be lifted from the waxy
clay by a block and tackle attached to the trees.
My ride over the trail took me as far as the crest of the range beyond
Little River, whence I returned to White Horse to go down the Yukon by
steamer. The motor trip was a moving picture of the wonders of nature.
On each side of the roadway the country is the same as it was when
Columbus discovered America; it is the same as when the Scandinavian
navigators drifted down our coast about 1000 A. D.--yes, I venture, the
same as it was when old Cheops built his great pyramid on the banks of
the Nile. With the exception of several log huts where meals are served
to travellers, there were no signs of human habitation, and aside from
the roads, old and new, not one mark of human labour. We were in no
danger of meeting other machines or farm wagons, although we might have
run down a covey of birds instead of the usual chicken, or a fox or a
bear in place of a dog. At one time a lynx leaped across the trail in
front of our machine, and later a great flock of grouse passed over our
heads with a whirr. I am told that hunters sometimes bag a good lot of
birds on this route by shooting them from automobiles.
All sorts of animal tracks were to be seen as we rode over the trail.
The woods are full of bears, brown and black, caribou in great numbers,
and wide-antlered moose. There are foxes and lynx and millions of
rabbits. We passed groves of small trees, every one of which had been
killed by the rabbits. They had eaten the bark off during the winter,
beginning when the snow was two or three feet in depth and biting it
away inch by inch as the snow melted, until a belt of white a yard wide
girdled each tree. The bark above and below was dark green or brown,
and the white shone out like ivory. Beavers and muskrats abound in the
streams, and there are many kinds of squirrels, as well as gophers,
that burrow like moles under the roadway. We crossed many such burrows,
our motor car hitting them with a bump that shot us from our seats, so
that our heads struck the top.
Upon starting from White Horse we were told of a narrow escape from a
bear that one of the railroad clerks had had only the night before.
This man had gone out to a lake in the woods about five miles away and
made a good catch of fish. He was riding home on his bicycle when a
big black bear rushed out of the forest and upset him. Fortunately,
he fell near a dead root. He seized this as he jumped up, and hit old
Bruin a blow on the snout. Then, before the bear had time to recover,
he mounted his bicycle and sped away. But the bear got the fish.
Our first stop was twenty-two miles from White Horse, at the Tahkeena
road house, on the Tahkeena River, where there is a famous Irish cook,
Jimmy. The road house is built of logs and heated by a stove made of
a hundred-gallon gasoline tank. The tank lies on its side, resting on
four legs made of iron pipe. A stovepipe is fitted into the top and a
door is cut in one end. The result is an excellent heating device, and
one that is common in many parts of Alaska and the Klondike. We got a
snack at this road house on our first stop and had an excellent dinner
there on our return.
We crossed the Tahkeena River on a ferry boat attached to a cable
worked by the current. We then rode on through a parklike country,
spotted with groves of pine trees, each as high as a three-story house,
as straight as an arrow, and, branches and all, no bigger around than a
nail keg. I cannot describe the beauty of these trees. Where they were
thick we rode for miles through walls of green twenty or thirty feet
high, and in places where the trees had been burned by forest fires the
walls were of silver, the dead branches having been turned to the most
exquisite filigree.
The trees here are like those of most parts of interior Alaska. They
grow in the thin soil, nowhere more than six inches or so deep, which
is underlaid by strata of earth that have been frozen for thousands of
years. The moss on the top of the soil acts as an insulator and keeps
the ice from melting except on the surface. The roots go down to the
ice and then spread out. When a tree dies one can easily pull the stump
out, roots and all, and throw it aside. The overland trail was cleared
in this way, and the sides of it are fenced with piles of such trees.
We are accustomed to think of this part of the world as all snow and
ice. That is so in winter, but in summer the whole country is as
spotted with flowers as a botanical garden. During our ride we passed
great beds of fireweed and motored for miles between hedges of pink
flowers, higher than the wheels of our automobile. The woods that had
been swept by forest fires were dusted with pink blossoms, and in the
open spaces there was so much colour that it seemed as though Mother
Nature had gone on a spree and painted the whole country red. In one
open place where we stopped to put on a new tire, I picked nineteen
varieties of wild flowers. Among them were roses of bright red, and
white flowers with petals like those of a forget-me-not. There were
also blue flowers the names of which I do not know, and daisies with
petals of pink and centres as yellow as bricks of Klondike gold.
The mosses were especially wonderful. One that looked like old ivory
grew close to the ground in great patches. It reminded me of the
exquisite coral of Samoa and the Fijis. I am told that this moss is
the favourite food of the reindeer, and that the caribou paw their way
down through the snow to get it. Another curiosity found here is the
air plant. I have always thought of orchids as confined to the tropics,
but in this part of the world are polar orchids, great bunches of green
that hang high up in the trees.
The character of the country varied as we went onward. Now our way was
across a rolling plain, now the road climbed the hills, and again it
cut its way through the mountains. At one break in the hills we could
see the Ibex Range, with glaciers marking its slopes, and its peaks
capped with perpetual snow. In other places the mountains were as green
as the hills of the Alleghanies, and they had the same royal mantle of
purple. Just beyond the Tahkeena River we rode through a valley walled
with mountains from which the earth had been torn by a cloudburst
a few years before. The faces of the green hills were covered with
clay-coloured blotches and they looked as though they had been blasted
by leprosy or some earthy plague.
We crossed one little glacial river after another, and rode through
valleys that are covered with ice in the winter and become soup sloughs
in the spring. A great part of the way was over what is known as
glacial clay. This clay is solid when dry, but when moist it has the
consistency of shoemakers’ wax and, like a quicksand, sucks in anything
that goes over it. A railroad track built on it and not well protected
by drainage may disappear during a long rainy season.
The labour of keeping the overland trail in order reminds one of that
of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. The road bed has had to be
filled in and remade again and again. The route is changed from year to
year. Now and then we passed an old roadway that had become so filled
with boulders that a man could hardly crawl over it. This region had
no rain for three months until day before yesterday, when enough fell
to change the whole face of Nature, and make this glacial clay like so
much putty. Our automobile weighed more than two tons, and we had to go
carefully where there was any doubt as to the condition of the clay.
At one wet spot we found ourselves down to the axles, with the wheels
held fast in the mud. We had brought with us an axe and a long-handled
shovel for use in just such an emergency. We cut down trees and made
a bed of branches in front of the car. A pine track was put under the
wheels and a pine tree used as a lever to aid the jack in getting the
car out of the mud. It took us about two hours to dig the machine from
the clay and get it on the firm road bed. After that when we came to
soft clay we turned out and sought new roads through the grass or
rushed over the wet spots to prevent the car from sinking.
The overland trail is used almost altogether during winter, although
the Canadian government keeps it in such a condition that it is fit for
travel in summer. It is, on the whole, better than most of Uncle Sam’s
roads in Alaska, and in the winter makes possibles regular mail service
into the Klondike. The freight and the mail are carried on great sleds
hauled by six horses, with relays at the various road houses. Each
house has stables for the horses and at some of them there are sleeping
accommodations for passengers.
At the Tahkeena road house I saw a great stack of horse feed that had
been brought up the Tahkeena and cached there for the winter, and at
the Little River road house I saw one of the sleds used for carrying
foodstuffs and other perishables into the Klondike during the cold
season, when the thermometer may fall to seventy degrees below zero.
The sled was a covered one, large enough to carry three or four tons.
It was so arranged that carbon heaters could be placed in troughs
around its bed. These heaters keep the tightly covered load from
freezing. Such sleds are drawn by four or six horses, according to the
state of the roads.
The Canadian government has already spent a great deal on this road,
and its upkeep costs thousands of dollars a year. Within the last few
years the trail has been much improved for the use of automobiles. The
first time an automobile road was proposed many people scoffed at the
idea and said that it could not be done. The matter came up before the
Parliament at Ottawa and was discussed pro and con. An appropriation of
fifty thousand dollars had been asked. The objections made were that
automobiles could not be run in the low temperature of the Yukon, and
that the road was so rough that the machines could never make their way
over it.
[Illustration: Built at the height of the Klondike gold rush, the White
Pass Railway transported thousands of prospectors and millions of
dollars’ worth of gold during the first few years of its existence. It
is one hundred and eleven miles long and connects Skagway with White
Horse.]
[Illustration: For more than half the year the Yukon River is covered
with ice, and then mail, freight, and passengers for the interior are
carried on sleds by way of the Overland Trail from White Horse to
Dawson.]
[Illustration: “Our first stop was at the Tahkeena roadhouse, famous
for its Irish cook. It stands on the banks of the Tahkeena River, which
we crossed on a ferry.”]
This discussion occurred in the midst of the winter, and while it
was going on the Honourable George Black, who was then Commissioner
of Yukon Territory, decided to show parliament that the undertaking
was practicable. He made an arrangement with C. A. Thomas, the
resident manager of the Yukon Gold Company at Dawson, to take a
forty-horse-power automobile over the trail. With a chauffeur, the two
men left Dawson when the road was covered with snow and the thermometer
far below zero. The long winter nights were at hand and the sun shone
only an hour or so every day. The darkness was conquered in part by a
locomotive headlight on the front of the car.
The trip to White Horse and return was made within fifty-six hours,
of which thirty-six hours was actual running. The distance of seven
hundred and twenty miles was covered at an average speed of twenty
miles an hour for the running time of the round trip. During the
journey the thermometer fell to fifty-six degrees below zero, but the
air was dead still, and wrapped up as they were in furs, the men did
not realize how cold it was until they came to a road house and read
the thermometer.
It was necessary to keep the machine going continuously, for during a
stop of even a few minutes the engine would freeze and the oil congeal.
At one time their gasoline gave out and they had to stop twenty miles
away from a road house they had expected to reach. A dog team was found
and sent on to the road house, but while they waited the engine froze
and the oil became stiff, and they had to build a fire under the car
with wood from the forest before they could start off again. When they
had completed the journey and returned to Dawson the bill for the road
appropriation was just coming up for action. The news of their trip was
telegraphed to Ottawa and the bill was passed.
CHAPTER XXXII
FROM WHITE HORSE TO DAWSON
Within the last fifteen days I have travelled by foot, by rail, and by
steamer from the headwaters of the Yukon to Dawson, a distance of five
hundred miles. The river has one of its sources in the coast range of
mountains only fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean. It starts as a
trickling stream of icy cold water and winds its way down the hills to
Lake Bennett. On the White Pass Railway I rode twenty-five miles along
the east shore of that lake to Caribou, and thence for an hour or so
farther to White Horse. That town is at the head of steam navigation on
the Yukon, from where one can go for more than two thousand miles to
the mouth of the river on Bering Sea, not far from the Arctic Ocean.
The Yukon makes one think of Mark Twain’s description of the
Mississippi, which he knew so well as a pilot. He said: “If you will
peel an apple in one long paring and throw it over your head, the shape
it will have when it falls on the floor will represent the ordinary
curves of the river.”
Let me take you with me on my trip down this looping river. In its
upper reaches, it winds about like a snake. It narrows and widens, now
measuring only a few hundred feet from shore to shore, and now almost
as broad as a lake. It is full of sand banks, and there are rocky
cañons through which our boat shoots, its sides almost grazing the
cliffs.
Our ship down the Yukon from White Horse is the little steamer
_Selkirk_, drawing between four and five feet of water. Nevertheless,
it is so skilfully handled that it twists and turns with the current
and at times swings about as though on a pivot. Now the pilot throws
the boat across the stream and lets the current carry it along, and now
he drives it through the rapids, putting on steam to make the paddles
go faster.
In addition to the boat itself we have a great barge to care for. Most
of the freight that goes down the Yukon is carried on barges pushed
along in front of the steamers. The load of to-day consists largely
of cattle. The barge is enclosed in a high board fence, within which
are eight cow pens, with a double-deck sheep-fold at the back. There
are one hundred and fifty beef cattle in the pens and two hundred live
sheep in the fold. The animals were brought by rail from Calgary to
Vancouver. There they were loaded on a Canadian Pacific steamer and
carried through the thousand miles of inland waterways that border
the west coast of the continent to Skagway. They were then taken over
the mountains on the White Pass Railway, and are now on their way to
Dawson, where they will be transferred to another steamer that will
push them a thousand or fifteen hundred miles more down the Yukon.
The freight charges are so heavy that the animals selected must be of
a high grade. The steers average three fourths of a ton and several of
them weigh close to two thousand pounds each. They were raised on grass
and are now fed on the bales of alfalfa piled around the edge of the
barge.
[Illustration: From White Horse, at the head of navigation on the
Yukon, during the open season from June to October one can travel by
steamer down that river for two thousand miles to Nome on Bering Sea.]
[Illustration: A wood-burning heating stove common throughout Alaska
and the Yukon is made from a gasoline tank turned on its side and
fitted with legs of iron pipe.]
We have other live stock on board. Down in the hold are eight hundred
chickens bound for the hen fanciers of interior Alaska. They crow night
and morning, and with the baaing of the sheep and the mooing of the
cattle we seem to be in a floating barnyard. The barge is swung this
way and that, and whenever it touches the bank, the sheep pile up one
over the other, some of the cattle are thrown from their feet, and the
chickens cackle in protest.
The _Selkirk_ burns wood, and we stop several times a day to take on
fuel, which is wheeled to the steamer in barrows over a gangplank from
the piles of cord wood stacked up on the banks. At many of the stops
the only dwelling we see is the cabin of the wood chopper, who supplies
fuel for a few dollars a cord. The purser measures with a ten-foot
pole the amount in each pile loaded on board. Going down stream the
_Selkirk_ burns about one cord an hour, and in coming back against
the current the consumption is often four times as much. The wood is
largely from spruce trees from three to six inches in diameter. Many of
the little islands we pass are covered with the stumps of trees cut for
the steamers, but most of the wood stations are on the mainland, the
cutting having been done along the banks or in the valleys back from
the river.
Except where we take on fuel there are no settlements on the Yukon
between White Horse and Dawson. The country is much the same as it
was when the cave dwellers, the ancestors of the Eskimos, wrought
with their tools of stone. For a distance of four hundred and sixty
miles we do not see a half dozen people at any stop of the steamer,
although here and there are deserted camps with the abandoned cabins
of prospectors and wood choppers. One such is at Chisana, near the
mouth of the White River. The town was built during the rush to the
Chisana gold mines, and it was for a time a thriving village, with a
government telegraph office, a two-story hotel, and a log stable that
could accommodate a dozen horses and numerous sled dogs. The White Pass
and Yukon Company built the hotel and the stable, expecting to bring
the miners in by its steamers and to send them into the interior with
horses and dogs. It did a good business until the gold bubble burst and
the camp “busted.” To-day the Chisana Hotel is deserted, all the cabins
except that of the wood chopper are empty, and under the wires leading
into one of them is a notice: “Government telegraph, closed August 3,
1914.”
The woodman’s cabin is open. A horseshoe is nailed over the door and a
rifle stands on the porch at the side. On the wall at the back of the
hut a dog harness hangs on a peg. The skin of a freshly killed bear is
tacked up on one side, and bits of rabbit skins lie here and there on
the ground. The cabin itself is not more than eight feet in height. It
is made of logs, well chinked with mud and with earth banked up about
the foundation. There is a weather-strip of bagging nailed to the door
posts. The door is a framework filled in with pieces of wooden packing
boxes for panels.
Entering, we find that there are two rooms. One is a kitchen, and the
other a living room and bedroom combined. Three cots, made of poles and
covered with blankets, form the beds. There are some benches for seats
and a rude table stands under the window. Various articles of clothing
hang from the walls or lie upon the floor. In the kitchen a table is
covered with unwashed dishes. There is a guitar on the shelf near the
stove and a pack of cards on a ledge in the logs. The whole is by no
means inviting, but I doubt not it is a fair type of the home of the
prospectors and woodsmen throughout this whole region.
I have seen most of the great rivers of the world--the Rhine, the
Danube, the Volga, the Nile, the Zambesi, the Yangtse, and the Hoang
Ho. I know the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Indus, and the
Irrawaddy, as well as the Amazon and the Parana, and many other streams
of more or less fame. But nowhere else have I seen scenery like that
along the Yukon. We seem to have joined the army of early explorers and
to be steaming through a new world. We pass places
Where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where.
Much of the country is semi-desert, but some of it is as green as the
valley of the Nile. In places the hills, sloping almost precipitously
back from the river, are wrinkled with dry waterways filled with
scrubby forests. In others there are series of ledges rising one over
the other, making great terraces from the edge of the stream to the
tops of the mountains.
The Yukon changes its course like the Yellow River of China. Now we
pass through gorges of silt where the sand walls rise above us to
the height of a twenty-story office building; and now swing around
beds where we seem to be walled in by the cuttings made by the water.
The hills are composed of earth washings, and from year to year the
snaggy teeth of old Father Time have been gouging long furrows out of
their sides. These furrows have caught the moisture, forests of small
evergreens have grown up in them, and the landscape for miles looks as
though it had been ploughed by the gods and drilled in with these crops
of green trees. This makes the country, when seen from a distance,
seem to be cultivated. There is a scanty grass between the patches of
forests, and the whole is like a mighty farm planted by the genii of
the Far North.
As we go down the river the scenery changes. Here the banks are almost
flat and are covered with bushes. There on the opposite side they are
of a sandy glacial alluvial formation, perfectly bare. At times the
soil is so friable that it rolls down in avalanches, and a blast from
our steam whistle starts the sand flowing. It makes one think of the
loess cliffs on the plains of North China. Those cliffs contain some
of the richest fertilizing matter on earth, and their dust, carried by
the wind, enriches the country upon which it drops as the silt from the
Abyssinian highlands enriches the Nile Valley.
The soil from the upper Yukon, on the other hand, is poorer than that
which surrounds the Dead Sea at the lower end of the Jordan. It lacks
fertilizing qualities, and some of it rests on a bed of prehistoric
ice, which carries off the rainfall, leaving no moisture for plant
life. A geological expert in our party says it is as though the land
were laid down on plates of smooth copper tilted toward the valleys to
carry the rain straight to the rivers. He tells me that the region has
only ten or twelve inches of water a year, or a rainfall similar to
that of California in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He says also
that sixty-five per cent. of the water that falls finds its way to the
streams.
[Illustration: The upper Yukon River in places is only a few hundred
feet from bank to bank, and in others as wide as a lake. Throughout
most of its length it is dotted with islands in all stages of
formation.]
[Illustration: The Yukon twists and turns in great loops and curves
throughout its entire length, and at Five Finger Rapids presents a
stretch of water that can be navigated only by the exercise of the
utmost skill in piloting.]
Much of our way down the Yukon is in and out among islands. The stream
is continually building up and tearing down the land through which it
flows, and the islands are in every stage of formation. Here they are
sand bars as bare as the desert of Sahara; there they are dusted with
the green of their first vegetation. A little farther on are patches of
land with bushes as high as your waist, and farther still are islands
covered with forest. Each island has its own shade of green, from the
fresh hue of the sprouts of a wheatfield to the dark green mixed with
silver that is common in the woods of Norway and Sweden. Not a few of
the islands are spotted with flowers. Some from which the trees have
been cut are covered with fireweed, and a huge quilt of delicate pink
rises out of the water, the black stumps upon it standing out like
knots on the surface. Such islands are more gorgeous than the flower
beds of Holland.
In places the Yukon is bordered by low hills, behind which are
mountains covered with grass, and, still farther on, peaks clad in
their silvery garments of perpetual snow. At one place far back from
the river, rising out of a park of the greenest of green, are rocky
formations that look like castles, as clean cut and symmetrical as any
to be seen on the banks of the Rhine. Down in the river itself are
other great rocks, more dangerous than that on which the Lorelei sat
and with her singing lured the sailors on to their destruction.
One such formation is known as the “Five Fingers.” It consists of
five mighty masses of reddish-brown rock that rise to the height of a
six-story building directly in the channel through which the steamers
must go. The current is swift and the ship needs careful piloting to
keep it from being dashed to pieces against the great rocks. The
captain guides the barge of cattle to the centre of the channel. He
puts the barge and the steamer in the very heart of the current and we
shoot with a rush between two of these mighty fingers of rock down into
the rapids below. As we pass, it seems as though the rocks are not more
than three feet away on each side of our steamer.
A little farther on we ride under precipices of sand that extend
straight up from the water as though they were cut by a knife, with
strata as regular as those of a layer cake. They seem to be made of
volcanic ash or glacial clay. They rise to the height of the Washington
Monument and are absolutely bare of vegetation, save for the lean
spruce and pine on the tops.
We pass the “Five Fingers” between one and two o’clock in the morning,
when the sun is just rising. This is the land of the midnight sun, and
there are places not far from here where on one or two days of the year
the sun does not sink below the horizon. Even here, at midnight it is
hard to tell sunrise from sunset. There is a long twilight, and the
glories of the rising and the setting sun seem almost commingled. At
times it has been light until one o’clock in the morning, and I have
been able to make notes at midnight at my cabin windows.
There is a vast difference between this region and the rainy districts
near the Pacific coast. We have left the wet lands, and we are now in
the dry belt of the great Yukon Valley. The air here is as clear as
that of Colorado. The sky is deep blue, the clouds hug the horizon, and
we seem to be on the very roof of the world, with the “deep deathlike
valleys below.” We are in the country of Robert Service, the poet of
the Yukon, and some of his verses come to our minds:
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE CAPITAL OF THE YUKON
I write of Dawson, the capital of Yukon Territory, the metropolis of
the Klondike, and for years the richest mining camp of the world. In
the height of its glory it had more than thirty thousand inhabitants,
and in the region about there have been more than sixty thousand
people. To-day the population of the town is less than one thousand.
With the gradual exhaustion of the gold the population is decreasing,
and it may be only a question of years when the precious metal will all
have been taken from the ground and the chief reason for a city here
will have disappeared. One of the great hopes of the people is in the
discovery of rich quartz mines or the mother lode from which all the
loose gold came. The hills have been prospected in every direction, but
so far no such find has been made.
Dawson lies just where it was located when gold was discovered. The
houses still stand on the banks of the Klondike and Yukon rivers where
the two streams meet. The town is laid out like a checkerboard, with
its streets crossing one another at right angles. They climb the sides
of the hills and extend far up the Klondike to the beginning of the
mountains of gravel built up by the dredgers. The public roads are
smooth, and the traffic includes automobiles and heavy draft wagons.
There are more than fifty automobiles in use, and two hundred and
fifty-five miles of good country highways have been made by the
government in the valleys near by.
Dawson has been burned down several times since the great gold rush,
and vacant lots covered with the charred remains of buildings are still
to be seen. Most of the stores are of one story, and log cabins of all
sizes are interspersed with frame houses as comfortable as those in the
larger towns of the States. Scores of the homes have little gardens
about them, and not a few have hothouses in which vegetables and
flowers are raised under glass. Empty houses and boarded-up stores here
and there show the decline in population.
This is the seat of government of Yukon Territory and the district
headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Here the judges hold
court, and here the commissioner has his residence. The government
house is a large yellow frame building with a wide porch. In front of
it is a beautiful lawn, and beds of pansies border the walk that leads
to the entrance. At the rear are gardens filled in summer with the most
delicious vegetables grown in the Yukon, and near by are the hothouses
that supply the tomatoes and cucumbers for the commissioner’s table.
Yukon Territory is next door to Alaska, and its resources and other
characteristics are so similar that it might be called Canadian Alaska.
Its southern boundary is within thirty miles of the Pacific Ocean, and
the territory extends to the Arctic. It is a thousand miles long and
in places three hundred miles wide, and it comprises almost as much
land as France. It is one third the size of Alaska from which it is
separated by the international boundary, which crosses the Yukon River
about one hundred miles from here.
The Dawson of to-day has none of the earmarks of the Dawson of the
past. It has now several churches, a city library, radio concerts,
women’s clubs, sewing societies, and afternoon teas. The palatial bars
where beer cost three dollars a bottle and champagne twenty dollars
a pint have long since disappeared. The hymns of the Salvation Army
have taken the place of the songs of the dance halls, and in the hotel
where I am staying is a Christian Science lecturer who is drawing large
crowds.
The order on the streets is as good as that of any town in New England,
and educationally and socially the place is the equal of any of its
size in the States. There is still a large proportion of miners, but
most of them are connected with the great dredging and hydraulic
operations, and the independent prospectors are few. There are many
business men and officials, as well as lawyers and doctors. Now and
then Indians come in to sell their furs to the traders. The stores have
large stocks of goods and handle most of the trade of the Yukon and
some of that of eastern Alaska.
For the first few years after gold was discovered in the Klondike
everything was paid for in gold dust or nuggets, and the store-keepers
had their gold scales, upon which they weighed out the price of their
goods. Every miner then carried a gold poke, and paid for a cigar or a
drink with a pinch of dust. To-day the only place where one can use any
coin less than a quarter is at the post-office, and there the change is
in stamps.
Visiting a grocery store, I saw cantaloupes selling at seventy-five
cents apiece, chickens at three dollars, and eggs at a dollar a dozen.
These are the summer prices. In the heart of midwinter, when the hens
go on a strike, eggs soar to five dollars a dozen. In early days they
sometimes sold for eighteen dollars, and were cheap at one dollar
apiece. In a butcher shop hard by I saw salmon that had been brought
seventeen hundred miles up the Yukon, and the finest of porterhouse
steaks. As I have said, the beef has to be brought in from southern
Canada or the States, and the freight rates are so high that the
butchers cannot afford to import skinny animals. Indeed, I am told that
the transportation charges are quite as much as the first cost of the
meat.
“All game here is cheap,” said a butcher I talked with. “We sell moose
and caribou steaks and roasts at twenty or twenty-five cents a pound.
As to bear, the people won’t eat it; it is too tough. In the winter
we have plenty of caribou. The Indians kill deer in great numbers and
bring in the hind quarters, peddling them about from house to house.
The fore parts of the animals they feed to their dogs. This country
is also full of grouse and ptarmigan, and any one can get game in the
winter if he will go out and hunt for it.”
The commissioner of the territory tells me that the Yukon is one of the
best big game regions of the North American continent. All shooting is
restricted and licensed, and, so far, there is no indication of the
animals dying out. There is an abundance of moose, mountain sheep,
and mountain goats, and ten thousand caribou may sometimes be seen
moving together over the country. Such a drove will not turn aside for
anything. One can go moose hunting in an automobile within twenty-five
miles of Dawson. The moose are among the largest of the world. Their
horns have often a spread of five or six feet, and it is not uncommon
to kill caribou with antlers having more than thirty points.
At a drug store I paid a quarter for a bottle of pop. The proprietor,
a pioneer gold miner, had a store in Pittsburgh before he came to hunt
for gold in the Klondike. He did fairly well mining, but decided there
was more money in drugs.
“My prices are small, compared with what I got when I first started
business,” he said. “I used to charge a dollar for a mustard plaster,
a dollar for a two-grain quinine pill, and fifty cents an ounce for
castor oil. I sold my Seidlitz powders at a dollar apiece, and flaxseed
for thirty-two dollars a pound. The latter was used largely to make a
tea for coughs and colds. I remember a cheechako, or tenderfoot, who
came in during those days. He asked me for ten cents’ worth of insect
powder. I looked him over and said: ‘Ten cents! Why man, I wouldn’t
wrap the stuff up for ten cents.’ The cheechako turned about and
replied: ‘You needn’t wrap it up, stranger; just pour it down the back
of my neck.’”
Speaking of the old-time prices, I hear stories everywhere as to the
enormous cost of things in the days of the gold rush. All tinned
vegetables were sold at five dollars a can, and a can of meats cost a
third of an ounce of gold dust or nuggets. At one time, the usual price
of all sorts of supplies and provisions was one dollar a pound. One man
tells me he bought an eight-hundred-pound outfit in Dawson for eight
hundred dollars. It consisted of provisions and supplies of all kinds,
shovels and nails costing the same as corn meal and rice. At that time
flour sold for fifty dollars a sack, firewood for forty dollars a cord,
and hay for from five hundred to eight hundred dollars a ton.
[Illustration: Many who live in Dawson in winter spend their summers in
little cabins in the country or on the islands in the river. Some of
them grow flowers and vegetables for the Dawson market in gardens along
the river.]
[Illustration: Though not many degrees south of the Arctic Circle, the
official residence of the Commissioner of Yukon Territory has in summer
green lawns, shade trees, and beds of flowers that thrive in the long
hours of sunlight.]
[Illustration: Dawson is so far north on the globe that some days
in midsummer have only one hour of darkness. This photograph of Mr.
Carpenter and a miner’s pet bear was taken after ten o’clock at night.]
I heard last night of Jack McQuestion, who had a log cabin store
at Forty Mile, a camp on the Yukon. One day a miner came in and
asked for a needle. He was handed one and told that the price was
seventy-five cents. The man took the needle between his thumb and
finger, looked hard at it, and then said to McQuestion:
“Say, pard, ain’t you mistaken? Can’t you make it a bit cheaper? That’s
an awful price for a needle.”
“No,” said the storekeeper, “I’d like to if I could, but great snakes,
man, just think of the freight!”
Another story is told of a miner who wanted to buy some sulphur. The
price asked was five dollars a pound.
“Why man,” said he, “I only paid five cents a pound for it in Seattle
last month.”
“Yes, and you can get it for nothing in hell,” was the reply.
Here in Dawson the days are now so long that I can read out-of-doors at
any time during the twenty-four hours. I can take pictures at midnight
by giving a slight time exposure, and in the latter part of June one
can make snapshots at one in the morning. It is not difficult to get
excellent photographs between nine and eleven P. M. and at any time
after two o’clock in the morning. The sun now sets at about eleven
P. M. and comes up again about two hours later. The twilight is bright
and at midnight the sky is red. Last night I saw a football match that
did not end until after ten o’clock, and moving pictures were taken
near the close of the game.
I find that the light has a strange effect upon me. The sleepiness that
comes about bedtime at home is absent, and I often work or talk until
midnight or later without realizing the hour. The air is invigorating,
the long hours of light seem life-giving, and I do not seem to need as
much sleep as at home.
The weather just now is about as warm as it is in the States. The grass
is green, the trees are in full leaf, there are flowers everywhere, and
the people are going about in light clothing. The women go out in the
evening with bare arms and necks, and the men play football, baseball,
and tennis in their shirt sleeves. There are many bare-footed children,
and all nature is thriving under the hot twenty-two-hour sun of the
Arctic.
Many people here declare that they like the winters better than the
summers, and that they all--men, women, and children--thrive on the
cold. The pilot of the boat on which I came in from White Horse tells
me he would rather spend a winter on the Upper Yukon than at his old
home in Missouri. He says that one needs heavy woollen clothing and
felt shoes or moccasins. When the thermometer falls to fifty or sixty
degrees below zero he has to be careful of his face, and especially his
nose. If it is not covered it will freeze in a few minutes. At twenty
degrees below zero the climate is delightful. The air is still and dry,
and the people take short walks without overcoats. At this temperature
one needs a fur coat only when riding. Cows and horses are kept in
warmed stables and get along very well. Horses are seldom used when the
thermometer is fifty degrees below zero. At that temperature the cold
seems to burn out their lungs. Still, it is said that there are horses
that are wintered in the open near Dawson. They have been turned out in
the fall to shift for themselves and have come back in the spring “hog
fat.”
The old timers here tell me that the dreariness of the long nights of
the winter has been greatly exaggerated. During that season most of the
earth is snow-clad, and the light of the sky, the stars, and the moon
reflected from the snow makes it so that one can work outside almost
all the time. True, it is necessary to have lights in the schools, and
in the newspaper offices the electricity is turned off only between
11:15 in the morning and 2:15 in the afternoon. The morning newspaper
men who sleep in the day do not see the sun except upon Sunday.
In the coldest part of the winter the snow makes travelling difficult.
It is then so dry that the dogs pulling the sleds have to work as hard
as though they were going through sand. In March and April the snow is
not so powdery and sleighing is easier. The ideal winter weather is
when the thermometer registers fifteen or twenty-five degrees below
zero, with a few hours of sunlight. The most depressing time is from
the middle of December until the end of the first week in January. Then
comes the most severe cold, and the sun may not be seen at all.
It is this midwinter period that is described in many of the gruesome
poems of the Yukon, especially in Service’s “Cremation of Sam McGee.”
You remember how Sam McGee left his home in sunny Tennessee to roam
around the North Pole, where:
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a
spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d sooner live in
hell.
The poet describes how Sam froze to death on the trail above Dawson and
how, before he died, he made his partner promise to “cremate his last
remains.” This was done, between here and White Horse, on the “marge of
Lake Lebarge.” There the frozen corpse was stuffed into the furnace of
the derelict steamer _Alice May_ and a great fire built. Sam McGee’s
partner describes “how the heavens scowled and the huskies howled, and
the winds began to blow,” and how, “though he was sick with dread, he
bravely said: I’ll just take a peep inside.’” He then opens the furnace
door:
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the
furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please
close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and
storm----.
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve
been warm.”
[Illustration: Yukon Territory is said to have thirty-eight million
acres of land that can be utilized for crops or grazing. Above the
Arctic Circle red-top grass, which is used as hay, grows almost as high
as a man.]
[Illustration: Land on the upper Yukon will yield six or seven tons of
potatoes an acre. Sometimes prices are so high that one crop from this
seventeen-acre field has brought in ten thousand dollars.]
CHAPTER XXXIV
FARMING ON THE EDGE OF THE ARCTIC
This is the story of Chicken Billy and his ten-thousand-dollar potato
patch. It is about a young American who became the poultry king of the
Klondike, and then turned to farming with such success that he has had
a field of potatoes that brought in ten thousand dollars in one year.
Chicken Billy is a representative type of the farmers of the Far North.
I first met him yesterday afternoon when he called at my hotel here in
Dawson. A rough-looking man of less than medium height, his face is
bronzed by the hot summer sun of the Arctic and his hands are horny
from handling the plough. He had brought some of his crops of hot-house
vegetables into Dawson for sale, and he wore his working clothes--a
flannel shirt open at the neck, blue jeans somewhat the worse for wear,
and a pair of rough boots that reached to his knees.
Billy was born in Philadelphia and went to school there. He was still
under twenty when he passed the examinations for appointment to the
navy. He was so excited over his success that when he came into the
hands of the surgeons to be tested as to his physical fitness his heart
was throbbing at the rate of a hundred-odd beats to the minute, and the
result was that the doctors said he had heart disease and pronounced
him unfit for service.
Billy then worked at odd jobs, without great success, until one day he
read in a newspaper about the gold strike in the Klondike. The article
was headed “Gold at the Grass Roots,” and Billy tells me he decided
to dig into the grass and take out a fortune. He had only seventeen
dollars at the time, but with that he got to St. Paul and thence worked
his way up to Skagway. He walked in over the Dyea trail and fought for
his own with the miners of Dawson. He got some gold from his various
ventures, but made no big strikes, and finally gave up mining to raise
chickens. For this purpose he bought an island in the Yukon not far
from the mouth of the Klondike, and built a henhouse of logs with glass
windows facing the south.
For a while Billy prospered. His eggs sold for fifty cents each, and
his fat chickens brought in forty or fifty dollars a dozen. He built up
his flock until he had nine hundred chickens, and his fresh-laid eggs
became so well known that he acquired the nickname of Chicken Billy.
When he thought he was on the sure road to success, competition arose.
The other poultry raisers cut prices, and chickens dropped to a dollar
apiece. Billy began to lose money and so looked about for other kinds
of farming. He is now raising only fancy chickens, and is devoting his
energy to hogs and potatoes, with occasional crops of turnips and oats.
My visit to Billy’s farm was one of the most interesting trips I have
had in the Yukon. We started up the river from Dawson in a gasoline
boat about three feet wide and forty feet long. The boat had a big
paddle wheel at the end attached to the engine by a long iron shaft.
We had gone only two miles when this shaft broke and we had to row
ourselves to the nearest island. Leaving the beach, we made our way
through the potato rows from one farm to another. The first farm we
visited was owned by a Swede. He had eleven acres under cultivation,
half in potatoes, and half in oats. The oats are grown for hay, and
some of it stood in shocks as high as my head, while that not yet cut
reached halfway to my waist.
The owner told me that this oats hay often sells for sixty dollars a
ton. When I asked what he expected to get for his potato crop, he fixed
the price at ninety dollars a ton, saying that it might go as high as
one hundred dollars. He told me of one crop from three acres that had
yielded him thirty-seven hundred dollars. That was when the Guggenheim
syndicate began to dredge out the gold of the Klondike. They were
employing large numbers of men, and potatoes were scarce. Since then
he has raised nothing but potatoes and oats. The next farm we visited
produced potatoes and carrots. The woman in charge told me that the
carrots paid as well as the potatoes. She said that she and her husband
enjoyed their summer home on the Yukon. They live in Dawson in winter.
Leaving this farm, we found ourselves at the end of the island with
the next one about a half mile upstream. This was Billy’s island, and
a loud shout brought his helper after us in a canoe. Upon landing we
first took a look at the hot-house, where cucumbers and tomatoes are
raised for the markets of Dawson. This is one of the most interesting
features of farming in the Far North. There are more than twenty-five
big hothouses in Dawson itself, and they are all doing well, although
Billy says his farm makes more profit than any two of the others.
Billy’s hot-house is about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. It
consists of a great pit walled with logs to the surface of the ground
and above that a framework entirely covered with glass. The house is
kept warm by wood fires, the ever-present gasoline tank having been
made into a stove for the purpose. The plants are set out in beds upon
low tables, which are connected with a network of wires. The vines of
the cucumbers and tomatoes are trained on the wires. They climb up the
walls and hang down from the roof. Many of the cucumbers are over ten
inches in length and the largest tomatoes are bigger than the head of a
baby.
Leaving the hot-house we took a look at the hogs. During the summer
they are kept in enclosures out in the open and in the winter they
live in the log henneries, which have been turned into pig pens.
The buildings are warmed with good stoves, and the fires are kept
up day and night. In the winter the pigs are fed upon potatoes and
grain. Their food is cooked and served hot morning and evening. Every
bit of manure is saved, Billy says, for the soil of the Yukon needs
fertilizing, and this by-product is worth almost four times as much as
in the United States.
I went with Billy from pen to pen to examine the stock. It is said that
a man may be known by the way animals act in his presence; that if
they like him he is to be trusted, if not, he is a man to be watched.
If this is true, Chicken Billy should sprout angel’s wings. His hogs
seemed to love him. He talked to them as though they were human, and
they lay down and rolled over like pet dogs. One of his biggest boars
did tricks. The babies of the hog pens were of all ages, from little
red piggies as big as a kitten to lusty black Berkshires the size of a
fox terrier.
Chicken Billy started in the hog business with fourteen
pigs--Duroc-Jerseys, Berkshires, and Yorkshires--most of which had
taken prizes at the agricultural fair at Vancouver. He bought them for
sixty dollars apiece, and shipped them into the Klondike for breeding
purposes.
Leaving the pigs, we went to the farmhouse, a log cabin of two rooms
besides a kitchen. The earth was banked up around the outside to keep
out the winter cold, and inside were great stoves. For dinner we had
eggs fresh from the hens, fried with ham that fairly melted in our
mouths. There were mealy potatoes as good as any that ever came out of
Ireland, although they had been harvested more than a year before. The
bread was made by Billy’s hired man, and there were more cucumbers than
we could possibly eat.
After dinner we took a skiff and rowed from the island over to Billy’s
potato farm on the mainland. This farm was on the banks of the Yukon,
and the crop was raised within a stone’s throw of the river in a
seventeen-acre field a half mile long. I have seen many farms, but none
better cultivated and more free from weeds than this potato patch. The
rows were perfectly straight and the vines reached to my knees. Billy
told me he hoped to get six or seven tons to the acre, or more than
three thousand bushels in all. At one hundred dollars a ton the gross
receipts would be something like ten thousand dollars.
In the centre of the patch is a log cabin with a great cellar where the
potatoes are stored until shipped to market. This is so well built and
so insulated with air spaces that the potatoes do not freeze, even in
the severest weather.
There is no doubt that potatoes can be raised in most parts of Alaska
and the Yukon. When Luther Burbank was in Dawson he said that these
regions may some day be among the chief potato lands of the world and
that by selective breeding a potato can be developed that will mature
here to perfection. Even now the country is raising nearly all that it
needs, and the potato imports are decreasing. This year the crop is
especially good, and the potatoes are equal in quality to any brought
in from outside.
Plants live upon sunshine, and as the Yukon Territory has about one
third more sunlight than the United States in the same period of
summer, Nature puts on its seven-league boots and makes things grow
during our nights. Growth begins in April, when the crocuses come up
through the snow. Gardens are planted by the middle of May, and by the
latter part of June there are vegetables to eat. The chief summer month
is July, although the frosts do not come until the middle of September.
After that follows Indian summer, when the hills are ablaze with gold.
The country about Dawson is virgin land covered with trees, which are
usually stunted except in the river bottoms. There are meadows in the
south and the southwest, and also great areas that can be used for
grazing. Doctor Dawson, the man who first surveyed the territory, says
that there are thirty-eight million acres that can be utilized either
for crops or for grazing. He compares the Yukon with some of the inland
provinces of Russia where oats, rye, barley, flax, and hemp are raised
successfully.
Most of the farming is in small patches. There are gardens about the
miners’ cabins where potatoes and turnips, green peas and beets, and
carrots and celery are raised. Last year one man grew forty tons of
turnips upon a single acre, and from another acre the same man raised
five hundred and sixty-one bushels of potatoes. Another farmer brought
in to Dawson a cauliflower measuring ten inches in diameter, a turnip
weighing fourteen pounds, and six heads of cabbage that tipped the
scales at one hundred and thirty pounds.
Already a number of homesteads have been taken up in the territory, and
there are little farms here and there on the banks of the Yukon and on
the islands with which it is dotted. The soil is a sandy loam made up
of silt brought down by the river. The land is so thickly covered with
bushes and trees that it costs one hundred dollars and upward an acre
to clear it. Farm wages are high, although the demand for labour is
limited, and the market for potatoes and other vegetables is confined
to the small population in the mines and in Dawson. If the farms are
increased by many new homesteaders there may be a glut in the market
and the prices will fall.
CHAPTER XXXV
MINING WONDERS OF THE FAR NORTH
This faraway land of the North is the treasure cave of Jack Frost,
where gold and gravel are cemented together by perpetual ice. You know
of the thousands who rushed here years ago, and of the hundreds who
went back loaded with riches. You may have heard how the district about
Dawson, where I am writing, produced gold by the ton, the output for
ten years being worth more than one hundred million dollars.
In those days pockets worth hundreds of dollars were not uncommon.
In August, 1899, George T. Coffey took up two shovelfuls of earth
from Bonanza Creek, from which he washed sixty-three ounces of gold,
worth nearly a thousand dollars. A miner by the name of MacDonald got
ninety-four thousand dollars for the gold from a forty-foot patch of
ground. Some of the miners on Bonanza Creek were dissatisfied if the
gravel ran less than a dollar a pan. They worked the rich spots only,
and when the cream had been skimmed off the surface, gave up their
claims.
The gold diggers were followed by corporations. They brought to the
abandoned fields millions in capital and the best mining machinery.
They thawed the frozen gravel with steam and scooped up the
gold-bearing earth with dredges run by electricity. They carried rivers
in pipes over the mountains to wash down the gold-sprinkled hills.
They handled millions of tons of material, each of which yielded only a
few grains of pure gold, but altogether they produced as much wealth as
was taken out in those first prosperous years by the individual miners.
There are two methods by which the treasure that has been left is being
recovered. One is hydraulic mining and the other is dredging. Let me
give you some of the pictures of the first method, as I saw it on a
ride up the Klondike Valley this afternoon. I went with the resident
manager of the Yukon Gold Company, the Guggenheim corporation doing
most of the gold mining in the Dawson district. We flew along in a
high-powered automobile, winding in and out through great piles of
débris. We rode up Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, which have been dredged
from one end to the other. The whole way was through a mass of gravel,
rock, and earth washings. The beds of the rivers and creeks had been
ploughed in great furrows many feet deep. There were places where miles
of boulders, pebbles, and broken rock seemed to flow down the mountain
sides into the valley. Streams of water as big around as the thigh of a
man were shooting from pipes with such force that they gouged out great
chunks of icy gravel. In some places the water dropped from the top of
the mountain, washing down the earth in its fall. The whole gave me the
impression of a mighty cloudburst that had torn down the hills and let
loose avalanches of earth.
The story behind those streams of water will give you some idea of the
marvels of mining in the Far North. When the company bought what were
supposed to be the exhausted creeks of the Klondike, it found that in
order to work its concessions it must have water with sufficient force
to wash out the hills. There was no adequate supply nearer than the
Tombstone Mountains, seventy-odd miles away. The Guggenheims spent
four years and millions of dollars in bringing this river to their
gold fields. They carried it across frozen morasses, through vast
ravines, down stupendous valleys, and then lifted it over mountains and
delivered it by a great inverted siphon across the Klondike River to
the once famous diggings.
Much of the ditch had to be thawed out and cut from the perpetual ice.
In crossing the swamps new methods of road building had to be devised,
and men and machinery were assembled far in the interior of a region
once thought inaccessible to all but the most daring arctic explorers.
The supplies, mostly from the United States, had to come a thousand
miles over the ocean and then be carried five hundred miles more across
the mountains and down the Yukon to Dawson. Machinery was taken to
pieces and dragged by horses and dogs through almost impassable wilds.
The water flows through about twenty miles of flume, twelve and a
half miles of steel and stave pipes, and thirty-eight miles of ditch.
It comes out at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five cubic feet a
second, and with a pressure of four hundred pounds to the square inch.
As the stream is applied, the gold-bearing sand, gravel, and water go
tumbling down into sluice boxes filled with steel riffles bedded in
mercury. The quicksilver catches the gold, while the rock and sand go
on to the tailings below. Some of the gold sinks into the pile at the
foot of the sluicing, but this is reclaimed at the clean-up in the
fall. Something like three million cubic yards of earth are treated in
this way by the hydraulic giants each season. The average amount of
gold in the gravel is about twenty cents’ worth per yard, and of this
amount one half is said to be profit. The dividends paid by the Yukon
Gold Company have amounted to more than ten million dollars, and the
profits of a single year have been as much as one million.
As we rode up the valleys I asked the manager whether this process took
out all of the gold. He replied:
“We may lose a cent or two to the ton, but the amount is so small that
we are unable to tell just what it is. The gold content varies a good
deal. The stuff that goes through the dredges may at times yield sixty
cents a yard, and we have struck patches that ran five dollars per yard
or more.
“The old miners threw away the values that are now being saved,” he
went on. “One day I showed an old-timer a pan I had just finished
washing, and asked him how much he thought it would run. The pan
contained a few flakes of gold and quite a little fine flour gold. The
miner tilted it so that the grains ran to one side, and then took his
thumb and scraped out the flour and threw it away. He threw out just
the sort of stuff which we are trying to save, and upon which all our
calculations are based.”
The dredges, by which much of the gold is now being taken out, operate
in ground that has to be thawed before it can be worked. With the
exception of a foot or so at the surface, this whole Klondike region
is one mass of ice, mixed with boulders, pebbles, and sand that has
been frozen for thousands of years. The ice goes down no one knows how
deep. Diamond drills sunk to a depth of three hundred feet have gone
all the way through frozen earth. The mixture is covered by a thin bed
of muck, on top of which grows a layer of arctic moss. It is only when
the moss and the muck are stripped off that the hot summer sun makes
any impression on the ice below. Sprinkled through this ice, earth, and
rock lies the gold in the proportion of from thirty to sixty cents’
worth to the ton. In a wagon load of this mass there is not more pure
gold than you can pinch up between your forefinger and thumb. Yet
methods for mining it have been devised that make it worth going after.
There is a little gold not far from the surface, but most of it is at
bed-rock, which may be thirty, forty, or fifty feet down.
The earth has to be thawed out, inch by inch, and foot by foot, in such
a way that the dredges can bite into it and gulp it down at the rate of
twenty-six bites to the minute and about one third of a ton to the bite.
The dredges do their work so thoroughly that no bit of earth ever
escapes them. You can throw a red cent into the heart of a ten-acre
field that is to be upturned by these machines and be sure that the
coin will come out with the gold. A common amusement is to saw a dime
in two and then bet whether the dredges will bring up one of the
pieces. The man who bets in the negative holds one of the halves, and
the other is buried in the earth. As soon as that spot is dredged, the
missing half is almost certain to turn up.
The first miners kept wood fires burning until they had thawed their
shafts down to the gold. Other fires were then built along the bed-rock
and the earth was dugout until they had made great caverns and tunnels
thirty or forty feet under the frozen earth overhead. They used hot
stones to aid in the thawing and took out the loosened material in
wheel-barrows and raised it to the surface with buckets and a windlass
like an old-fashioned well-sweep. The earth being frozen, the miners
did not have to bother to use any timbers to support the roofs of their
tunnels.
Much of the thawing of to-day is done by steam forced into the earth
through steel tubes three fourths of an inch in diameter, and from ten
to thirty feet long. These are called “points.” Each tube has a hard
metal cap or steel head on the top, and below this an opening where the
connection with the main steam pipe is made. The bottom of the tube is
pointed so that it can be forced down into the ground. A man stands on
a tall derrick and with a twelve-pound sledge hammer drives the pipe,
inch by inch, through the earth. The steam-heated steel melts the ice
as it goes down. When the point reaches bed-rock, it is left there for
two or three days, oozing forth steam. To thaw out enough ground for
the dredges to work on, hundreds of these steam points have to be sunk.
In places the pipes are so close together that they stand out on the
back of old Mother Earth like the quills on a porcupine. They soften
the ground so that it is dangerous to walk over it until it has cooled.
A man may think it is solid under foot, when all at once he may sink to
his knees or waist in scalding hot mud.
In the creeks where the Yukon Gold Company has been operating with
steam points and dredges, the values amount to sixty or seventy cents’
worth of gold to the ton. The thawing costs about thirty cents for each
ton. When the famous Joe Boyle, organizer of the Canadian Klondike
Company, came to figure on his problem he found that the steam-point
method would cost him four cents more a ton than the value of the gold
he could recover. He concluded that if he could get rid of the great
non-conductor of muck and moss that covered the frozen earth, the sun
of a few summers would eventually thaw its way down to bed-rock.
Then came the question of how to strip off the muck at a cost that
would not eat up the profits. Boyle decided that the Klondike River
itself could be made to do the job. He dammed it in places and turned
its course this way and that. The current soon cleaned off the top
layer, and when the water was drawn off it left the gravel exposed to
the rays of the sun.
Boyle spent in the neighbourhood of a half million dollars apiece for
some of the dredges with which he scooped up the earth thawed out by
the sun. They were the largest ever built up to that time, and were
manufactured especially for his purposes. They were brought in pieces
by sea to Skagway, Alaska, carried over the coast mountains by train,
and transported down the Yukon by steamer to Dawson, where they were
put to work. They are now lifting the bed of the Klondike Valley and
turning it upside down at the rate of five hundred tons in an hour.
Buckets that hold a ton apiece pick up boulders as big as a half-bushel
basket and earth as fine as flour. They raise this stuff to the height
of a six-story house and pour it through revolving screens. The rock,
gravel, and sand are carried away, and the gold is caught in layers of
coconut matting. Every twenty-four hours the mats containing the gold
are lifted and washed. The gold and the black sand fall to the bottom
and the mats are put back again.
While I was cashing a draft at the Bank of British North America the
other day, I had concrete evidence of the wealth being won, grain by
grain, from the Klondike. I saw a shipment of gold ready to be sent
out. It had come to the bank in the form of dust and nuggets and had
been melted down into bricks. There were fifty thousand dollars’ worth
of these bricks lying on the counter, covering a space about three feet
square. They were of a light yellow colour, and some were almost white
on account of their high percentage of silver. Some were the size of a
cake of laundry soap while others were only as big as a cake of milk
chocolate. I lifted one of the larger ones. It weighed a little more
than twelve pounds and its value was two thousand dollars. Later I
saw the bank clerk put the bricks into canvas bags and label them for
export by registered mail.
Leaving the bank, I dropped in at the offices of the Northern
Commercial Company, where I watched gold dust and nuggets being made
ready for shipment to the States. The gold filled two satchels and was
worth in the neighbourhood of one hundred thousand dollars. It was put
up in little sacks the size of a five-pound salt bag. Each sack was
worth from five to ten thousand dollars.
All gold that is shipped out of Canada pays a royalty or tax to the
government, and everyone who leaves the Klondike is examined to see
that he has no gold upon him. Once a woman succeeded in smuggling out a
large quantity of nuggets and dust. She was examined by the inspectors,
but they took no account of a big flower pot containing a rose bush
that she was carrying with her. Not until she got safely away was it
learned that the soil with which the pot seemed to be filled was only
half an inch deep and that underneath were hundreds of dollars’ worth
of almost pure gold.
CHAPTER XXXVI
ROMANCES OF THE KLONDIKE
Sit beside me on the top of King Solomon’s Dome and listen to some of
the romances of the Klondike, true stories surpassing the fiction of
the “Arabian Nights.” King Solomon’s Dome is the very centre of the
Klondike gold region. It is a mountain higher than the average peaks
of the Alleghanies, rising three thousand feet above Dawson, and I
have climbed to its top in an automobile. There at the west is Bonanza
Creek, where, twenty-five years ago, gold was first found, and running
into it is Eldorado Creek, where Swift-Water Bill Gates and Charlie
Anderson, the Lucky Swede, as well as scores of others, made their
fortunes.
The man who first discovered gold in the Klondike was George Carmack, a
New Englander who had come to Alaska from North Adams, Massachusetts.
He married an Indian and he had three Indians with him when he was
prospecting on the ground just below us. As the story goes, one of the
Indians who had gone to the creek for some water saw the gold shining
there in the sand. Taking up some dirt on the edge of the creek, the
men washed it, and within a half hour had recovered twenty dollars’
worth of gold. Carmack then laid out claims for himself and his three
companions, each of which brought a fortune that all too soon slipped
through its owner’s fingers. The news of the discovery spread like
wildfire over the North. It was telegraphed to all parts of the
world and by the next year men were rushing to the Klondike from every
direction. They staked both sides of the Bonanza. They set up claims
along Eldorado, Dominion, and Hunker creeks, and dug out gold all along
the valley of the Klondike River.
[Illustration: Although the earth contains only a few cents’ worth of
gold to the ton, the use of giant dredges to scoop up the gravel from
the beds of the Klondike and Yukon rivers enables the mining companies
to operate at a profit.]
[Illustration: With all the force of a shell from a big gun, a giant
stream of water is played against the hillside, washing the earth
into sluice boxes, where a layer of mercury catches even the most
infinitesimal particles of gold.]
Charlie Anderson’s claim was No. 29 Eldorado and it cost him six
hundred dollars. He had saved this money from his wages as a
pick-and-shovel miner at Forty Mile, and bought the mine one night when
he was too drunk to know what he was doing. When he awoke the next day
he wept bitter tears and asked the men who thought they had swindled
him to take back the claim and give him his money. They refused, and so
Anderson walked eighty miles to the Klondike and started work. He found
only a hole in the ground, but he thawed and dug eighteen feet deeper
and came upon a fortune. When he made the first strike the men who had
sold him the claim were near by and asked with a sneer what he had
found. He replied: “Ay tank Ay got some gold here,” and showed them his
pan. There were fourteen hundred dollars’ worth of gold nuggets in it,
and the claim eventually yielded between one and two million dollars.
But, like other Klondikers, Anderson ran through his money as fast
as it came. He was cheated by every one, and ended as a day labourer
somewhere in the States.
In coming down the Yukon to Dawson the captain of the steamer told me
many stories about Charlie Anderson, whom he had known well. Said he:
“Anderson had been doing railroad work in the States, but was
discharged, and that drove him to Alaska. When he struck it rich he
took out more than two hundred thousand dollars the first year, and
during the next four years his claim yielded him almost two million
dollars.”
“What did he do with the money?” I asked.
“He spent it as fast as he got it. He kept a gang of gamblers and dance
hall girls about him and gave away thousands. When he was at the height
of his fortune and had an income of a half million a year, he fell
in love and was married. He took his wife to San Francisco, where he
bought her a house and gave her all the money she could spend besides.
When he was about at the end of his fortune he told me she had cost him
a quarter of a million. He then pulled out of his pocket a garter with
a clasp set with a diamond as big as the end of your thumb, and said:
“‘And this is all I have to show for it. I am almost broke now, but I
will go back and find some more.’
“Anderson’s claim was then played out,” the captain continued. “He
tried to find others, but failed. In his first trips with me he
travelled in state, buying all the liquor and cigars that the ship had
and standing treat to the passengers. On his last trip he booked in
the steerage. He was dead broke. Shortly after we started I saw him,
dressed in rough clothes, sitting at the prow of the boat. I went up to
him and said:
“‘Well, Charlie, it is different with you from what it used to be.’
“He looked up and his eyes filled with tears.
“‘Yes,’ said he,’ I am travelling steerage, for I have not enough money
to pay first class.’
“I was so sorry for him that I put him in one of the first cabins and
took him home without charge.”
Swift-Water Bill Gates’ story was a good deal like Anderson’s. He was a
Portuguese, who got his nickname from his claim that he swam down the
rapids of the Yukon on his way to the gold fields. He began as a waiter
in an eating house. One day while serving two miners he heard one tell
the other of the gold discovery in the Klondike. He left their order
unfilled, got a dog team, and rushed to Dawson. He was in at the first
and picked out a number of claims, including that on Eldorado, which
made him a fortune. He was successful for years, but was so dissipated
that he ran through his millions, and when he left with the stampede
to Fairbanks, he had only fifty cents in his pockets. There he made a
second great strike, but he lost that fortune as well.
Swift-Water once cornered the egg market in Dawson, and all for the
love of a lady. He was a gallant suitor, and at this time he was
courting Miss Gussie Lamore, a popular and beautiful young woman who
had been nicknamed “The Little Klondike Nugget.” But the course of true
love did not run smooth, and for a time it seemed as though Bill’s cake
were all dough. Then he remembered that Gussie doted on eggs, and he
prepared to corner the supply. There were just eight thousand eggs in
the town, and they were selling at a dollar apiece. Bill slipped about
from store to store and bought every one of them. He then remarked that
if Gussie wanted more eggs she would have to eat out of his hand, or if
she stuck to his rival “she wouldn’t eat no eggs.” Gussie succumbed,
and so Cupid won by an egg.
In another claim on Eldorado a young Y. M. C. A. secretary struck it
rich. This man had started mining on Forty Mile Creek, but when gold
was discovered near Dawson he left his young wife there and came on
with the crowd. The first claim he selected was comparatively small
and had no timber upon it. As he needed logs to build a cabin, he
traded his claim for another farther down the creek where the valley
was wider and timber was plentiful. He built a cabin, sent for his
wife, and they started to work. When he had thawed the earth to some
distance below the surface he laboured down in the pit and his wife
wound the windlass that drew up the buckets of rocks. Time and again,
in despair, they talked of selling out and going back home. But they
held on until they came to bed-rock, where the gold was so rich that
their claim paid them about two million dollars. Unlike Anderson and
Gates, this man invested his money in real estate in Seattle.
All sorts of characters came to the Klondike in the early days. With
such types as the Lucky Swede, Swift-Water Bill, and Frank Slavin, the
prize fighter, came business and professional men from all parts of
the United States. Joaquin Miller came to mine gold and write poetry
and newspaper articles. Rex Beach was here, and so was Jack London.
Jack London was at one time a partner of Swift-Water Bill, and it is
said that the two owned a claim that eventually produced more than one
million dollars in gold. Jack London began the work on the property.
He made a fire and thawed the muck on the top of the gravel. He left
his tools in the soft mud over night. Before morning the thermometer
dropped to sixty degrees below zero, and when he again started to work
he found he would have to thaw out his tools, but that if he did so
their handles would be burned. He left in disgust, and Swift-Water Bill
got all the gold. Jack London’s wealth came from the literary material
he carried away as the result of his experiences. The same may be said
of Rex Beach, who has written so many good stories of Alaskan life, and
of Robert Service, whose shabby cabin still stands near the Dome.
[Illustration: To-day most of the Klondike gold is recovered by
machinery in large-scale workings, but now and then one sees a miner
washing the gravel by hand in a contrivance like this.]
[Illustration: Some of the miners, instead of moving on to new scenes
of action when the gold began to give out, have stayed on with their
families, working a few acres of land and occasionally panning out a
little gold.]
[Illustration: Much of the Yukon is unexplored, and bridges and ferries
are few, so the hunter and the prospector must ford the rushing streams
and make their own trails through the country.]
Indeed, many books might be made about the ups and downs of the
Klondike in the height of the gold fever. Men came here beggars and
went away millionaires, and millionaires lost fortunes and became
tramps. Gold was shipped out by the ton, and in the city of Dawson
it was spent by the pound. At the start, the town was what in slang
phrase is known as “wide open.” The scores of gambling houses,
saloons, and dance halls all made money. In one dance hall twelve
women were employed at $50 a week, besides the twenty-five per cent.
commission they received on the drinks and cigars sold through their
blandishments. One girl stated that her bar commission for the first
week amounted to $750. Another saloon had six beauties to dance at $150
a week, and in many of the halls the women were paid a dollar for a
dance of five minutes.
I have before me a copy of a bill of fare of one of the old
restaurants. A bowl of soup cost $1 and a bowl of mush and milk $1.25.
A dish of canned tomatoes cost $2, a slice of pie 75 cents, and a
sandwich with coffee, $1.25. Beans, coffee, and bread were $2, a plain
steak was $3.50, and a porterhouse was $5.
A leading restaurant, which had a seating capacity of thirty-two,
employed three cooks, one of whom received $100 a week, and the others
$1 an hour. The waitresses got $100 a month. The restaurant occupied a
tent twenty by forty feet, which rented for $900 a month. Carpenters
were drawing $15 a day, and common labourers $10. Skilled woodworkers
got $17 a day, and journeymen tailors $1.50 an hour. The ordinary
charge for a sack suit was $125. Barbers made from $15 to $40 a day,
each receiving sixty-five per cent. of the receipts of his chair. Four
barber shops were in operation, and their prices were $1 a shave, $1.50
for a hair cut, and $2.50 for a bath.
During that winter newspapers brought in over the trail sold for $2
apiece. A weekly newspaper was started, known as the Yukon _Midnight
Sun_, which cost $15 a year, and a little later the Klondike _Nugget_
was issued weekly at 50 cents a copy.
Banks were soon established and did a big business in buying gold dust
and putting their notes into circulation. The first eight days after it
opened its doors, the Canadian Bank of Commerce bought one and one half
million dollars’ worth of gold dust. Some years ago the old building
in which that bank had its offices was burned, and one of the clerks
asked permission to work over the ground as a gold claim. He wanted to
recover the waste from the assay offices and also the dust that had
fallen on the floor from time to time in the purchase of gold. His
request was granted and his idea proved worth thousands of dollars.
CHAPTER XXXVII
A DREDGE KING OF THE KLONDIKE
Since I have come to western Canada I have acquired a contempt for
Aladdin. At every step here I am meeting common, everyday men who are
enslaving genii a million times mightier than those of the Arabian
Nights. They rub their magic lamps and mechanical wonders spring up
almost in a night. They give an order and change the course of a river.
They lift a hand and valleys are turned upside down. Of all these
conquerors of Nature in the Klondike none has come up to Joseph W.
Boyle, the famous dredge king, who was once the most striking figure in
this land of gold.
Joe Boyle started at the bottom and won great wealth and a dominant
position. In manner and thought he was as plain as a pipe stem. A giant
of a man, over six feet in his stockings, he was straight and well
formed. He had a big head, a broad, high forehead, and eyes like blue
steel. Yet he was a good companion and hail-fellow-well-met with those
he liked. He was a friend to his employees and addressed them by their
first names. They referred to him always as “Joe Boyle” or “J. W. B.,”
but they understood that he was the boss and that everything must be
done just as he said.
Boyle began his fight with life as a boy and kept it up until he died
after the World War. His father, who was a farmer living at Woodstock,
in eastern Canada, had planned that Joe should become a lawyer or a
preacher and with that end in mind had sent him to college. This was
too tame for “J. W. B.” He left school and shipped before the mast as a
sailor. Once, in going from the Island of St. Helena around the Cape of
Good Hope, his ship sprang a leak. Boyle took charge of the crew at the
pumps and kept them at work for four thousand miles until they sailed
into Bombay. When he had risen to the position of quartermaster of a
British vessel he gave up the sea and came home.
A little later he struck out for the West, where he became trainer and
manager for Frank Slavin, the bare-knuckle champion prize fighter. The
two staked their all on Slavin’s success in a big fight, which was
lost. They had exactly fifty cents between them when they decided to
go up to the new gold mines of the Yukon. They “mushed” it from Dyea
over the mountains, and got to the Klondike shortly after gold was
discovered. For a time they worked together, and then Boyle engaged in
placer mining with Swift-Water Bill Gates.
At one time he and five or six companions ran out of supplies. They
had started for the “outside” through Chilkoot Pass, where a blizzard
caught them. Swift-Water was overcome, and Boyle carried him back into
camp on his shoulders. After that the party came to a stream that only
Boyle had the strength to cross. He took over the others one at a time
and they went on their way. When at last they reached San Francisco
they were given a big banquet and on the menu cards was printed the
story of what Boyle had done.
At this time Boyle was not doing as well as he had hoped at his mining.
He looked over the ground of the Klondike Valley and conceived the
idea that there was a fortune to be made in the earth the miners had
left. Boyle stood on a little hill above the Klondike River, and
determined to lease all the land within sight. This was when the mining
in the creeks was at its height and the valley was so lean it was
thought worthless.
Joe Boyle also staked a timber claim ten miles in length and extending
through and beyond the area of his mining claim. Everyone laughed at
his mining proposition, but he had to fight for his timber. As soon
as news of his application got out his competitors at Dawson saw
the authorities and had them require him to stake out the whole ten
miles of his claim. This stipulation was made at three o’clock on the
afternoon before the last day in which the title could be perfected.
Boyle started on foot that afternoon and tramped all night, wading
through swamps, blazing trees, and driving stakes to define limits. The
work was exhausting, but he kept on until he thought he had marked out
not less than fifteen miles. He got back to Dawson at nine o’clock the
next morning, only to find a number of men ready to jump his claim if
it had not been staked. When the area was measured according to law,
it was found that his stakes fell short only twenty feet of the ten
miles allotted. Boyle put in saw-mills and made money out of his lumber
and wood. He got from this same claim the timbers needed in his gold
dredging.
His lumber profits gave Boyle the money he needed to approach
capitalists about financing his mining concessions. He first formed an
alliance with the Rothschilds, by which he was to have one third and
they two thirds of the stock. The understanding was that they were to
furnish the money, amounting to some millions, and that Boyle was to
manage the property and superintend its development.
Then the Rothschilds tried to squeeze out “J. W. B.” They questioned
his title and planned a reorganization. Boyle carried the matter to
Ottawa; he fought them in the courts, where he got a judgment in his
favour for more than six hundred thousand dollars. The Rothschilds then
offered him a million dollars for his share of the stock. He refused
and in return made them an offer of four hundred thousand dollars for
the two thirds they held. At first they laughed, but they finally
reconsidered and accepted his proposition. Boyle then formed another
corporation, the Canadian Klondike Mining Company, by which name the
property is known to this day.
This company owns leases from the government of Canada that give it
the right to work the lower valley of the Klondike up to the crest
of the mountains on both sides of the river. The greater part of its
holdings lie in the wide bed between the hills through which runs the
swift-flowing river. At a distance it looks like farm land and when
the concessions were granted much of it was covered with gardens. It
had been cleared of woods by the first miners, who, it was generally
believed, had stripped the soil of its gold.
Joe Boyle thought otherwise. He reasoned, “If so much gold has come
from the valley there must be quantities of gold dust and grains in
the bed-rock underneath.” Working upon that supposition, he became a
rich man by handling gold-bearing earth carrying values of only about
twenty-six cents to the ton.
And this brings me to another of the wonders of engineering in the Far
North. It is a device invented by Boyle for keeping the hydro-electric
plant running throughout the winter, notwithstanding the fact that the
temperature at times falls to seventy degrees below zero. That is so
cold that if you should attempt to run a sprayer such as is used in an
orchard the water would turn to ice before it fell to the ground. At
such times some of the streams have seven feet of ice over them and
many are solid. Nevertheless, Boyle turned a branch of the Klondike
River into a ditch six miles long and dropped it down upon turbines
with a fall which he said would generate electricity to the amount of
ten thousand horse-power a day all the year through.
Joe Boyle knew that the waters of the Yukon and the Klondike flow
under the ice all winter long and that there is an air space between
the water and the ice overhead. He concluded that, on the principle
of the double walls of an ice house or a thermos bottle, it was this
dead air space that kept the running water from freezing. The only
thing necessary was to make Nature furnish the thermos bottle. This
Boyle did. He filled his ditch to the top and allowed a sheet of ice
to freeze a foot or so thick upon it. He then lowered the level of the
water two feet, leaving a running stream four feet deep, with an air
space above. He next installed electric heaters underneath to help keep
the water from freezing. In this way he made the water warm itself, for
the stream thus kept moving generated the electricity for the heaters,
each of which required current equal to one hundred horse-power.
I went out yesterday in an automobile to North Fork, thirty miles up
the Klondike Valley, to see this electric plant. The ditch is thirty
feet wide, about six feet in depth, and six miles long. The water drops
down through great pipes, with a fall of two hundred and twenty feet
on the turbines. I asked one of the men how Mr. Boyle got the idea of
electrically heating the water and was told it came to him one morning
at breakfast. The family had toast and eggs, and were browning the
bread on the electric toaster. As he looked at it, Boyle thought that
he might employ the same principle in keeping the water from freezing.
His men made out of telephone wire a gigantic toaster somewhat like a
woven-wire bed spring. This was properly insulated, dropped into the
ditch, and connected with the electric plant.
In 1914 Boyle was forty-seven years old and in the prime of his vigour.
Moreover, he had just won a million dollars in a suit against the
Guggenheims and so had plenty of cash for any adventure. He organized
a machine gun battery of fifty gunners, picked men of the Yukon, and
offered them to the Allied armies. To his great distress, his battery
was broken up and scattered through the forces. He went to London and
from there was sent into Russia to help in keeping transportation open.
On one occasion he reported to the chairman of the Soldiers’ Committee,
who was inclined to be nasty.
“Were you sent here because you were the best man they could find on
the Western Front?” he demanded of Boyle.
“Possibly so,” was the reply. “And now, you answer me this. Are you the
best man on your committee?”
“I am,” answered the chairman, expanding his chest.
“Very well, I will meet you man to man,” said Boyle, as he unbuttoned
his coat and doubled his fists. He had no more trouble with that
chairman.
[Illustration: Starting with a capital of fifty cents, Joe Boyle made
a fortune by gleaning gold from abandoned workings. Then he gave up
mining to go to war and became almost as famous in Eastern Europe as in
the Klondike.]
[Illustration: To get the water for washing down the gold-bearing
gravel of the Klondike hills, millions of dollars were spent in
building ditches, flumes, and pipes from the Tombstone Mountains,
seventy miles away.]
When Russia gave up, Colonel Boyle went over into Rumania, where he
became a national hero. He undertook all sorts of dangerous and
important missions. For instance, when the Bolsheviki were beginning
to get the upper hand, he offered to go to Moscow to bring back the
national treasure of Rumania, which had been sent there for safe
keeping. He got into Moscow, loaded millions of dollars’ worth of bank
notes and securities on a special train, and started back. On the
way the engineer of the train deserted, leaving his boilers without
water or fuel. Boyle and his helpers carried water in buckets from the
nearest station and cut wood for the fire. Though he had never driven a
locomotive before, Boyle climbed into the cab and got the train and its
treasure across the border. Later he turned the Russian Black Sea fleet
pro-Ally, arranged peace terms between Rumania and the Bolsheviki, and
saved sixty Rumanian deputies from banishment to Sebastopol.
After the Armistice he was commissioned to superintend the distribution
of the food and supplies bought for the country with the Canadian
credit of twenty-five million dollars. Then he became interested, with
the Royal Dutch Shell Transport Company, in oil concessions in Caucasia.
In the course of his many adventures in Rumania, Colonel Boyle flew
so high and so fast in airplanes that he suffered a sort of paralytic
stroke. During his illness he was attended for two months by Queen
Marie and her daughter, who did everything they could to show their
appreciation of his service to their country. He finally recovered, but
when in England on his way back to Canada, he died of heart failure.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE
Everyone has heard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They
constitute one of the most remarkable military forces in existence,
with an amazing record for the capture and punishment of criminals in
the frontier lands of the Dominion. I have met with the Mounted Police
in all parts of Canada, have visited the headquarters in Ottawa and the
training station at Regina, and have talked here at Dawson with the
inspector in charge of the Yukon division. I find the service a gold
mine of stories, and fully deserving its reputation for maintaining law
and order on the fringes of civilization.
Our own “wild and woolly West” has disappeared, but Canada still has
vast areas of undeveloped country into which white men are pushing
their way under conditions similar to those in the United States a
generation or two ago. But where our frontier was notorious for its
lawlessness, that of the Dominion is equally noted for its few crimes.
In the Canadian Northwest a “bad man” cannot long escape the strong arm
of the law, and in nine cases out of ten he meets with punishment both
swift and sure.
From the wheat lands adjoining our border to the gold rivers of the
Yukon, from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, the settler, the
prospector, or the trader can lie down to sleep at night with little
fear for his safety. That this is so is chiefly due to this police
force.
Detachments of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are now located all
over Canada. They are to be found in the thickly populated centres as
well as in the Far North. But it was as a frontier police that the
organization was first created, and it was in the Northwest Territories
that its reputation was made. It has its stations about Hudson Bay,
along the Peace River, on the banks of the Mackenzie, and on the shores
of the Arctic Ocean. The latest posts established are those on the
north coast of Baffin Island, opposite Greenland, and on Ellesmere
Island, less than one thousand miles from the North Pole.
The duties of the Mounted Police are widely varied. They are especially
charged with the enforcement of federal statutes, and are wholly
responsible for law and order in the Northwest Territory, the Yukon,
the national parks, and the Indian reservations. Elsewhere the
organization coöperates with provincial authorities and the federal
departments. It looks after such matters as violations of the customs,
of excise regulations, the circulation of radical or revolutionary
propaganda, the improper storing of explosives, and the debauching of
the Indians. Special patrols are sometimes sent out to strengthen the
hands of the Indian Department when unrest is reported among their
charges. Some are detailed to see that the betting at the race tracks
in the various provinces does not infringe upon the laws, and others to
escort trainloads of harvest workers to their destinations and prevent
disorders on the way. Patrols go for hundreds of miles by dog sled into
the Far North to keep order and investigate crimes among the Eskimos.
The actual discharge of these duties leads to a variety of activities.
The Mounted Police patrol the United States border to guard against
smuggling of liquor, Chinese, and narcotics. They ride about the newly
colonized districts, visiting the homes of the settlers and watching
for cattle thieves. Any complaint of disorder or law breaking is
promptly investigated, and a member of the force may spend months
in the rôle of detective, seeking evidence or making a search for a
suspected man.
The Mounted Police have cut many of the trails of the Far North. When
the big gold strikes were made in the Klondike, they built the first
road through the wilds of the Yukon, and they have opened up parts of
the Canadian Rockies to prospectors. Whenever a new gold district is
discovered, or an oil find is reported, the Mounted Police are among
the first on the scene, and every one knows that the law is at hand.
That is why the Klondike was peaceable during gold rush days, while in
Alaska, across the international boundary, notorious “bad men,” such as
“Soapy Smith” and his gang, held almost undisputed sway for a time.
The Mounted Police sometimes erect shelters along the new trails, in
which they place stores of food for use of prospectors in an emergency.
They often bring relief to those in the wilds rendered helpless through
injury, disease, or insanity. They settle on the spot minor disputes,
especially among the Indians and Eskimos, sometimes perform marriages,
and, as the Dawson inspector said to me to-day, do about everything any
occasion may require except grant divorces. In extreme cases, a member
of the force may arrest his man, try his case, sentence him to death,
and, finally, act as clergyman, executioner, and coroner. It is the
almost inviolate rule of the organization, however, that a prisoner
must be brought in alive and given his chance at a fair trial.
[Illustration: “Bring in your man” is the law, stronger than any
legislative enactment, of the Mounted Police. The reputation
established by this unique force for never giving up is one of the
reasons for its astonishing success.]
[Illustration: With the increase of crime, especially murder, among
the Eskimos of the Far North, the Mounted Police now have established
several stations in the Arctic, including one on Ellesmere Island, in
the Polar Sea.]
All these activities are carried on by a body of only a little more
than a thousand men, scattered from the Maritime Provinces to the
Alaska boundary. Here in the Yukon there are but fifty-one men, for
whom horses and dogs furnish a part of the transportation.
To get into the service a man must have a good character, a sound body,
and some education. Most of the men speak both French and English.
Recruits must be between the ages of twenty-two and forty, unmarried,
and expert horsemen. The term of enlistment is three years, with
reënlistments permitted. Many of the present force have been long in
the service. In their training at Regina, much attention is paid to
shooting with both rifle and pistol, and in the latter the Mounted
Police now hold the championship of all Canada. Many of them are young
Englishmen who have failed to make their fortunes and some are younger
sons of the nobility. In the old days a son of Charles Dickens, the
novelist, served beside a former circus clown and the brother of a
baronet.
The inspector of this body at Dawson is the military ruler of a region
bigger than Germany. It begins at the south, within thirty miles of the
Pacific Ocean, and extends northward to Herschel Island, near where the
Mackenzie River flows into the Arctic. It is about a thousand miles
long and several hundred miles wide. The inspector tells me that his
force is scattered all over this territory, from White Horse, at the
end of the White Pass Railway, to Rampart House, on the Arctic Circle.
When I asked him about the work of his force, he said:
“Each of our constables has one or two men with him, and sometimes an
Indian or so. Together they patrol the whole country. They make long
trips to the mines, and report what is going on among the prospectors.
In out-of-the-way places they keep order among the Indians and the
Eskimos. They also look after the poor and the insane. Recently
we heard that a dangerous lunatic was at large over in the Donjek
District. Our patrol went after him and brought him several hundred
miles through the country to White Horse, whence he was later sent
to an asylum. Last year our men penetrated to regions never visited
before; they frequently make trips of hundreds of miles by dog sled.”
“But how can you keep track of the people in such a large territory?”
I asked. “Your whole land is a wilderness, and for more than half the
year it is all snow and ice.”
“Each hotel and road house is required to keep a daily record of all
who stop there,” he replied, “and I may say that we know about where
every man in the territory sleeps every night. We are informed of all
the passengers who start up or down river, and get reports from every
telegraph station they pass on the trip. When a steamer leaves White
Horse for Dawson the purser hands in the names of his passengers and
they are telegraphed here. If any one gets off on the way his name is
wired to us, and we check up the list when the boat comes in. If three
men set off in a canoe, the report on that canoe as it passes the next
telegraph station will show us if one of them is missing. The patrols
also send in reports of the names and business of all newcomers in
their districts.”
“Give me some idea of the amount of crime committed in your territory.”
“Our record is fairly good,” replied the inspector of the Mounted
Police. “Last year we investigated forty-two cases, only eight of
which were under the criminal code. Out of this total of forty-two, we
secured thirty-seven convictions. Remember that this is for an area as
big as France, and for a population made up largely of frontiersmen,
miners, Indians, and Eskimos. Most of the time we have so few bad
characters in jail here that it is difficult to keep our barracks in
order and the lawn properly mowed. Just now we have two women serving
terms for picking the pockets of men who were drunk. They work in the
jail laundry, so we are sure of help in our washing for the rest of the
year.
“We have had but few murders in our territory,” the inspector
continued. “The average was less than one a year for the first twenty
years after the big rush to the Klondike, and in every case, without
exception, the guilty were caught and executed. There are some
interesting stories connected with crimes in this part of the world.
Take, for instance, one that occurred in Alaska. The murdered man was a
miner who had been killed by an Indian at the close of the season when
the miners were about to leave for the winter. They had not time to
follow the Indian, but they went to the chief of his tribe and told him
that he must catch the murderer and have him ready for them when they
returned in the spring. When the spring came they went to the chief and
demanded the man. He replied:
“‘Me got him all right. You come see.’ He thereupon took them to the
back of the camp and showed them a dead Indian frozen in a large block
of ice. As they looked, the chief continued:
“‘We got him last fall. We know you kill him in spring, so we shoot him
in fall. What use feed him all winter?’
“We had a case of a miner who inveigled two young men with money to
go with him in a canoe two hundred miles down the Yukon. From there
they were to make their way inland to a gold prospect the miner had
located. As they camped, the miner had one of the men build a fire,
while he took the other off to hunt game. Within a short time the man
at the camp heard a shot and later the miner came in and said they had
killed a bear about a mile away and wanted the man at the camp to go
with him to bring in the meat. The two started off together, the miner
walking behind. The stranger began to think that all was not right. He
turned his head quickly and found that his companion had raised his
rifle and was drawing a bead on him. He grappled with him and succeeded
in getting the gun. He ran away and finally got to Dawson, where he
notified us. We watched the river and within a few days the old miner
came down in a boat. Our men arrested him and then went back to the
camp and found the body of the man who started out to hunt bear. The
murderer was tried in a month and hanged two months later.”
“Do you ever have any lynchings?” I asked.
“I do not believe there has ever been a lynching in all Canada,” said
the inspector. “Certainly I never have heard of one in the Yukon.
Neither do we have hold-ups such as are not uncommon, I am told, in the
United States.”
The inspector’s reference to hold-ups reminded me of a story of a
highwayman I heard at the Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa. A
road agent held up a man and a woman who were riding through the
hills. He covered them with his revolver and made the man dismount so
he could go through his pockets. The woman was sitting on her horse,
congratulating herself upon her escape, when the robber stepped up to
her, saying, “Beg pardon. Just a moment, madam.” He thereupon gently
raised her skirt to her knees, thrust his hand into her stocking, and
took out her money. He seemed to know just where it was, and there was
no waste effort.
“One of the classics of our service”--it is the inspector who is
speaking once more--“is the King-Hayward case. Edward Hayward, a young
Englishman, was killed in the wilds around Lesser Slave Lake. He had
gone up there from Edmonton to hunt with Charles King, an American
from Salt Lake City. Some weeks later an Indian notified one of our
sergeants that two men had come into the country and one of them had
disappeared. The officer got on the trail, went to the last camp fire,
where the Indian reported seeing both men, and sifted the ashes. He
found three hard lumps of flesh and a bit of skull bone. Near the camp
fire was a little pond. In this Indian women were set to work to fish
up with their toes any hard substance they might find in the ooze. They
brought up a stick-pin of unusual design and a pocketbook. The pond was
drained and on the bottom was a shoe with a broken needle sticking in
it. The sergeant then examined the ashes of the fire with a microscope,
which revealed the eye of the broken needle.
“King was tracked down and arrested, and Hayward’s brother was brought
on from England to identify the trinkets of the murdered man. It took
the sergeant eleven months to complete his case, and he had to bring
forty Indian and half-breed witnesses from Lesser Slave Lake to
Edmonton to testify at the trial. But King was finally convicted and
hanged. All this cost the Canadian government more than thirty thousand
dollars, yet it was not considered a waste of money.”
I inquired of the inspector the cause of most of the crime in his
division. He replied:
“One of our troubles is with smuggled liquor. We try especially to
keep it from the Indians, but nevertheless it gets in. In one instance
bottles of whisky were shipped to the Yukon inside the carcasses of
dressed hogs. In another a woman contrived a rubber sleeve, which she
filled with whisky. All one had to do for a drink was to give her arm a
hard squeeze.”
I asked how it was that the Mounted Police are so feared by bad
characters that this whole territory can be controlled by a handful of
them. The officer replied:
“Every man in frontier Canada knows that if he is wanted by the Mounted
Police, they are sure to get him. A fugitive from justice could very
easily kill one of our men sent after him, but he realizes that if he
does so, another will follow, and as many more as are necessary until
he is brought in. I have seen constables arrest men of twice their
weight and strength, and have had one or two men round up a mob and
bring them all to jail. This is true not only of our own bad men, but
also of those who come across from Alaska. They may be dangerous on the
other side of the border, but they are always gentle enough when they
get here.
“The big thing that helps us,” concluded the head of the police, “is
that the government supports us up to the limit. For example, it cost
us two hundred thousand dollars to convict in one famous murder case,
but it was done and the guilty man hanged. Ottawa always tells us that
it is prepared to spend any amount of money rather than have a murderer
go unpunished. It is that policy that enables us to keep order here.”
THE END
SEEING THE WORLD WITH FRANK G. CARPENTER
Doubleday, Page & Company, in response to the demand from Carpenter
readers, are now publishing the complete story of CARPENTER’S WORLD
TRAVELS, of which this book is the tenth in the series. Those now
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Morocco, Algeria,
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4. “_The Tail of the Hemisphere_”
Chile and Argentina
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Egypt, the Sudan,
and Kenya Colony
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Java, Sumatra,
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France, Belgium,
Holland, Denmark,
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9. “_Australia, New Zealand, and Some Islands of the South Seas_”
Australia, New Zealand,
New Guinea, the Samoas,
the Fijis, and the Tongas
10. “_Canada_”
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INDEX
Abitibi, large production of news-print at, 92.
Agriculture, in Newfoundland, 11;
in Quebec, 47, 48;
possibilities of Manitoba, 154.
Air plant, a polar orchid along the Yukon Trail, 236.
Airplanes, fail in attempt to reach Fort Norman, 205.
Alberta, coal deposits estimated to be one seventh of the world’s
total, 200;
extent of pure bred cattle and dairy industries, 208.
Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, pioneer in Alberta
irrigationwork, 207.
Alfalfa, largely produced in southwestern Saskatchewan, 176.
American “branch plants” in Canada, 104.
American capital and investments in Canada, 105.
American owned pulp-mills and timber tracts in Canada, 96.
Americans, number of, in Canada, 2, 193.
Anderson, Charlie, his lucky strike in the Klondike, 275.
Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia’s apple-growing district, 34.
Anyox, British Columbia, copper mines at, 223.
Apples, largely grown in Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, 34;
in the Okanagan Valley, 223.
Asbestos, most of world’s supply produced in Thetford district,
Quebec, 47.
Astrophysical Observatory at Victoria, British Columbia, 225.
“Athabaska Trail,” poem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 205.
Automobiles, American, in Canada, 104.
Banff, finest mountain resort of Canada, 215.
Bank of Montreal, one of the world’s great banks, 73.
Banks and the banking system of Canada, 69, _et seq._
Banting, Dr. F. G., discoverer of Insulin, 99.
Barley, production in the Winnipeg district, 149;
large crops at Edmonton, 200;
in Peace River Valley, 202.
Baseball, popular in Nova Scotia, 35;
in Toronto, 101.
Bassano, great irrigation dam at, 206.
Battleford, Saskatchewan, noted for its fur trade and lumber mills,
179.
Beach, Rex, in the Klondike, 278.
Bears, abundant in the Yukon, 234.
Beatty, E. W., first Canadian-born president of the Canadian Pacific,
165.
Beaver, the first fur exported by the Hudson’s Bay Company, 169;
abundant in the Yukon, 234.
Beck, Sir Adam, at the head of Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, 110.
Bell Island, visit to the Wabana iron mines on, 26.
Belle Isle, Strait of, 4.
Big game of the Yukon region, 253.
Black, George, demonstrates to Ottawa Parliament possibility of
winter automobile travel in the Yukon, 239.
Bonsecours Market, at Montreal, 66.
Boyle, Joseph W., successful gold-dredging operations in the Yukon,
271;
the story of his career, 281.
Branch plants, American, in Canada, 104.
Bras d’Or Lake, an inland sea, 39.
Bright “Dickie,” a character of old-time Calgary, 211.
British American Nickel Company, operators of mines at Sudbury, 130.
British Columbia, timber resources of, 90;
production of silver in, 124;
agricultural and mineral resources, 220 _et seq._
Buffalo, last wild herd reported to be near Fort Vermilion, 202;
largest herd in America at Wainwright Park, Alberta, 217.
Cabbage, as raised at Dawson, Yukon, 265.
Cabot, Sebastian, reported that fish obstructed navigation on
Newfoundland coast, 13.
Cabot Tower, commemorating discovery of Newfoundland, 6.
Calgary, Alberta, huge irrigation works of the Canadian Pacific
Railway at, 206, 207;
the city and its industries, 209.
Camping and hunting in Ontario province, 139.
Canadian Bank of Commerce, established in the Klondike, 280.
Canadian Banking Act, provisions of, 72.
Canadian Banking Association, of semi-official status, 73.
Canadian Klondike Mining Company, established by Joe Boyle, 284.
Canadian National Railways, eastern terminus at Halifax, 31;
extent of, 158;
work abroad to induce immigration, 190;
transcontinental route from Prince Rupert to Halifax, 229.
Canadian Northern Railway, growth of, 162.
Canadian Pacific Railway, eastern terminus at St. John, N. B., 41;
extent of its railroad and steamship service, 158, 160;
work abroad to induce immigration, 190;
begins huge irrigation project near Calgary, 206, 207;
leads in exploiting Canada’s scenic wonders, 218.
Canadian relations with the United States, 85.
Canso, Strait of, railroad trains ferried across, 39.
Cantilever bridge, world’s longest at Quebec, 45.
Cape Breton Island, port of province of Nova Scotia, 38.
Cape Race, chief signal station of the North Atlantic, 3.
Cape Spear, most easterly point of North America, 6.
“Card money,” circulation of, 74.
Caribou, abundant in Newfoundland, 11;
in northern Ontario, 140;
in the Yukon, 234, 253;
meat sold at butcher shops in Dawson, 253.
Carmack, George, discoverer of gold in the Klondike, 274.
Carrots, a successful crop at Dawson, Yukon, 261.
Cartier, Jacques, early explorations of, 45.
Catholicism, Quebec the American capital of French, 57.
Cattalo, cross between buffalo and cattle, raised in large numbers at
Wainwright Park, 218.
Cattle, pure bred, in Alberta, 208;
transportation of, on the Yukon River, 242.
Cattle ranches being supplanted by farms in Alberta, 206.
Château Laurier, government railroad hotel at Ottawa, 81.
Chaudière Falls, source of power for Ottawa manufactures, 80.
Chicken Billy and his ten-thousand-dollar potato patch, 259.
Chinese labourers, not admitted to Canada, 190.
Chippewa, immense hydro-electric development at, 113.
Chisana, abandoned town on the Yukon River, 244.
“Circle tour,” the Canadian Rockies, Yellowstone Park, and Grand
Canyon motor route, 215.
Clay Belt, the Great, agricultural possibilities in, 139.
Clergue steel plant, at Sault Ste. Marie, 135.
Climate, at Edmonton, 200;
at Prince Rupert, British Columbia, 228;
at Dawson, Yukon, 256.
Coaker, Sir William, organizer of Newfoundland Fishermen’s Protective
Union, 21.
Coal, great importance of the Sydney mines, 39;
amount saved by development of Canada’s water-power, 108;
Alberta’s deposits, the greatest in the Dominion, 200;
immense deposits, near Crow’s Nest Pass, 221.
Cobalt, Ontario, world’s richest silver deposits at, 119.
Cobalt, immense production of the mineral at Cobalt, Ontario, 125.
Cochrane, “Billy,” breeder of “wild” cattle at Calgary, 210.
Cochrane, Senator, owner of large cattle ranch in Alberta, 207.
Cod fisheries, of Newfoundland, 13;
of Nova Scotia, 36.
Coffee, George T., lucky miner in the Yukon, 266.
Coke ovens, at the coal deposits near Crow’s Nest Pass, 221.
Columbia River, source of, in the Kootenays, 220.
Conservation of forests in Canada, 89.
Copper, rich deposits in Newfoundland, 12;
in the Kootenay country, 221, 222.
Copper sulphate, by-product of Sudbury mines, 130.
Cornwallis, Lord, city of Halifax, founded by, 32.
“Country banks” of coal, the settler’s recourse, 201.
Creighton Nickel Mine, largest producer in the world, 127.
“Cremation of Sam McGee,” poem by Robert Service, 257.
Crow’s Nest Pass, railway line through, 217, 220;
immense coal deposits near, 221.
Cucumbers, a hot-house crop, at Dawson, Yukon, 261.
Curling, a popular game in Canada, 68.
Dairy cattle and products of Alberta, 208.
Dawson, the capital of the Yukon, 250 _et seq._
Deer, plentiful in Nova Scotia, 57.
Divorce, no laws for, in Newfoundland, 9.
Domestic servants, scarcity of, 192.
Dominion Agricultural Department, originates improved wheat
varieties, 183.
Douglas fir, principal timber of British Columbia, 91.
Doukhobors, fanatical colonists from Russia, 194.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, poem, “The Athabasca Trail,” 205.
Dredging for gold in the Yukon, 267, 269.
Dunsmore, Lord, as a pioneer names town of Moose Jaw, 179.
Edmonton, Alberta, the gateway to the northwest, 197 _et seq._
Electric current, low cost of in southern Ontario, 106, 108, 111.
Electrically heated water for winter mining in the Klondike, 285.
Elevators, how conducted in the Canadian wheat belt, 186.
Farm labour, how obtained for the Canadian wheat fields, 184.
Farmers, American, movement to the Canadian wheat belt, 193.
Farmhouses, well built in Nova Scotia, 38.
Farming, on the edge of the Arctic, Fisheries, of Newfoundland, 13;
of Nova Scotia, 36.
Fisheries of British Columbia, extent of, 230.
Fishermen, Newfoundland, their hard lives and small incomes, 20.
Fishermen’s Protective Union, activities of, 21.
Flax seed, production in the Winnipeg district, 149.
Fleming, Peter, plans harbour development of Montreal, 62.
Floating dry dock, at Prince Rupert, 229.
Flour industry, location of principal mills, 186.
Football, popular in Toronto, 101.
Forest fires and protective measures, 89.
Forest reserves, set aside by government of Ontario, 139.
Forests, denudation of Canadian, 88.
Fort Garry, present site of Winnipeg, 151.
Fort McMurray, on the route to the new oil fields, 203.
Fort Norman, trading post for the new oil region, 203.
Fort Smith, capital of the Northwest Territories, 203.
Fort Vermillion, last herd of wild wood buffalo reported near, 202.
Fort William, the great wheat centre, 135, 141.
Fox, Black, price of fur declining since advent of fur farming, 173.
Fox farms on Prince Edward Island, 40;
near Indian Lorette, Quebec, 44.
Fraser River, gold discoveries on, the first in British Columbia, 223.
Freighters, Lake Superior, 146.
French, dispute British claims to Newfoundland fisheries, 14;
attempts to hold Nova Scotia, 15;
driven from Cape Breton Island, 39.
French, the language of Quebec, 49.
French Canada--Quebec, 42.
French Catholicism, Quebec the American capital of, 57.
Fruit growing in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, 224.
Fundy, Bay of, the forty-foot tides of, 38.
Fur, and the great organizations concerned in its marketing, 166 _et
seq._
Gas, natural, at Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 180;
at Medicine Hat and near Edmonton, 201.
Gates, Swift-Water Bill, his great strike in the Klondike, 277;
partnership with Jack London, 278;
partnership with Joe Boyle, 282.
Glace Bay, first transatlantic cable landed at, 39.
Gold, but little found in Labrador, 11;
production of, in the Porcupine district, 125;
in the Kootenay country, 221;
first discovery in British Columbia, on the Fraser River, 223;
supply being exhausted in the Klondike, 250;
the wonders of the Yukon, 266.
Gouin reservoir, immense water-power development in Quebec, 47.
Government ownership of railroads, how brought about, 162.
Governor-General, the, his position in the Canadian government, 84.
Grain-carrying ships, of the Great Lakes, 146.
Grain elevators, at Port Arthur and Fort William, 141 _et seq._
Grain sacks, manufacture of, a leading industry of Montreal, 63.
Granby Company, miners and smelters of copper in British Columbia,
222.
Grand Banks, the cod fishing grounds, 4, 19.
Grand Forks, British Columbia, smelter closed down after a record
production, 222.
Grand Trunk railway, growth of, in Canada, 162.
Grande Prairie, largest town in the Peace River Valley, 202.
Great Divide, crossing the, 213.
Great Slave Lake, on the route to the new oil fields, 204.
Grenfell, Dr., sailors’ mission of, at St. John’s, 8.
Gulf Stream, its influence on Newfoundland, 4, 5.
Halibut, large production of the British Columbia fisheries, 230.
Halifax, chief city and capital of Nova Scotia, 31.
Halifax explosion, one of the greatest ever known, 33.
Hamilton, Ontario, prosperity due to cheap electric power from
Niagara, 117.
Hayward, Edward, his murder near Lesser Slave Lake, and the running
down of his murderer, 295.
Hematite ore, in the Kootenay country, 221.
Hidden Creek copper mines, largest in British Columbia, 223.
Hill, James J., prediction of Canada’s future population, 189.
Hockey, the great game of Canada, 68.
Hogs, raised at Dawson, Yukon, 260, 262.
Hollinger Mine, largest gold mine in North America, 125.
Holt, Renfrew and Company, great furriers at Quebec, 171.
Homesteads in the Yukon, 265.
Horse raising, in Alberta, 209.
Hot-houses for cucumbers and tomatoes at Dawson, Yukon, 261.
Hudson Bay, railways projected to, 155.
Hudson’s Bay Company, history of, 166 _et seq._
Hudson Strait, chief difficulty in navigation of Hudson Bay Route,
156.
Hull, wet suburb of dry Ottawa, 80.
Hunting, in Newfoundland, 11.
Hunting and camping in Ontario province, 139.
Hydraulic mining, in the Yukon, 267.
Hydro-electric Commission, work of, in Ontario, 102, 103, 106, 107.
Hydro-electric development in Quebec, 46;
of Niagara Falls, 106;
of Welland River at Niagara Falls, 113;
at Sault St. Marie, 134.
Hydro-electric development and the paper and pulp industry, 96.
Hydro-electric plant, supplying St. John’s, 15.
Hydro-electric project at Ogdensburg proposed for furnishing power to
United States and Canada, 100.
Ibex Range, as seen from the Yukon trail, 236.
Ice Palace, formerly erected each winter at Montreal, 68.
Icelanders, a colony of, near Winnipeg, 152.
Immigration, Canada’s desire for, 188 _et seq._
Indian Head, government forestry experiments at, 178.
Insulin, specific for treatment of diabetes, discovered at University
of Toronto, 99.
International Joint Commission, approves project for improvement of
St. Lawrence waterway, 100.
International Nickel Company of Canada, Ltd., owners of rich Sudbury
mines, 127.
Iron, one of the world’s largest deposits in Newfoundland, 12;
the wonderful Wabana mines, 24;
in the Kootenay country, 221.
Irrigation in Alberta, 206;
in the Okanagan Valley, 224.
Japanese labourers, not admitted to Canada, 190.
Jasper Park, greatest of Canada’s western game and forest reserve,
217.
Keeley Mine, rich silver veins of, at Cobalt, 124.
Keno Hill, new silver district in the Yukon, 124.
Kicking Horse Pass, where the railway crosses the Great Divide, 216.
King, Charles, his capture and conviction of murder by the Mounted
Police, 295.
King Solomon’s Dome, in the centre of the Klondike gold region, 274.
Kirkland Lake gold district, production of, 125.
Klondike, the supply of gold being exhausted, 250;
romances of the, 274.
Kootenay country, resources of, 220, 221.
Kootenay Lake, steamer trip through, 221.
Labrador, cod fisheries of, 19.
Labour, how obtained for the Canadian wheat fields, 184.
Lac Beauvert, a mountain resort of the Canadian National Railways,
217.
La Chine Rapids, so-named by Cartier, 61.
Lachine Canal, near Montreal, 64.
Lacrosse, one of the most popular Canadian games, 67.
Lake of the Woods, a beautiful camping and hunting district, 139.
La Rose, discoverer of silver at Cobalt, 122.
Land grants to the Canadian Pacific Railway, 190.
Laurentian Mountains, oldest rock formation of the continent, 48.
Le Roi Copper Mine at Rossland, British Columbia, 222.
Leacock, Stephen, at McGill University, Montreal, 63.
Lead, in the Kootenay country, 221.
Left-hand driving, the custom in Newfoundland, 25.
Life insurance, amount held by Canadians, 78.
Lignite coal, in Saskatchewan, 180.
Live stock, transportation of on the Yukon River, 242.
Live stock production in Newfoundland, 11.
London, Jack, in the Klondike, 278.
London, Ontario, greatly increased consumption of electricity due to
low price, 112.
Louise, Lake, in the Canadian Rockies, 216.
Lumber, production at Sault Ste. Marie, 135;
production of the Saskatchewan province, 176, 179;
immense quantities shipped from Vancouver, 225.
Lumber industry of Canada, the, 88 _et seq._
Manitoba, extent of the province, its topography and resources, 154.
Maritime Provinces, of Canada, the, 31.
Marquette, Father, establishes first Jesuit mission in the new world
at Sault Ste. Marie, 135.
Marquis, valuable variety of wheat originated by Dominion
Agricultural Department, 183.
Matches, manufacture of, at Ottawa, 80, 88.
Medicine Hat, natural gas wells at, 201.
Mennonites, at Winnipeg, 153;
colonies of, from Russia, 194, 195.
McGill University, Montreal, 63.
Miller, Joaquin, in the Klondike, 278.
Mine props, cut in Newfoundland for use in English and Welsh mines,
11.
Mining wonders of the far North, 266.
Mond Nickel Company, operators of mines at Sudbury, 130.
Monel metal, how produced, 129.
Montreal, Canada’s largest city and financial centre, 60 _et seq._
Moose, plentiful in Nova Scotia, 37;
in Ontario province, 140;
in the Yukon, 234, 253;
meat sold at butcher shops at Dawson, 253.
Moose Jaw, an important commercial centre of Saskatchewan, 179.
Mosses, along the Yukon trail, 236.
Mother’s pension, in Ontario, 103.
Motor tourists, welcomed in Quebec, 50.
Mountain goats, abundant in the Yukon, 253.
Mountain sheep, abundant in the Yukon, 253.
Mount Robson, highest peak in Canada, 217.
Mount Royal, from which Montreal is named, 61.
Municipal ownership in Port Arthur and Fort William, 143.
Muskrat, a valuable fur when dyed and prepared, 172.
Names, fanciful, in Newfoundland geography, 12.
National debt of Canada, greatly increased during the World War, 188.
Natural gas, at Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 180;
at Medicine Hat, and near Edmonton, 201.
Nelson, British Columbia, in the heart of the mining country, 221.
New Brunswick, its resources and industries, 40.
New Caledonia, nickel production of, 127.
Newfoundland, size and strategic importance, 4;
population, 7;
education and church activities, 7;
political relation to British Empire, 8;
system of government, 9.
Newspapers in the early Klondike days, 280.
News-print, production of the Sault Ste. Marie mills, 134.
Niagara Falls, hydro-electric development of, 106, 113.
Niagara Falls Railway Arch Bridge, cost of lighting American half
more than double Canadian, 108.
Nickel, largest production in the world at Sudbury, Ontario, 127;
the different uses of the metal, 131.
Nickel-steel, the many uses of, 131.
Nipissing silver mine at Cobalt, 122.
Northcliffe, Lord, built plant in Newfoundland for supply of pulp
wood paper, 11.
Northwest Company, opponent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, finally
absorbed, 170.
Notre Dame, Church of, at Montreal, 65.
Nova Scotia, travels, in, 31 _et seq._
Oats, production in the Winnipeg district, 149;
large crops at Edmonton, 200;
in Peace River Valley, 202.
Oats hay, a farm crop at Dawson, Yukon, 261.
Ogdensburg, N. Y., site of proposed hydro-electric plant for
supplying Canada and the United States, 100.
Oil fields, the new operations along the MacKenzie, 203 _et seq._
Okanagan Valley, famous as fruit-growing region, 223.
Ontario, Province of, richest in mineral and agricultural wealth and
industrial development, 103;
the frontier of the province, 137.
Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, work of, in Ontario, 102, 103,
106, 107.
Ottawa, capital of the Dominion, 79 _et seq._
Paper, Quebec leading producer of, 46;
greatly increased production of, in Canada, 92;
process of manufacture, 93.
Paper mills, at Ottawa, 80, 88.
Parliament buildings, at Ottawa, 82.
Peace River, the town of, 202.
Peace River Valley, agricultural possibilities in, 202.
Petroleum, in Alberta, 201;
the new field along the Mackenzie, 203.
Petty Harbour, typical Newfoundland “outport,” 16.
Phoenix, British Columbia, copper mines at, 222.
Pilgrimages to Ste. Anne de Beaupré, 52.
Porcupine gold district, production of, 125.
Port Arthur, the great wheat centre, 135, 141.
Port Nelson, projected terminus of the Hudson Bay Route, and port
for wheat shipment, 155.
Portage la Prairie, a prosperous farming section, 175.
Potatoes, success with in Dawson, Yukon, 259.
Poultry raising in the Arctic, 260.
Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, noted for its fur trade and lumber
mills, 179.
Prince Edward Island, smallest but richest province in the Dominion,
40.
Prince Rupert, northern terminus of Canadian National Railways and
nearest port to the Orient, 226 _et seq._
Public ownership, in Toronto, 101 _et seq._;
success of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, 107.
Pulp wood, chief product of forests in Newfoundland, 11;
great production of Quebec, 46;
Canada’s resources in, of great importance to the United States,
91, 96.
Pulp mills, at Ottawa, 88;
great increase in numbers of, in Canada, 92;
at Sault Ste. Marie, 134.
Quebec, and its history, 42;
population, 46.
Queenston Chippewa hydro-electric plant below Niagara Falls, 113.
Radio, fisheries of Nova Scotia controlled by, 36.
Rabbits, destruction of trees by, 234.
Railways, in Newfoundland, 10;
transcontinental, of Canada, 157;
government-owned in Canada, 162.
Rainfall, excessive, at Prince Rupert, British Columbia, 229.
Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, 177.
Religious denominations in Newfoundland, 7.
Remittance men, in Calgary, 210.
Revillon Frères, chief competitor to the Hudson’s Bay Company, 170.
Rideau Canal, at Ottawa, 80, 81.
Rideau Hall, residence of the Governor-General, at Ottawa, 84.
Rockies, Canadian, beauty of the, 213.
Rocky Mountain Park, finest mountain resort of Canada, 215.
Royal Bank of Canada, connections abroad, 77.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, training camp at Regina, 177;
district headquarters at Dawson, 251;
the story of the service, 288 _et seq._
Russian church, at Winnipeg, 153.
Rye, production in the Winnipeg district, 149.
St. Boniface, old French-Canadian settlement near Winnipeg, 152.
St. Helene Island, once owned by Champlain, 64.
St. James, Cathedral of, at Montreal, 65.
St. John, chief city of New Brunswick, 41.
St. John’s, capital and chief port of Newfoundland, 3, 5;
around about the city, 8.
St. Lawrence River, International plans for improvement of, 99.
St. Mary’s River, hydro-electric development of, 134.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, first English house of worship in
Canada, 35.
St. Pierre Island, headquarters of bootleggers, 15.
Sainte Anne de Beaupré, the Shrine and its miraculous cures, 52.
Salmon fishing, in Newfoundland, 11.
Salmon fisheries of British Columbia, 231.
Sanderson, John, first homesteader at Portage la Prairie, 175.
Saskatchewan, greatest wheat province of the Dominion, 175 _et seq._,
181 _et seq._
Saskatoon, second largest city of Saskatchewan, 179.
Sault Ste. Marie, hydro-electric development of, 134;
one of the oldest settlements in Canada, 135.
Sealing industry, of Newfoundland, 21.
Selkirk, Lord, his colony in Manitoba the first wheat farmers, 182.
Service, Robert, the poet of the Yukon, 249, 257, 279.
Settlers, Canada’s inducements to, 191.
Shawinigan Falls, hydro-electric development of, 46.
Shaughnessy, Lord, an American boy who became president of the
Canadian Pacific, 165.
Sheep, in southern Alberta, 208.
Silver in the Kootenay country, 221.
Silver mines of northern Ontario, 119.
Slavin, Frank, in the Klondike, 278;
partnership with Joe Boyle, 282.
“Soo” Canal, the waterway and its traffic, 136.
Sports, Canadian, 67;
outdoor games promoted by municipal athletic commission at Toronto,
101.
Spruce, predominant standing timber of Canada, 91.
Steam thawing of the ground in Yukon mining, 266, 271.
Steel industries developed in Sydney district, Nova Scotia, 39.
Stock raising in southwestern Saskatchewan, 176.
Sudbury, rich nickel deposits at, 126, 127.
Sunlight, hours of, at Dawson, Yukon, 264.
Superior, Lake, the grain-carrying trade through, 141 _et seq._
Swift Current, an important commercial centre of Saskatchewan, 179.
Sydney coal mines, of immense importance, 39.
Tahkeena River, crossing of, on the Yukon trail, 235.
The Pas, an undeveloped mineral region, 154.
Thomas, C. A., demonstrates possibility of winter automobile travel
in the Yukon, 239.
Thornton, Sir Henry, in charge of the Canadian national railways, 164.
Three Rivers, Quebec, largest production of paper in the world, at,
47, 92.
Threshing, methods in the Canadian wheat belt, 185.
Tides, forty feet high in Bay of Fundy, 38.
Timber, valuable tracts in Newfoundland, 11.
Timothy hay, large crops at Edmonton, 200.
Tomatoes, a hot-house crop at Dawson, Yukon, 261.
Toronto, the city of public ownership, 97 _et seq._
Toronto University, largest in the British Empire, 98.
Transcontinental railway systems of Canada, 157.
Trappists, at Winnipeg, 153.
Truro, Nova Scotia, 38.
Turnips, as a crop, at Dawson, Yukon, 264.
University of Saskatchewan, efforts in behalf of agriculture and
ceramics, 179.
Valley of the Ten Peaks, in the Canadian Rockies, 216.
Vancouver, chief city of British Columbia and Canada’s most important
Pacific port, 224.
Vancouver Island, copper workings on, 223.
Van Horne, Wm., strenuous railroad builder, 165.
Veneer, manufacture of, at Sault Ste. Marie, 135.
Victoria, capital of British Columbia, 225.
Wabana iron mines rich under-sea deposits, 24.
Wainwright Park, Alberta, containing largest herd of buffalo extant,
217.
Waterfalls that work for the people, 106 _et seq._
Water-power, great developments in Quebec, 46;
its relation to the paper and pulp industry, 96.
Welland Canal, building of deeper and larger locks, 99.
Welland River, hydro-electric development of, 113.
Wheat, the great movement through Port Arthur and Fort William, 141
_et seq._;
production of the Winnipeg district, 149;
on the Saskatchewan prairies, 175, 181;
methods of planting and harvesting in the Canadian wheat belt, 183;
large crops at Edmonton, 200;
in Peace River Valley, 202;
importance of Vancouver as a shipping point, 225.
Wheat belt, Canada’s, its immense extent and great production, 181.
White Horse, beginning of the trail to Dawson, 232.
White pine timber becoming exhausted in Canada, 91.
Wild flowers, abundant in the Yukon, 235.
Williams-Taylor, Sir Frederick, interview with, on Canadian banking,
73.
Winnipeg, a fast-growing city, 148 _et seq._;
its importance in the fur trade, 166.
Winter sports in Quebec, 50.
Wireless telegraph, fisheries of Nova Scotia controlled by, 36.
Wolfe, General, captures Quebec from the French, 43.
Women, opportunities for, in Canada, 192.
Yellowhead Pass, railway line through, 217.
Yukon Gold Company, dividends paid by, 269.
Yukon River, a trip on the, 241.
Yukon Territory, by motor car through the, 232.
[Illustration: (Map of Canada)]
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
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