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Title: The Book of the West
Author: Kennedy, Howard Angus
Language: English
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[Cover Illustration]
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE NEW WORLD FAIRY BOOK
Canadian Legends and Tales of
Imagination,
Red and White. Sixth Edition.
THE STORY OF CANADA
In the Story of the Empire Series. Third
Edition.
NEW CANADA AND THE NEW
CANADIANS
Second Edition.
PROFESSOR BLACKIE, HIS SAYINGS
AND DOINGS
By his Nephew. Second Edition.
OLD HIGHLAND DAYS
Life of Dr. John Kennedy.
[Illustration: _Manitoba_ _Saskatchewan_
_Alberta_ _British Columbia_
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS OF THE WEST]
THE
BOOK OF THE WEST
_By_
HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY
_The Story of Western Canada, its Birth and_
_Early Adventures, its Youthful Combats,_
_its Peaceful Settlement, its Great_
_Transformation, and its_
_Present Ways._
[Illustration]
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
‾Copyright, Canada, 1925, by‾
THE RYERSON PRESS
_THIS BOOK_
_IS WRITTEN FOR_
ALL LOVERS OF THE WEST WHO
ARE NOT TOO YOUNG TO
THINK OR TOO OLD
TO LEARN
_Study to be quiet and to do your own_
_business, and work with your own hands,_
_that you may act honestly to others and_
_lack nothing yourselves._
_—PAUL THE APOSTLE_
CONTENTS
—————
PAGE
A HILL-TOP ADVENTURE. FOREWORD 1
THE OLD TIMES
I. ADVENTURES WITHOUT A MAN 4
_Giant Lizards, page 5. Birth of the Mountains, 7. Ice
Age, 7. Rhinoceros and Mastodon, 8. A Continent Waiting
for Man, 8._
II. THE INDIAN BY HIMSELF 9
_First Arrivals from Asia, 9. Spreading South and East,
11. Corn Found, 11. Gardening Begins, 12. Wanderings of
Northern Indians, 13. Prairie Left to the Last, 14. Life
and Death, 15. The Mound Builders, 16. The First
Plainsmen, 17. Buffalo Hunting Starts, 18. Blackfoot and
Cree come out of the Woods, 19. Life in a Hunting Tribe,
20._
III. THE WHITE MAN COMES EXPLORING 23
_Indians Hear Strange News, 23. Why the White Man
Crossed the Sea, 25. French Ascend the St. Lawrence, 26.
La Salle, 27. English Discover Hudson Bay, 25. Radisson
and Groseillers reach the West, 31. Hudson’s Bay Company
Started, 33._
IV. THE REIGN OF KING BEAVER 35
_His Achievements, Dead and Alive, 35. “Rupert’s Land,”
37. Trading on the Bay Shore, 39. French Opposition, 40.
Forest Runners, 41. The Vérendryes, 41. First Sight of the
Mountains, 43. The English Strike Inland, 44. Indians on
Horseback, 45. Hearne Reaches the Arctic Sea, 47. Eskimo
Massacred by Indians, 48._
_The Rival North-west Company, 49. Mackenzie Crosses to
the Pacific, 50. Thompson Descends the Columbia, 50.
Fraser of Fraser River, 51. The Companies at War, 52. Lord
Selkirk’s Colony on Red River, 53. Battle of Seven Oaks,
55. The Rivals Join Forces, 56. Company Rule Extended to
the Pacific, 56. The Fur Trader’s Life, 56. Travel by Land
and Sea, 57. Perils of the Straits, 57._
_The West as Paul Kane saw it in 1847, 60. Isolation of
Red River, 61. Slaughter of Men and Buffalo, 61. The Cree
and Blackfoot Feud, 62. Indian Dance and Horse Race, 63._
_Tragedy of Arctic Exploration, 64. Fate of Franklin,
65. North-west Passage Found, 66. Amundsen Gets Through,
66._
V. THE FARTHEST WEST 68
_North-west Passage Hunt not Wasted, 68. Drake on the
Pacific Coast, 69. Captain Cook, 69. British and Spanish
on Vancouver Island, 70. United States Frontier Fixed, 71.
Company’s Forts and Farming, 72. Dogs Bred for Wool, 72.
Indian Sports and Slavery, 73. Flat-Heads, 74._
_First White Colony, 75. The Gold Rush, 75. Company
Rule Ended, 76. British Justice, 79. Coal Found, 81.
Federation with Canada, 81. The Hog of San Juan, 82._
VI. THE WINDOWS OPENED 83
_Exploring for Homes, 83. “Paradise of Fertility,” 84.
The Door Still Shut, 84. Toleration of Savagery, 85.
Alexander Henry, 86. Indians and Christianity, 86. A Peace
Maker, 87. Rupert’s Land Enters Dominion, 88. Trouble on
Red River, 89. Wolseley’s Expedition, 90._
VII. THE MOUNTED POLICE 91
_New Danger on the Frontier, 91. Mounted Police
Organized, 92. Campaign against Whiskey Smugglers, 93.
Indians make Treaty, 93. Redcoats and Redskins, 94. Sioux
from the States, 96._
THE GREAT DIVIDE
VIII. OUR FIRST AND LAST INDIAN WAR 98
_Riel’s Second Revolt, 99. The Indian Peril, 99. Duck
Lake Fight, 99. Battleford Besieged, 100. Frog Lake
Massacre, 101. An Army from the East, 103. The Railway
just in Time, 104. Relief of Battleford, 105. The Fight on
Cutknife Hill, 106. Fish Creek, 111. Victory of Batoche,
112. Surrender of the Chiefs, 112. The Hunt for Big Bear,
114._
THE NEW TIMES
IX. OPENING THE DOOR OF THE WEST 117
_The Railway to the Pacific, 117. A National Necessity,
118. How it was Got, 120. Difficulties of Construction,
121. Finished in Five Years, 122._
X. OUR FATHERS AND MOTHERS COME IN 124
_British Settlers in the East, 124. Their Children
Colonize the West, 126. Immigrants Direct from Europe,
126. Early Isolation, 126. King Steer and King Wheat, 127.
Collecting Buffalo Bones, 127. The Ranching Era, 127._
XI. RIDING THE PLAINS IN 1905 128
_A Ride through Two New Provinces, 128. Calgary, 129.
Livestock in the Park Lands, 129. Untouched Prairie, 129.
“We are Canadians Now,” 130. Wild Life, 131. Antelope and
Railway, 131. Thin Thread of Settlement, 132. Hospitable
Métis, 133._
_Turn the Key and Walk in, 135. A Man from Iowa, 135.
Kings and Presidents, 136. Law and Order, 137.
French-Canadians’ Return, 138. Revisiting a Battlefield,
139. Indians Farming, 139. A Sylvan Home, 140._
XII. LEARNING TO BE CANADIANS 141
_Freighting, 141. The Blacksmith’s Wife, 141. Health in
the Air, 142. Scandinavians, 142. “Who are the Slavs?”
143. Small Beginnings, 143. A Spinning Bachelor, 143. A
Doukhobor Village, 145. The Long Migration, 148. The
Newcomer Learns, and Teaches, 149._
XIII. THE TREE OF FREEDOM 151
_Twin Provinces Born, 151. How to Cultivate the Tree of
Freedom, 153. The Political Art of Living Together, 154.
Loyalty to Union, 155. The Two Empires, 156._
XIV. ON THE WINGS OF THE WEST 158
_“Cultivating our Garden,” 158. Seeing the West from
the Air, 159. Victoria, 159. Federal Observatory, 159.
Ships, 160. What the British Navy Means, 160. Vancouver,
160. Fish, Forest, and Mine, 161. A Pioneer Family, 162.
“Simple Life and High Standard of Living,” 163. Fruit
Valleys, 164. Westerners and the War, 164. Sea of
Mountains, 165. Airplane, Wireless, and Forest Fires,
166._
XV. A FLIGHT ACROSS THE PLAINS 167
_Wealth of Coal and Water Power, 167. Manufactures,
168. The Chinook, 169. Watering Dry Land, 169. Bees, 170.
Natural Gas, 170. Quality in Cattle and Sheep, 171.
Regina, 171. Rare Clay and Common Dirt, 171. Network of
Railways, 172. Better Houses, 172. Telephones, 172. Tree
Planting, 173. Nomads Yet, 174. Climates, 175. “Test and
Select,” 176. Wasteful Cultivation, 176. Automobiles, 177.
The Business End of Farming, 178. Experimental Farms, 179.
Universities, 180. People Wanted, 180. Small Farming, 181.
Butter and Cheese, 183. Winnipeg, 184. Sports, 185. Boys
and Girls, 185. Citizen Soldiers, 186._
XVI. UP TO THE NORTH AND HOME AGAIN 187
_The Caribou Pastures, 187. Reindeer and Food Supply,
188. Police on Arctic Islands, 189. Wireless on the Arctic
Coast, 190. Up the Mackenzie, 190. Peace River, 191. Homes
in the Brush, 191. Buffalo Flourish Again, 192. Fur
Farming and Trapping, 192. A Beaver Colony, 193._
_New Settlers and Canadian Ideals, 194. Harmony and
Variety, 196. A Sure Foundation, 196. Pure Canadian, 199._
THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 201
INDEX 203
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS OF THE WESTERN PROVINCES _Frontispiece_
VERY EARLY WESTERNERS 5
_Giant Lizards on the Red Deer. Drawing by
E. S. Christman._
INDIAN LACROSSE PLAYER 13
_Drawing by George Catlin._
EARLY BUFFALO HUNTING 24
_Drawing by George Catlin._
TOWING THROUGH THE ICE 29
_From Gerrit de Veer’s “Vraye Description
de Trois Voyages,” Amsterdam, 1600._
THE VOYAGEURS’ WAY TO THE WEST. A PORTAGE ON THE
OTTAWA 36
_From W. H. Bartlett’s Engraving in
“Canadian Scenery.”_
CHIEF POUNDMAKER 36
_From Pastel by Edmund Morris._
CHIEF PIAPOT 36
_From a Photograph._
BEAVER AT WORK, AND BEAVER HATS 37
_From Horace T. Martin’s “Castorologia.”_
THE BEAVER AND THE UNICORN 37
_From John Ogilby’s “America,” 1671._
IN A SWIFT CURRENT 52
_Drawing by Frederic Remington._
ON THE WINTER HIGHWAY 52
_Drawing by Frederic Remington._
LORD SELKIRK, FATHER OF WESTERN SETTLEMENT 53
_From a Painting by Raeburn._
FORT DOUGLAS; WHERE WINNIPEG NOW STANDS 53
_Built to Protect the Selkirk Settlers.
From a Water-Color believed to be by Peter
Rindifbacher, Dutch Artist._
COAST INDIAN MASKS 73
_From the Marquis of Lorne’s “Canadian
Pictures.”_
ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL, THOMPSON RIVER 77
_From the Marquis of Lorne’s “Canadian
Pictures.”_
FORT CHIPEWYAN, LAKE ATHABASCA 96
_From a Drawing by W. S. Watson, 1899._
BUFFALO HERD AND PRAIRIE FIRE 96
_From a Painting by F. A. Verner._
MOUNTED POLICE CHASING WHISKEY SMUGGLERS 97
THE COVERED WAGON 97
_A Returned Canadian, Home-seeking. From a
Photograph by H. A. Kennedy, 1905._
AN INDIAN ULTIMATUM 102
_Facsimile of Big Bear’s Demand for
Surrender of Fort Pitt._
ON THE BATTLEFIELD. FRIENDS AGAIN 112
_Mounted Police Officer and Cree Indian,
Sir Archibald Macdonell and Piacutch. From a
Photograph by H. A. Kennedy on Cutknife Hill,
1905._
A HORSE RANCH 112
WHERE NO TREES GREW. FORESTRY STATION, INDIAN HEAD 113
QUALITY RAISING QUALITY. SCHOOL FAIR PRIZE WINNERS 113
ANTELOPE ON THE PRAIRIE 132
_From a Drawing by George Catlin._
FROM THE RUSSIAN OVEN 176
AT THE SPINNING WHEEL 176
_Doukhobor Housewives. From Photographs by
H. A. Kennedy._
THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW. ON A RUTHENIAN FARM 177
A FAMILY FROM POLAND 177
LAKE LOUISE, ROCKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK 192
MOUNT ROBSON, JASPER NATIONAL PARK 193
THE E. P. RANCH, HIGH RIVER 193
_The Prince of Wales and his Canadian
Home_
SKETCH MAP OF WESTERN CANADA 206
* * * * *
Hearty thanks are given to the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, and
the publishers of “Canadian Pictures,” for the use of pictures from that
book by the late Duke, Governor-General of Canada; to Mrs. H. T. Martin
for the beaver pictures from her husband’s book; to _Harper’s Magazine_
and Mrs. Remington’s executors for the two travel scenes by Frederic
Remington; to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, for the
giant lizards; to the scientific staff of the Victoria Museum at Ottawa
for checking my pre-historic facts; to many other officers of the
Dominion and the four Western Provinces, and unofficial informants, for
pictorial and other details; above all, to the numberless good folk all
over the West who have made my travelling and living among them an
endless revelation and delight.—H.A.K.
THE BOOK OF THE WEST
THE BOOK OF THE WEST
—————
A Hill-Top Adventure
_B__ULLETS whistled about my ears as I leapt from my horse on Cutknife
Hill. The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the
buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully
on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the
gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend
who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet
through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long
hours the painted braves kept up the zip-zip-zip, shooting us down like
rabbits. It was my first adventure in the West,—and the last of its
kind the West will ever know._
_That little war of 1885 was the Great Divide of Western History. It
marked an end and a beginning. The rising on the Saskatchewan was the
last volcanic outbreak of the fire primeval, the savage spirit of the
old Wild West. With the suppression of that rising, the fire was
quenched for ever. The old times ended; our own new times began._
_Standing on the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains we see, looking
back, the long road we have travelled up from the Atlantic, and then,
looking forward, the long road stretching down to the Pacific. So,
looking back from the Great Divide of Western History, we see a moving
picture of romance, of wonderful discovery, of long-drawn struggle
against fearful odds; a picture brightened with heroic deeds, though
darkened now and then by clouds of crime. Then, looking forward, we see
the moving picture of our modern West, the inrushing flood of humanity,
these forty years of peace and safety, of swift transformation from a
hunter’s wilderness to a land of a million homes, of marvellous, though
unsatisfying, progress._
_This picture too is crowded with adventure, of many kinds. People are
constantly having adventures without knowing it. They pass through life
and think it dull because they have a dull habit of not looking at the
thousand points of interest as they pass._
_When the first Indian landed in empty America, far back in the
mysterious past, that was a great adventure. And when the last family of
European newcomers stepped off the train this very morning, after a
journey of 6,000 miles by sea and land, that was just as big an
adventure to them. When a boy has learned to shoot, and hunts down a
coyote, he feels that he has had an adventure; but when he merely hunts
up a stray cow in the brush of the back pasture, on his pony, that too
is an adventure, and tests his power of observation and discovery as
well as horsemanship._
_Yes, and every spring when the farmer tests his grain for germination,
and fans the last weed seed out of it, and treats it with formalin for
smut, and carefully cleans his drill, he is preparing for a yearly
adventure, as truly as the fur-hunter centuries ago when he patched his
canoe and packed his belongings for a journey of months and years
through an unknown land._
_For me, it is an adventure to sit down and write this book, as truly as
when I saddled up and rode out of Battleford on my way to Cutknife Hill.
A hard adventure, too; harder work than rounding up cattle, or clearing
brush, or pitching hay, or stooking heavy wheat, or anything else I have
ever done on the farm. But there is great pleasure in doing hard things,
as every true Westerner knows by experience._
· · · · · ·
_A moving picture of the West is what you ask from me: a moving picture
in words that help you to see in imagination events as if they were
happening under your eyes. You want me to tell the story of our Western
home, and how it came to be ours,—yours and mine. You want me to
conjure up a picture of the West as it was and as it is._
_“The West as it was” may have a more thrilling interest to some of my
distant readers than “the West as it is”; but among Westerners
themselves the glimpses of modern life in the later chapters of this
book will have an interest keen enough, for it is their own life. The
questions touched by me, or by the men and women whose words I give, are
questions that Westerners have daily to face and often to wrestle with._
_The West is so vast, so full of contrast, so rich in variety of scene,
of climate, of industry and of people, that no one book can describe it
all as it is. To do that would need a library, with picture gallery
attached. I can only do my best, with two hundred pages of print and
pictures, to paint in true colors on the smallest scale the country that
I love._
_The West as it is to be,—the West as it will be when we have all done
our best for its prosperity,—ah, that I must leave for you to imagine
and create._
THE OLD TIMES
CHAPTER I
Adventures Without a Man
HOW IS your own imagination, to-day?
I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now.
The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with
no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the
most extraordinary adventures before the first man came.
Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination
here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more
huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale.
No human eyes ever saw them in life. No men lived here, or anywhere on
earth, so long, long ago. But we ourselves can see those very beasts,
their huge old bones and awful teeth; yes, the very pattern of their
skin, printed on the soft mud they sank and died in,—mud now hardened
into rock. Many of these monstrous skeletons have been put together and
set up in museums. Every year more come into sight, as the river
undermines its banks and the rock breaks up and wears away.
You can see these creatures, dead, with your eyes. Now set your
imagination to work, and see them alive.
What a picture! A dense jungle, of waving horsetail reeds and rushes
tall as our poplars, of spreading tree-ferns, of towering trees like
tropical palms. Here and there, an open stretch of gleaming, stagnant
water. Flitting overhead are curious birds with rows of sharp teeth in
their long beaks, and still more curious reptiles of the air with fleshy
wings, like overgrown bats. What are they looking down at? There is a
stir among the greenery. A lizard, fifty feet long, is wallowing in his
muddy bed; his head appears, with dull eyes looking out from a stupid
little brain; then his neck, longer than any giraffe’s. We call him the
Gigantosaurus, or giant lizard. He seizes a tree with his forepaws,
bends it down, and begins to munch the leaves and twigs.
[Illustration]
_Very Early Westerners,_
_Corythosaurus and Gorgosaurus_
Suddenly he stops, looks round in alarm, and dives. Too late. Another
huge lizard comes crashing and splashing through the greenery,—not
quite so big, but fierce and strong, his mighty jaws grinning with
terrible fangs. It is the Tyrannosaurus. He throws himself on the poor
leaf-eater, and bites and tears, and tears and bites, till the helpless
monster lies dead in the swamp. A whole tribe of the conqueror’s family,
and other flesh-eaters of all sizes and many curious shapes, creep up
and share the feast, till nothing is left but the bones—for us to
discover, a few million years later, and collect for our museums.
That was the most ornamental and spectacular age in the whole history of
animal life on this earth. Nothing so fantastic has ever lived, before
or since. One beast had a crest of many pointed plates jutting out of
its high humped back from head to tail. Several had two or three horns,
on forehead and snout. One had a full suit of bony armor plates,
including a movable shield over each eye. Another had a bill like a
duck, and a towering dome of a skull that gives an impression of high
intellect; but his brain, like that of all the rest, was ridiculously
small. There were hundreds of different kinds of these quaint animals
roaming about here at the same time.
Even that is not the earliest scene of Western life we can see when we
open the telescope of imagination and look back through the ages past.
Look back far enough, and we see the hot earth spinning through space, a
soft and fluid ball,—red-hot, only we cannot see the color, for a thick
cloud of vapor covers all. As the earth cools, it shrinks, wrinkling and
crinkling. The parts of its skin that rise make continents and islands,
the parts that sink make seas and lakes. It goes on shrinking, and its
shape changes constantly. A sea-bottom rises, and becomes land; land
sinks, and is covered by sea. Up and down, up and down, for millions of
years.
Little beasts appeared in the sea. High up in the Rocky Mountains we
find them by countless thousands—the trilobites, related to the
crabs,—their shapes preserved and moulded in the solid stone. But that
stone, when they lived and died, was soft mud at the bottom of the sea.
There were no Rocky Mountains then. The oldest mountains in this part of
the world are nearer the coast. They are worn down and rounded now; for
as soon as a mountain is raised it begins to wear away, split by frost,
falling in landslides, and washed down by rain. Even when the giant
lizards browsed and played and fought in the jungle, there were no
Rockies yet.
The giant lizards came, and passed away. The earth still shrank, and
threw up more wrinkles,—the Rocky Mountains at last rising out of the
sea. They are still so new that their ridges and edges and peaks have
not yet lost their sharpness, yet so many thousand years old that their
uppermost rocks, worn away to sand and carried down in rivers to the
plain, have had time to bury the lizards many feet deep. They have
buried, too, the tropical palms and ferns and reeds, and pressed them
into coal, which we dig up and burn.
Millions of years pass,—and when we look through our telescope again
the country has so changed that we cannot recognize it. Instead of being
hotter than now, it is colder. Most of it, in fact, has disappeared,
under an immensely thick sheet of ice. This icy mantle covers nearly all
Canada, and a great part of the United States. Its edge advances,
century after century, farther and farther south, slowly but surely,
wiping out forests, grinding and grooving the rocks underneath, as
glaciers always do. Then it slowly retires,—through more
centuries,—advances again, and again withdraws to the north. A third
time the land is covered before the final retreat of the Arctic ice.
How did this happen? Most likely by the surfaces of the earth and
sea-bottom in these northern parts rising many hundred feet and then
sinking, to rise and sink again and again. In some parts of the world
even now the level of the land is rising, in others falling; and
wherever the land is high enough to-day, with a considerable snowfall,
we know it is always covered with snow and ice, summer and winter.
Let us take a look at our country as it was when the second ice-cap had
melted and the last had not yet formed.
The monsters have gone, for ever vanished from the earth. Gone are the
tree-ferns and towering palms. New birds have come, like those we know,
and sing among trees and shrubs of the kind still growing around us. The
hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the mastodon, thunder over the grassy
plain. We see our northern musk ox grazing as far south as Kentucky and
Tennessee.
We look for men and find none at all. Not one man, woman or child, in
all these two vast continents. Fifteen million square miles, empty and
waiting, all ready for man, but waiting for him in vain; perhaps till
even the last and smallest of the ice-caps has disappeared.
Far away in the north-west the land comes to an end; but looking over
the water we see the coast of Asia only sixty miles off, with a
convenient little group of islands half-way over. There is nothing to
prevent man from coming over in a canoe in summer, or on the ice in
winter.
And there he is, coming!
CHAPTER II
The Indian by Himself
LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family,
starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping
for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number
increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes
up behind and drives them on,—moving on, and on, and on,—a few
families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the
American “Indians” do, to one great human stock that spread out east and
west along the northern lands of Asia and Europe, where their closest
kin to-day are found among the tribes of North Siberia and the Lapps of
Russia and Norway. Another branch of the same ancestral stock settled in
China, where it made many new inventions and slowly built up a
civilization of its own, with high achievements in literature and art.
But our “Indians” must have broken away long before that, for they had
none of these inventions to bring with them,—not even that of the
wheel, either for vehicles, for spinning, or for pottery; though the
wheel was in common use among the Chinese and other old-world races
thousands of years ago.
Let us watch these first men coming, now, and see what they are like.
They are a shaggy-looking folk, with bear-skins thrown over their
shoulders and tied round their waists. Their hair hangs long and black.
Their skin is dark.
They have little baggage. They bring nothing with them except spears,
bows and arrows, and furs. For a spear they have fixed a pointed bone or
horn or sharp broken stone to the end of a pole. Their arrows are just
little spears. The furs are the skins of bear, walrus, seal and caribou.
When we ourselves start on a journey, we know where we are going; we are
bound for some particular place with a name. But these first wanderers
from Asia don’t know where they are going, and don’t much care. They are
not looking for a place to settle down in, land of their own to farm, to
build a house on. So long as they find plenty of wild beasts, berries
and roots to eat, they are satisfied. They know how to make fire, by
twirling a stick between their hands till its lower end, by friction
against another piece of dry wood, kindles a spark which they catch on
dry bark or moss and blow into flame. They have neither pottery nor
baskets, but carry small articles in a big bowl-shaped receptacle of
rawhide. Their only animal is the dog, the half-tamed descendant of
foxes, wolves or jackals.
These first comers have “discovered America,” without knowing it. They
have no idea that they are the first to set foot in a “new world.” It
looks just like the “old-world” to them. They have been living on the
sea-shore, over there at the tip of Asia. Their number has increased,
and other tribes have come up behind them, so they have simply crossed
over to the land they have often seen at a distance, where they can have
the hunting all to themselves. They just go on living as they have been
used to living.
Some of them wander along the north coast, where they still wander,—we
call them Eskimo.
Most of the newcomers, however, turn to the right, and follow the coast
to the south. One family follows another, family after family, band
after band,—not close on each other’s heels, or many at a time, but in
driblets, for hundreds or thousands of years. When the coast of Alaska
is dotted with encampments, the next comers pass on and pitch their skin
tents on the empty shores of British Columbia. There they are astonished
to find a mighty forest. They make rough shelters of bark and branches,
instead of skin tents. After a time some clever fellow says,—“This is a
good place to live; we don’t need to wander about all the time, for the
salmon and deer are plenty. Let us cut down trees and build houses.” So
they do, though they have never seen such a thing as a house before.
They learn to be carpenters, and finally wood carvers. They have no
teachers, they just learn by trying. With axes of big chipped stone they
cut down trees, and build houses with thick posts which they carve and
color in rough imitation of men. They make boats, each of one tree,
hollowed out like Robinson Crusoe’s.
More little bands follow, and settle all along the shore of the
Continent. Some of them strike inland, perhaps chased off the coast by
others, perhaps finding the food supply too poor where they have landed.
One party comes at last to what we now call Mexico.
One day, while the men are off hunting, the children find here and there
a plant of wild maize, and bite the juicy grains off the cob. The men
come back at night, empty-handed; game is getting scarce. They are glad
to eat the corn their children have found. It is good. Later on, when
the corn is ripe and hard to chew, some one has a bright idea. I think
it must have been a woman, a mother with little children whose teeth
cannot chew the hard grains. She spreads a handful of the grains on a
flat stone, breaks them up with a stone hammer, and mixes the meal with
water, so the little ones have mush to eat. Some of the mush she roasts
in lumps. She is the first baker in the new world. Next year another
woman, or perhaps it is the same, takes some of the big grains left
over, makes a scratch in the earth, and drops them in, so that she can
have food close at hand without wandering about to pick the wild ears.
She is the first gardener.
Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The
men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad
to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move
every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a
permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as
savages do,—we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,—but
the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join
to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes
join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think
and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They
twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a
spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron,
but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and
temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and
silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of
ancient Egypt.
Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of
Panama, or skirt the coast till they come to South America, and there
they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru.
Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples
adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave.
They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin,
the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool.
Wild tribes of men continue streaming down from the north. Some of them
conquer the Mexicans, and settle down among them and learn their arts.
Some hover on the outskirts of the new civilization for a while, and
learn how to spin and weave and raise corn, but then wander on to the
east along the Gulf of Mexico, or north up the Mississippi. A group of
these tribes, finding their way at last into the St. Lawrence Valley,
settle down there and join forces in the great Iroquois alliance of the
“Six Nations.” Their women grow corn, melons, beans and pumpkins, but
the favorite occupation of the men is fighting, as the first white
Canadians will discover to their cost in the seventeenth century.
Between fights, they play a magnificent game of their own invention,
which we call lacrosse. The goals are the two villages in which the
teams live.
[Illustration: _Lacrosse—Before the White Man Played It_]
There was one tribe that never went south at all. When they landed in
Alaska these folk struck inland and wandered away to the east, past
Hudson Bay, some of them spreading then through Labrador, others
crossing the St. Lawrence and never stopping till the Atlantic rolled at
their feet in Nova Scotia, where a remnant of them may be seen to-day.
Some of them had fallen out at various points along the way, finding
hunting grounds that suited them, and others turned back to the west, so
that the early white fur traders found them scattered all through the
forest lands from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west of Hudson Bay.
The Crees, a western branch of this Algonquin stock, were still a
woodland folk, although, as they depended mostly for food and shelter on
the caribou, they followed the herd in its yearly migrations out of the
wood and across the treeless country towards the Bay.
Our fertile prairie was still an unpeopled wilderness, long after a
multitude of tribes had spread over the rest of the continent.
What sort of country was this vast empty space, “the granary of the
British Empire” to-day?
It is not hard to imagine, for white men are still alive among us who
remember it pretty much as it was when the “Indians” first came, a
thousand years ago. A great grassy plain dotted with pale anemones in
spring, pink roses and white strawberry blossoms in summer; mighty herds
of buffalo grazing over it, and wallowing in little pools; parts of it
flat, but most of it rolling, up and down, like a sea of earth suddenly
stilled after a storm. Poplar bluffs rise here and there, but for
hundreds of miles not a tree is to be seen. Two great rivers, the North
and South Saskatchewan, have carved deep valleys across from west to
east; their water, and that of many smaller rivers, pours into the
Manitoban lakes, and out again to lose itself in Hudson Bay. Those
lakes, great as they seem, are but the remnants of one vast lake which
covered nearly all Manitoba long after the ice-cap had retreated.
Beyond the prairie northward stretches the forest, poplar and willow and
birch, tamarack, pine and spruce. North-east the forest dwindles and
fades away into the “barren lands,” which are not really barren, for
countless caribou and musk ox pasture there. North-west, great rivers
pour through the forest and away to the Arctic Sea; north-east, more
rivers drain out to the Bay.
The plains rise gently for a thousand miles from east to west; so gently
that we do not notice the change, till we see the foothills swelling up
and the sharp-edged mountains towering high beyond in a heavenly rampart
of white and grey. Beyond the prairie, mountains on mountains, range
after range, with roaring torrents in deep ravines; wider valleys, and
placid lakes reflecting stately trees; the country smoothing down to the
north, in a thick cloak of poplar and pine, and sinking in the
south-west to a level plain, dark under thronging regiments of giant
firs and cedars, along the coast of the western sea.
No voice of man is heard upon the untilled plains; but the land is not
silent. The coyote screams and howls. High overhead the wild-goose
honks. The air is musical with songs of little birds and gay with their
colors. No hand of man is raised to kill; but hunters are busy killing.
In the woods, the rabbit squeals as the weasel catches him by the
throat. On the prairie, the hovering hawk drops swiftly to seize a
gopher. On the lake, the skimming gull darts down and snatches out a
fish. In the mountains, the eagle swoops and carries off a marmot; the
prowling bear claws at a rotting stump and gobbles down grubs by the
mouthful.
Far away in the south, the prairie is invaded by man. Not suddenly, or
by a great armed host. Don’t imagine that the buffalo-hunting tribes
known to our fathers came riding out on to the plains one day in a
picturesque and mighty horde, as the invading Tartar host swarmed out
over Europe. The first hunter of the plains had never heard of a horse.
This is more likely what happened.
The Indians who settled in the Mississippi Valley were far from
“civilized,” but they were no longer mere wandering hunters. They hunted
deer and beaver and other animals, but they also cultivated the soil,
growing corn and beans and squash. They made real homes beside their
fields. They stayed there long enough to build great mounds, which are
still to be seen, grown over with grass and trees. Some of these mounds
are very curiously shaped, like serpents, turtles and other animals,
which the people superstitiously reverenced as their protectors. Some of
the mounds, however, are like fortifications, high dykes or ridges
enclosing great squares of land, large enough to protect whole villages.
These needed all the protection they could get, and often more, for the
wilder tribes were constantly raiding the weaker.
* * * * *
One night a war party breaks in upon a village of the grain-growers,
rushing over the dykes and killing the owners of the fields. A few
escape, and scatter in all directions. See! There is one whole family,
stealing away through the woods to the west—a man and woman, with
deerskins thrown over their shoulders and tied with rawhide thongs
around the waist; two naked children trotting behind, and a dog at their
heels. They stop when tired out, snatch a few hours’ sleep, and flee on
again. Day after day they hurry on. Their old hunting ground is left
behind, and they slacken the pace, but still they press on to the west.
The woods get thinner and thinner, till there is only a fringe of trees
in a valley, sheltered from the wind of the plain above. The fugitives
keep close to the rivers, where they can be sure of fish and birds and
berries to eat.
At last they come to a place where two rivers meet. The narrow valley
here spreads out wide; its banks slope more gently, and are covered with
brush; but a mile farther on both valleys are narrow again, and almost
bare. “This place looks good to me,” says the man; “stay here by the
river while I go exploring.” Climbing through the brush and out of the
valley, he stands on the edge of a bare and boundless plain. He shades
his keen eyes to see the end of it,—in vain. The gentle waves of turf
stretch away—surely to the edge of the world!
“If we go farther,” the man says, coming back to his wife, “we shall
find nothing to catch; if we go back, we may be caught ourselves. We
shall camp here.” He takes his bow and arrows to shoot a few rabbits for
supper; his wife with a sharp stone axe cuts down branches for a
shelter,—and that is the first prairie home.
Time passes. More families come straggling up and join them. There is
not enough food for all, and they often go hungry. There are coyotes on
the plain, but they run like the wind; and antelopes, but they run like
the cyclone. One day, the children climb up to the plain with their
little bows and arrows to shoot gophers, but come running down again.
They have seen monstrous animals up there, they say. Their father goes
up with a spear. Sure enough, there is a herd of shaggy brown beasts
grazing on the turf, with huge heads, fierce eyes, short horns and
woolly manes. He has been used to hunting deer and moose in the woods,
where he could creep silently from tree to tree until he got within easy
range. It is quite another matter to attack a herd of fierce-looking
buffalo, out on the bare plain where no shelter is. But the temptation
is greater than the risk, when other game is scarce or small or hard to
catch.
“Let us go boldly out and attack the buffalo in the open,” says the
brave man. He shouts down to his friends in the valley camp. Two other
hunters climb up to where he stands, and together they glide over the
prairie, slower and slower as they near the herd, till you can hardly
tell they are moving. The buffalo stop grazing, lift their heads, and
stare at these two-legged creatures they have never seen before. The men
come close, and fling their spears. One spear goes home, and brings down
a beast; but the rest of the herd wheel round and thunder away over the
sounding turf, carrying two spears with them.
That troubles the hunters, for a good spear-head of sharpened bone or
antler takes long to make. Next time, they use bows and arrows, and
shoot from a distance; but now all the buffalo get away, with arrows
sticking in their tough hides. Many spears and arrows are lost, and
every now and then a hunter is killed, for sometimes the desperate
animals rush at the men who have attacked them, instead of rushing the
other way.
“If we can drive the buffalo off the prairie into the brush,” says a
thoughtful Indian at last, “they can’t run away so fast; and if they run
at us we can get behind trees.” So the hunters do that. Still, most of
the hunted animals get out of the wood again, and escape.
Presently another clever Indian thinks of a better plan. “Let us build a
corral in the brush, and drive the beasts into it,” he says. So the men
cut down trees and make a rough stockade of upright logs, leaving a wide
entrance. They manage to drive a herd of buffalo into the corral, and
there the poor beasts are crowded together and rush round and round
while the hunters behind the trees shoot them down by the score.
There is plenty of food now; too much, in fact. So the Indians just cut
out with stone knives the tenderest parts of the meat, the hump and the
tongue, and leave the rest to be eaten by coyotes. Some of the lean meat
is dried and beaten into powder, and mixed with fat and crushed into
bags of skin. This is pemmican, and it keeps a long time, so the tribe
has a store of meat to use without hunting.
The buffalo-hunting tribes increase, and spread out over the southern
plains. Some of them have never been anything but hunters, in the woods;
and whether they have once grown corn or not, they come to despise the
corn-growers. The buffalo is their only crop.
Unknown to these southern plainsmen, after a time the plains were
invaded from the north as well. Bands of the northern Wood Indians,
first perhaps the Blackfeet, long afterwards the Crees, began to creep
out on the prairie. Like the southern Sioux, they could not travel fast
on land; the Indians had no horses. Ages before the first men came there
had been horses here, at first of a dwarfish kind, with three toes. The
horse tribe may have had its beginning here and spread over to Asia when
the sea between Siberia and Alaska was dry land; but nothing was left of
them in all America except their fossil bones.
To be sure, the Indians had dogs; but at first these were only
camp-followers, and their only use was to be killed and eaten when
better meat was scarce. In the far north, the Eskimo learned to hitch
dog teams to a sleigh; and presently the Indians south of them put their
dogs in harness, too.
The Wood Indians, living in a country full of lakes and rivers, in
summer did all their travelling by canoe. In winter they stayed idle in
camp, down in some sheltered valley or forest glade, living in rough
shelters or tents of birch-bark or caribou hide. Presently, when they
came out into the open to follow the buffalo, they had to leave their
canoes behind. They did not like carrying loads on their backs; and one
day an Indian, no lazier than the rest, but with more active brains,
thought of a new way to make the dogs do that work. They had already
been trained to haul toboggans in winter, and sometimes in summer; but
the toboggan is a poor sort of cart except when it has smooth snow for
its flat surface to glide over. To be sure, the travoy was not very much
better, but it was less easily upset, and as the Indian never thought of
inventing wheels let us give him all credit for inventing the travoy.
You have probably seen it in action,—two poles crossed over the dog’s
back, and trailing wide apart behind, with cross-pieces to carry the
load.
To these Indians spreading slowly over the prairie from the north, the
buffalo was everything, as it was to the plainsmen of the south. They
made their tents of its skin. They lived on its meat, though when the
pemmican gave out and no herd was near they ate rabbit, gopher, beaver,
crow, dog, anything and everything they could get. As for vegetable
food, they were content with berries and roots, especially the “pomme
blanche” or prairie turnip, which the women scraped and dried for winter
use. The early explorers found the Mandans of the Missouri growing corn
and tobacco, beans and pumpkins, and sunflower—for the seed,—with a
hoe made of the buffalo’s shoulder-blade and a wooden handle; but the
prairie Indians as a whole despised farming.
They hunted the buffalo in the same wasteful way as the southern
plainsmen, from whom they probably learnt the trick of driving the
beasts into an enclosure. They made some progress in a few of the arts.
Many of them tried their hands at pottery; they also plaited bark and
other fibres into baskets. They decorated articles of hide with
geometrical designs, in paint or porcupine quill; their famous bead-work
only came into fashion when white men gave them glass beads in trade.
The beaten copper with which they fastened the plaits of their long
black hair, they got from tribes who found it on the shore of Lake
Superior. They could not write, but they could draw. They drew maps, of
their land and water trails, on bits of birch-bark. They painted figures
of animals on the outside of their skin tents.
They would hunt a band of other Indians or a herd of buffalo with the
same ingenuity and fierce delight. Having spent all their energy in this
violent collection of human scalps and buffalo meat, they dropped into
idleness. But time did not hang heavy on their hands. They were never
bored by lack of occupation; they enjoyed doing nothing, as a cow enjoys
chewing the cud. They smoked dry willow-bark, when they could not get
tobacco, in carved stone pipes. They used no strong drink, till the
white man brought it to them. They did not lack the pleasures of
imagination; endless and agreeable were the hours they spent telling and
hearing tales of enchantment and mythical legends of the past, many of
which I have borrowed for my “New World Fairy Book.”
CHAPTER III
The White Man Comes Exploring
ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men
and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark,
discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to
listen and wonder.
A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,—a light-skinned
man.
How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with
each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally
killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. But they often
kept the women and made wives of them.
It may have been one of these women, captured by some raiding party in
the south, who told the prairie Indians the story her tribe had heard in
the same way from some tribe still farther south. The story was that a
lot of these “white” men had come sailing across the big water in
monstrous canoes with wings; once ashore, they had come riding over the
country on great four-legged animals, as swift and terrible as buffalo,
though not so shaggy. Nearly all the tribes had an old story about an
agreeable fair-skinned god who had once lived among them and had
promised to come back, so the newcomers were at first believed to be
that god and his brothers. But they were not at all agreeable, for they
took possession of the land and killed the Indians resisting them. They
had terrible weapons,—tubes that breathed fire, and shining swords that
cut off a head at a blow.
Fortunately for our Indians, these mysterious conquering white-skins
never came up to the north. But some of their animals did. Running wild,
little herds of horses found their way up at last to the prairie. They
were hard to catch; but if buffalo could be driven into a corral, so
could they. It was not very long before the Indians were breaking and
riding them; and from that time the tribesmen chased the buffalo on
horseback instead of on foot.
[Illustration]
_Early Buffalo Hunting_
Presently news came that more white men or gods had appeared,—this time
in the east.
* * * * *
Here is what had happened.
While the early forefathers of our “Indians” were spreading north
through Asia and wandering over into America, our own forefathers came
wandering and hunting west through Europe. Some of them came to the very
edge of the sea before they finally settled down, and learned to plow,
and gradually joined together to form nations. Five hundred years ago,
three of the strongest nations had grown up on the shores of the
Atlantic, in Spain, France, and England. They, like other nations in
Europe, used to get spices and incense, pearls and precious stones,
ivory and silk, from India and the farther East. But the way to India
was now barred by the Mahommedans. The goods that they allowed to pass
were heavily taxed on the way, and became very dear.
Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew
it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher
Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him
three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a
shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of
islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West
Indies and their people Indians,—a mistaken name which has stuck to the
native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of
them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their
runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains.
The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out
into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it.
Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King
of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more
northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland
and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to discover the
mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years
earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited
Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very
soon. Some of them may have been captured and “adopted” into Indian
tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten.
European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the
Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably
landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their
stories attracted little notice.
The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques
Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in
1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another
great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first
Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time.
For a long while, however, the towns of “New France” on the St. Lawrence
were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian
product that any one in Europe thought of much value.
The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of
Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it
might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with
India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of
the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the “North-west Passage”
through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three
thousand miles away across a whole wide continent.
To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave
Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St.
Lawrence,—not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to
find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers,
La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and
fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of
a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into
the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did
not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned,
to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered
it to flow south instead of west.
La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous
journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed
the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great
river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when
traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their
way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French
forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British
force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down
French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the
valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even
Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe’s
crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain’s action in freeing
her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn
on Britain herself a few years later, and, this time with the help of
French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the
English-speaking brotherhood.
* * * * *
Let us turn back now to the earlier days.
The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western
route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot’s voyage to Labrador,
another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on
this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain’s name. Passing
Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily
believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of
fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay—Frobisher
Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now.
A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren
country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a
second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher
discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the
name of Hudson Strait.
The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till
1610, and his first appearance was his last. Passing through the strait,
he rounded the north point of Labrador, and, turning southward, sailed
out upon a body of water so vast that three months’ exploration left the
work unfinished; but it was pretty clear that no way through to the
Pacific existed in that direction.
Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed
and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months.
They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set the
ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The
homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their
captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a
boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last,
professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay
if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to
keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though
ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still
bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.
[Illustration]
_Towing through the Ice—1600_
Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to
find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had
another aim—they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of
North America, a way by which the wealth of the great North-west might
be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St.
Lawrence route.
Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and
Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.
The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the
Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to
fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the
Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even
cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without
muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed,
and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.
At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived
Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about
seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins
in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy
to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their
wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but
only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his
feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian
“father and mother” ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the
tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a “good mixer” he became
quite popular with his redskinned companions.
In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into
the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York.
At Fort Orange, or Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town
of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few
months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada,
where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape
from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could
satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had
travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians
had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless
plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no
doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up
there in the north.
Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard
Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658,
paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and
down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in
the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown
river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered
the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red
man of the West looked on a white man’s face.
The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always
breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as
yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if
bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had
heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for
these Sioux were already wearing European beads which must have been
brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to
tribe.
The two young Frenchmen travelled for months over the plains. They saw
the buffalo and hunted them; the swift and graceful antelope as well.
How far west they got we do not know. They heard from the Indians of a
range of mountains beyond the sunset; but then, circling south and east
again, they set out for home. There they arrived, after two years’
absence, and had a tremendous welcome, not only from their families, but
from the Governor of the Colony at Quebec. That was because they had
brought home with them a wealth of furs; and skins were very scarce, for
the Iroquois so infested the country around that friendly tribes dared
not venture down to the settlement with their catch. The Iroquois
themselves had no trouble in selling all they caught to the English, who
had been settling in New England for thirty years and more.
In New France, the fur trade was a strict monopoly. The Government had
given the privilege of dealing in furs to a company, and any one else
daring to buy skins without a license was severely punished. When
Radisson and Groseillers asked leave to start on another journey to the
north and west, the officer in command at Three Rivers refused to let
them go, because they would not promise him half their catch. They
started in spite of him. This time they kept farther to the north, and
reached the country beyond Lake Superior, where they built the pioneer
fort of the West. They spent the winter travelling among the Crees, the
Sioux in the south, and the Assiniboines up in Manitoba. All the tribes
were eager to exchange their furs for guns, knives, beads, and other
European wares; and when the travellers got back east they brought an
enormous quantity of precious fur along with them.
The Governor of the Colony seized nearly the whole of it!
Disgusted with this treatment, Groseillers went over to France and tried
to get help in fitting out an expedition to the forbidden West through
Hudson Bay; but all his persuasions failed. He and his brother-in-law
then went to England, where they were warmly welcomed. By this time
several English ships had explored Hudson Bay, and many people were
ready to put their money into a venture which promised to capture the
fur trade of the West without interference from the French of “Canada.”
King Charles himself was much interested in the two young Frenchmen’s
scheme, and so was his cousin, Prince Rupert. A royal charter was given
in 1670 to the Prince and a few other noblemen and commoners, who thus
formed the “Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Radisson
and Groseillers were sent out in English ships, and helped to establish
forts at the southern end of the Bay.
Thus the Hudson’s Bay Company started on its great trading enterprise,
which continues to this day.
Unfortunately, when rival French traders came overland from Quebec and
drew away much of the Indian trade, the English Company’s chief officer
suspected his two French comrades of playing into the hands of their
fellow-countrymen. Radisson went back to England to defend himself. The
Company’s chiefs were convinced that the charge against him was false;
but as they would only pay him $500 a year for his services he was
tempted back to France, where he became a naval officer. Groseillers
also was forgiven by the French, and returned to his people at Three
Rivers.
Presently both the brothers-in-law went off again to Hudson Bay, this
time in French vessels, but in competition with a powerful and jealous
French company; and on the return of the expedition to Quebec their furs
were confiscated. They appealed to the French Government against this,
but could not get justice. Radisson went back to England, made several
more voyages to the Bay, and the last we know of him is that in his old
age he had a pension of $250 a year from the Hudson’s Bay Company.
He “died poor,” as we say, after making other men’s fortunes. Poor in
money, yes; but the men who took the money he made are forgotten, and he
will always be remembered as one of our greatest explorers. He had two
ambitions, to discover new lands, and to make money by trade. He failed
in one, but succeeded brilliantly in the other. A man with two such
different aims can hardly ever succeed in both; and Radisson won the aim
he most desired. His life was hard, but not poor—far richer than a soft
life could have been.
CHAPTER IV
The Reign of King Beaver
THE KING of the West was no longer the buffalo. From the time the
Company opened its first fort on the Bay, the beaver was king; and his
reign lasted two hundred years. White men and red alike, all were his
servants. They served him for what they could get out of him, as
courtiers often did with human kings in days not long ago.
The buffalo remained the chief food and house-material used by the
plainsmen themselves, but its skin was not so easy to sell as the
beaver’s. To be sure, it had a cash value. Early in the eighteenth
century we hear of a French company building many posts in the
Mississippi Valley, to make fortunes by this “neglected” trade; and they
collected 15,000 skins in one season. Many of us can remember the
buffalo robe and coat in common use, down east, and their popularity was
well deserved. Nevertheless, the Indians dealing with the fur traders
found the beaver both lighter to carry and in greater demand.
A wonderful monarch the beaver was—an architect, an engineer, an expert
lumberman. So clever was he in damming up streams, felling trees and
building lodges, that ignorant people came to believe anything of him.
He was described as walking on his hind legs and carrying a log on his
shoulder.
“Their Nests, very artificial, are six Stories high,” says John Ogilby,
Esq., in a big book published the year after the foundation of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, 1771. Now John Ogilby was a man of authority, “His
Majesty’s Cosmographer, Geographick Printer and Master of the Revels in
the Kingdom of Ireland.” Yet in one of his pictures the beaver is shown
at the feet of a Unicorn (ridden by an eagle) which seems to have leapt
off the Royal Coat of Arms. This beast, “seen sometimes on the Borders
of Canada,” Mr. Ogilby says, has “cloven Feet, shaggy Mayn, one Horn
just on their Forehead, a Tail like that of a wild Hog, black Eyes, and
a Deer’s Neck: it feeds in the nearest Wildernesses.” The males at a
certain season “grow so ravenous that they not onely devour other
Beasts, but also one another.”
The beaver’s performances alive were nothing compared to the wonders his
dead body was supposed to work. A waxy material, called castoreum, was
taken from it and used as medicine for madness, deafness, stomach-ache
and all other aches, pleurisy and sciatica, weak sight and hiccoughs,
tumors and abscesses; it killed fleas, and there was “nothing like it
for gout”; it put people to sleep, and kept them from getting sleepy; it
was even said to bring back lost memory. The fat was prescribed for
asthma, giddiness and apoplexy; the skin, for bed sores and consumption;
the hair, to stop bleeding.
It was the precious castoreum that men chiefly hunted the beaver for, in
ancient times. One of the ridiculous stories then believed was that the
clever animal used to cut out its own castoreum glands and throw them to
the hunter, who would then let it escape.
[Illustration]
_The Voyageurs’ Way_
_to the West_
[Illustration: _Chief Poundmaker_]
[Illustration: _Chief Piapot_]
[Illustration]
_Beaver at Work_
[Illustration]
_Left to Right: Beaver Hat, 1820_
_Clerical Beaver, 18th Century_
_Paris Beau, 1815_
[Illustration]
_The Beaver and the Unicorn_
The beaver’s long, sharp-edged teeth were used as chisels by the
Indians, before the white man brought in iron and steel. The meat I have
spoken of already; some of my western readers know its taste well. It is
something like tender pork; the choicest morsel, the tail, makes fine
bacon. The animal used often to be roasted whole, in the skin, till its
fur became too valuable to burn.
The French fur traders found their best market in Russia and Poland; but
the fur-wearing fashion “caught on” in France itself, and spread to
England. Then it was found that the shorter hairs of the beaver made the
finest felt, and beaver hats of many shapes became the rage. When
English hatters took to mixing cheap rabbit fur with the more expensive
material, a law was passed forbidding them to use anything but beaver.
If silk had not taken its place, in the last century, the beaver would
probably have been hunted out of existence in Canada. It disappeared
from England hundreds of years ago, and very few are now left in
northern Europe and Siberia. Even when the beaver’s fur was no longer
wanted for felting, and there was choice of many fur animals for other
purposes of luxurious clothing, it was still greatly sought after, and a
few years ago the beaver was disappearing. Then Canadian governments
forbade its capture for a while, and to-day our beaver colonies are
growing fast.
Look back now to the day when the beaver first became King of the
West—when the Company settled on the shores of the Bay.
The domain granted by Charles the Second to this company included “all
the lands, countries, and territories upon the coasts and confines” of
“all those seas, straits, bays, rivers, lakes, creeks and sounds lying
within the entrance of Hudson’s Straits,” excepting only such land as
might be in the possession of other Christian nations. As we look on the
map we see that the area thus granted included not only a strip of land
two or three hundred miles wide around the eastern and southern shores
of Hudson Bay, but an empire of forest and prairie stretching westward
to the Rocky Mountains, where the Saskatchewan had its sources—a
thousand miles across.
Over the whole of this territory of “Rupert’s Land” the Company was to
reign. Some of its powers were greater than the king himself dared to
exercise in the mother-country. An absolute monopoly of trade; power to
make laws, inflict punishment, plant colonies, build towns and forts,
maintain armies—all these were conferred on Prince Rupert and his
partners; and, to crown all, no British subject was so much as to set
foot on the soil of Rupert’s Land without the Company’s written leave.
The reason given for this imperial grant was that the Adventurers had
“at theire owne great cost and charge undertaken an Expedition for the
discovery of a new Passage into the South Sea, and for the finding some
Trade for Furrs, Mineralls, and other considerable Commodityes,” by
which the king hoped for “very great advantage” to himself and his
kingdom. As rent for the whole vast domain the Company was to pay his
Majesty “two elks and two black beavers” per annum.
* * * * *
For many years the Company had no idea of the size of its domain, and
made no attempt to occupy even the best-known districts of the interior.
The Indians from hundreds of miles up country brought their annual catch
of furs to the Company’s posts on the Bay.
The scene when one of these yearly parties appeared was picturesque, but
not altogether pleasant. Pitching their camp outside the palisade of the
fort, the red men celebrated their arrival by drinking as much of the
white men’s spirits as they could get. Although the liquor, for economy
and for safety, was plentifully mixed with water, trading was out of the
question for two or three days.
When the Indians were ready for business they were admitted to the fort
with their bundles of furs. Each skin was carefully examined, and the
price decided on was paid in the form of little notched sticks or
quills. With these counters each red man passed on into another room,
where axes, guns, blankets, mirrors, beads, trinkets, and all the other
useful or useless objects of an Indian’s desire were spread before him.
Everything was priced in beaver-skins, not in shillings or dollars. A
price list dated 1733 shows that one beaver would then buy a brass
kettle or twelve ounces of colored beads, a pound and a half of
gunpowder or two pounds of sugar, two combs or twelve needles, a pair of
shoes or two looking glasses, eight knives or two hatchets. If the
Indian asked the price of a blanket, he was told “Six Beaver.” He could
get a gallon of brandy, at that time, for four beaver. He paid ten or
twelve beaver for a gun, four for a pistol, three for a pair of breeches
or two handkerchiefs.
These were the prices at the southern forts, Albany and Moose River,
under competition. The Company charged higher prices in the north, as
they frankly said—“The French being not so near these places, and
therefore can’t interfere with the Company’s trade so much as they do at
Albany and Moose River, where they undersell the Company, and by that
means carry off the most valuable furs.”
When the last skin had been turned into the store, and the last counter
had been exchanged for British goods, the tribesmen vanished away into
the wilderness, and the piles of furs were sorted and packed for the
ocean voyage. Every summer a single London ship sailed into the Bay,
discharged her cargo of provisions for the white men and merchandise for
the red, filled her hold with the precious “peltries,” and sped away
home before the early winter barred the straits with ice.
If the Company had only had the Indians to reckon with, it might have
gone on gathering the furry harvest of the West with imperial ease. But,
as we have seen, there were other white men in America who had no notion
of submitting to such a monopoly. The King of France claimed as his own
the territory that King Charles had given away. Several times before the
close of the seventeenth century the French raided the Bay and captured
or destroyed the English forts, coming overland from Canada and also
sailing round through Hudson Straits. In 1697, France and England being
at war, five ships swooped down upon Fort York, at the mouth of Nelson
River, and captured the place after defeating three English vessels. A
peace treaty, signed that same year, left England with only one little
foot-hold on Hudson Bay, at Fort Albany. It was sixteen years before
another treaty, at the end of another war, restored the whole of the
north land to the English King and Company.
There was no end, even then, to the furious competition of the French
fur-buyers. If it had been only the official French Company, that would
have been bad enough; but swarms of independent French traders were
bidding against both the French Company and the English.
These men were outlaws. Flogging, and branding with red-hot irons, were
the mildest of the penalties decreed against the “free traders” by their
own French Government. Yet the temptation of fortunes to be made by fur
proved stronger than all the risks. Hundreds of young men took to the
woods, and spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp to another,
living as the Indians lived, and buying up in advance the skins which
should have gone down to the Company at Quebec. At one time, when the
whole population of the French colony was only about 10,000, as many as
800 men were away in the forest, defying the King and his officers.
These “coureurs de bois,” or forest-runners, were protected not only by
the forest hiding them, but often by the very officials who were
supposed to be hunting them down. Many officials were quite ready to
take big bribes from the outlaws. The Governor himself went in for
unlawful trading on a large scale, in secret partnership with outlaws
who smuggled the beaver-skins over to the English colonists in the
south.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1731, a French army captain named Pierre de la
Vérendrye—Canadian born, he was—set out from Montreal for the West.
Like most of the earlier explorers, French or English, he was keen to
discover an outlet to the Western Ocean. The Governor gave his full
consent—but he would give nothing more. Some of the merchants were then
persuaded to “stake” the expedition, supplying Vérendrye with goods to
trade for furs in all the unknown lands he was to discover. The captain
took with him his three sons, the youngest only sixteen, and a nephew as
second in command, besides a dozen soldiers and a band of Indians.
It was a long and tragic journey. At the western end of Lake of the
Woods, Vérendrye built a fort among the Crees. Some of these Indians one
day fired on a party of Sioux, and then pretended that the French had
done it. In revenge, the Sioux set upon a French detachment, on its way
to fetch up supplies from Michilimackinac, and killed every man,
including a priest and the explorer’s eldest son. The merchants at home
in Canada were grumbling because the cargoes sent down to them were not
as large as they had expected, and jealous rivals falsely accused
Vérendrye of keeping some of the furs for himself. More than once he had
to go back east before he could get enough goods for trading.
At last, in the February of 1737, he got as far as the south end of Lake
Winnipeg, where his sons had already built a fort. The year after, he
made his way up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine and
established a trading post—Fort Rouge, now part of the city of
Winnipeg. Pressing on to the West, he built another fort at Portage la
Prairie, where Indians bound for Hudson Bay used to lift their canoes
from the Assiniboine for the overland carry to Lake Manitoba.
Surely the ocean could not be far away now! Montreal was fifteen hundred
miles behind him in the East—how could he know that the ocean of his
dreams was still nearly as far again to the West? The Assiniboines knew
nothing of such a sea, but they had heard tales of it through the
Mandans, farther south. Southward, accordingly, the captain marched for
a month and a half across the plains, till he found the Mandans on the
Missouri River. But even they could only tell him a vague story of white
men in armor who were said to have built stone houses beside salt water,
somewhere away in the south-west—the Spaniards, perhaps, on the Pacific
coast of Mexico.
Back to the north tramped the disappointed captain over the snowy plain,
and spent the rest of the winter among the Assiniboines; but his sons
made one excursion to the unknown country north-west. There they
discovered two more great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, and
started a trading post where the rivers joined. In the spring their
father had once more to make his weary way to Montreal, where the
discontented merchants had refused to send him any fresh goods, and even
threatened to seize his property for goods already supplied. He never
saw the West again. It was years before he succeeded in getting leave to
make another expedition, and then it was too late—he died in Montreal
in the midst of his preparations.
His two sons, Pierre and François, meanwhile, had done their best to
carry on his work. They pushed on to the West, visiting one tribe after
another who had never seen a white man before, and came at last to an
encampment of the Bow Indians. Now the Bows were just sending a war
party out against a tribe still farther West, so the Frenchmen went on
with them, over the high plateau of Montana, and at last, one day early
in 1743, as they travelled they saw rising above the horizon a beautiful
range of snowy peaks.
They had discovered the Rocky Mountains. If they could only climb that
range, they thought, they would see the long-sought ocean spreading out
below their feet on the other side. The Indians, however, flatly refused
to go on. Not finding the tribe they had come to fight, the Bows hurried
back home, fearing the enemy would get there ahead of them; and the
disappointed brothers had to go with the rest.
The bravery and dogged perseverance of Vérendrye and his sons had thrown
open a new world, the prairie and woodland of the West; and their
fellow-countrymen pressed in to reap the profits of its trade. While the
English Company’s officers sat waiting for the Indians to bring their
furs down to the Bay, the French traders pressed farther and farther
west and north, buying up the furs themselves.
The Indians living far inland, though eager for the white man’s
wonderful wares, did not like making the long journey to the Bay.
Sometimes they nearly starved before they got there; sometimes they were
kept at home by fear of attack from hostile tribes.
The first white man who ventured inland from the Bay and tried to
overcome their hesitation did so without orders. Henry Kellsey was just
a lad who had made particular friends of Indians around Port Nelson. The
Governor did not like this, and punished him. Henry ran off, joined a
party of Indians, and after a year or so came back with an Indian wife.
He was forgiven, and the Company was glad to employ him after that, “to
call, encourage and invite the remoter Indians to a trade with us.”
Half a century later, another adventurous young Englishman, named
Anthony Hendry, was sent off on the same errand; and he was the first
white man to explore the great plain between the North and South
Saskatchewan. There for the first time Indians were discovered hunting
buffalo on horseback, near the Red Deer River, and Anthony hunted with
them. These were the Blackfeet. They used pads of buffalo skin for
saddles, with stirrups of the same leather.
When he had smoked the pipe of peace, Hendry asked the Chief to send his
young men down to the Bay, promising guns, ammunition, “and everything
else they desire,” in return for beaver and wolf skins. But the chief
said his men could neither paddle canoes nor live on fish; they could
only travel on horseback, and needed buffalo meat. Besides, they did not
want guns—bows and arrows were all they needed. It was not very long
before they changed their minds.
Hendry spent a whole winter in the park lands, which he found swarming
with beaver and otter. The Indians, however, would never go hunting till
they were actually short of supplies. Even when the cold weather was
coming on and many had not furs enough for winter clothing, they would
spend their time feasting and dancing to the music of the tom-tom.
In spite of all the Company’s invitations, it could not keep the Indians
from staying at home and selling furs to the more enterprising French
traders who came to their very doors. At the French Fort de la Corne, on
the Saskatchewan, Hendry found Captain de la Corne himself; and, the
Englishman says, “I am certain he hath got above one thousand of the
richest skins.”
Yes, and very soon British traders were doing the same—especially
Scotsmen, who flocked over when King Louis gave up Canada to King
George.
The Company found that its easy-going habit of staying on the sea-shore
did not pay. Easy-going habits don’t. Besides, other British merchants,
who wanted to get into Hudson Bay and share its trade, began to
complain. They said: “The Company only got the privilege of keeping all
the trade to itself because it made big promises, to attempt the
discovery of the North-west Passage to Asia, and to search for minerals
as well as fur. It has not kept its promises.”
Something more had to be done, the Company saw that. So it sent off one
of its best men, Samuel Hearne, on an exploring trip inland from Prince
of Wales Fort, at the mouth of Churchill River. He set out in November,
1769, with two other white men and four Indians; but the Indians
deserted, and he had to come back. In February he started again, and got
up into the “barren lands,” where his party nearly starved. At last he
came upon the herd of caribou on their spring procession from the
woodlands in the west where they had spent the winter. Meat was now
plentiful; but the explorer’s quadrant was broken, and without that
instrument he would not be able to put his route on the map for future
travellers; so again he had to turn back. It was nearly the end of
November when he reached the Fort.
After such hardships he must have been greatly tempted to stay there
until spring. But no; he would not rest until he had won the double goal
he had set before him. He was bent on reaching a mysterious river, where
Indians said that enormous masses of copper were found; and as the river
was believed to flow north he hoped it would lead him to an unknown
sea-way uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. If he waited till
spring for his next start, he could not reach that sea before winter,
when it would all be hidden under ice. So, after only twelve days’ rest,
he plunged once more into the wilderness, alone with five Indians.
It was a year and a half before his white comrades saw him again. Now,
however, he had great things to tell. He had not only found the
Coppermine River, but had followed it down and down to its very mouth.
There at last, on the 17th of July, he had looked out upon the Arctic
Sea. It was truly the North-west Passage, or one of the North-west
Passages, that lay before his eyes, for its waters connect with both
oceans, east and west; but he could not be sure of that. Indeed it took
a hundred years more of exploration to prove the fact.
The young explorer had a bitter experience in the far north, the country
of the Eskimo. These “Usquemows,” as the old travellers called them,
were an interesting and generally harmless folk. Captain Coats gives a
quaint description of them, as he used to see them on his many voyages
through Hudson Straits: “Bold, robust, hardy people, undaunted,
masculine men, no tokens of poverty or want, with great, fat, flatt,
greazy faces, little black piercing eyes, good teeth, lank, black,
matted hair, with little hands and feet, under proportion; a well made
back and shoulders; loyns, buttocks and haunces well fortified; thighs
are pretty full, but their legs taper to a little foot.” The women, he
says, are “very fair when free from greese, very submissive to their
men, very tender of their children, and are indefatigable in the
gew-gaws to please their men and children,”—little ivory toys carved
like fishes, fowls, animals, people, ships and boats.
The Indians, however, had “no use for” the Eskimo, except to raid and
rob and kill them. A band of Indians who had joined Hearne’s party,
apparently for this very object, attacked an Eskimo village, without the
slightest provocation, while the people were asleep in their tents, and
slaughtered them, men, women and children. The horrified white man tried
to stop the massacre, but the Indians pushed him aside. The Eskimo had
furs, the white men wanted furs, and the Indians thought it unreasonable
for a white man to object if they got those furs by murder.
As for the mountains of copper which the Indians had described, Hearne
found only “a jumble of rocks and gravel,” and the best specimen he
could find was a lump of ore weighing about four pounds.
Coming back from the Arctic, on Christmas Eve he found himself looking
out upon a vast lake which no white man had seen before and few have
seen since. We know it on the map as Great Slave Lake. In Hearne’s time,
buffalo beyond numbering roamed the plains up to its southern shore. He
spent the rest of the winter among the Indians, and when spring came a
party of them accompanied him down to the fort on Hudson Bay.
From this time forward the Company sent its officers back into the
country that Hearne had explored, and other parts of the interior, where
they built trading forts on the shores of many a river and lake. Fort
Cumberland was the first of them, on the lower Saskatchewan. The trade
picked up, but if the Company thought it would now be allowed to have
things all its own way it was much mistaken. The revolutionary war broke
out between the British colonists down east and the Mother Country. The
King of France, though he ruled his own people with tyranny and hated
the idea of popular freedom, hated England more, and he was delighted to
help anyone who would injure her. So, while his soldiers were sent over
to help the American colonists on land, his sailors raided Hudson Bay,
where they captured, looted and destroyed the English Company’s forts.
Hearne was by this time in command of Fort Prince of Wales, but his
handful of clerks and traders could do nothing against three ships of
war.
The next year, 1783, ended the war between the nations; but the trade
war between the Company and the other fur traders went on more bitterly
than ever. A rival “North West Company” was formed by Scottish merchants
down in Canada, who engaged many of the French “voyageurs” and “coureurs
de bois,” and their half-Indian sons, and sent them out skirmishing for
trade and building forts among the tribes of the far west. The old
Company met the competition by building more forts and organizing on its
own account more bands of hardy Frenchmen and “Métis”—the name given to
men of mingled French and Indian blood.
* * * * *
The names of three great western rivers, the Mackenzie, the Thompson and
the Fraser, still remind us that some of the North West Company’s men
were famous explorers as well as traders.
Alexander Mackenzie, a young Scot from the Hebrides, was the officer in
charge of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca. With the old dream of the
North-west Passage in his mind, he set off on the 2nd of June, 1789, to
descend a river flowing from the lake towards the north. His little
flotilla of canoes presently came out on another lake, the Great Slave.
Following its shores to the West, Mackenzie found the water at last
pouring out to form another river. This he followed day after day,
starting at three or four every morning, till the stream widened out
into a bay of many islands, where the tide rose and fell and whales were
playing. It was only the 14th of July, but the homeward journey would be
against the current, and the freeze-up would come early. Mackenzie
swiftly turned his back on the Arctic Sea, and reached his fort on the
12th of September. His tremendous dash had carried him nearly 3,000
miles in 102 days.
This adventure by no means took the edge off his appetite for
exploration. As he had proved that Mackenzie River did not flow to the
Pacific Ocean, he made up his mind to get there some other way. In 1793,
early in May, he once more left Lake Athabasca behind, and this time
steered his canoes up the Peace River to its source in the mountains. He
crossed the divide, and began to descend an unknown stream, but as this
only flowed south he struck over land to the west, and on the 22nd of
July came out on salt water, near Bella Coola. He had then only twenty
pounds of pemmican left, with fifteen of rice and six of flour, for his
party of ten; but they managed to get safely home to the fort after a
month’s hard travel across the mountains. Mackenzie’s troubles had been
many and great, from cataract and precipice, from hostile Indians and
cowardly guides; but he won the fame of the first man to cross the whole
width of the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.
In 1806, the year after Trafalgar, the young Welshman, David Thompson,
another of this Company’s officers, went up the North Saskatchewan to
Rocky Mountain House and across the Rockies to the Columbia. He spent
several years exploring the mountains and establishing posts for trade,
and at last descended the whole length of the Columbia to the Pacific.
At the mouth of the river he found that another party had got there
ahead of him, and had built a fort under the flag of the United States.
As a matter of fact, two explorers named Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark had reached that point in 1806, being the first white men to cross
the height of land from the Missouri to the coast. The fort had been
established five years later by a trading expedition sent round Cape
Horn from New York by John Jacob Astor. It was captured by the North
West Company’s men during the War of 1812, and Astor allowed the Company
to buy out his rights; but later on, as we shall see, it was decided
that this part of the coast should belong to the United States.
The North West Company meanwhile had sent young Simon Fraser up into the
mountains to discover the true course of the river which Mackenzie had
left because it seemed to go south instead of west. It was supposed to
be the head waters of the Columbia. Fraser and a brother Scot, John
Stuart, began by building little forts for trade. One of these, where
the mysterious river was joined by the Nechaco, he called Fort George,
after the King. There he embarked on one of the most perilous voyages
ever undertaken. With Stuart, and Jules Maurice Quesnel, nineteen
voyageurs and two Indians, in four birch-bark canoes, he trusted himself
to a torrent of which he knew nothing except that Indians living on its
banks declared no man could ever get through alive. Running rapids where
the chances were ten to one for death, clinging with heavy loads on
their backs to the precipitous walls of canyons when the raging torrent
absolutely compelled a portage, building new bark canoes when the old
were smashed beyond repair, those brave men came out at last on smooth
water where the tides of the Pacific rose and fell. Near where they
landed, the city of New Westminster now stands. They had explored the
whole length of the Fraser River, which to-day thrills even railway
travellers in the safety of an observation car.
* * * * *
The dangers conquered by these brave young men were great enough; but,
after all, it was only the grim force of nature they had to fight as
they broke their way through the mountains, with some little trouble now
and then from timid guides and suspicious bands of Indians. Back on the
plains and woodlands in the heart of the continent, there was danger of
another kind, and a most disgraceful one. The two companies were
practically at war.
In a “civilized” land, with the law wide awake, unscrupulous competitors
have to be satisfied with slower methods of ruining each other. In the
wild west of our fathers’ time the voice of civilization was feeble, and
law was laughed at. The passion of gain was free to indulge its natural
tendency to crime. Parties of rival traders, meeting in solitudes where
no witnesses were to be feared, fought out their differences with gun
and hatchet.
All the trickery of war was brought into play as well as its violence.
At some points both companies had trading posts, and the rival traders
now and then entertained each other in quite a neighborly way. Once the
Hudson’s Bay men, having discovered that an Indian hunting party had
just returned to its camp forty miles away, invited the Nor’-westers to
a dance, and kept them revelling while four Hudson’s Bay sledges dashed
away over the snow and bought up the whole of the catch. Next day the
Nor’-westers heard of the same hunting party and made the same long
journey, hoping to do a big trade, but came back, of course,
empty-handed and full of wrath.
[Illustration]
_In a Swift Current_
[Illustration]
_On the Winter Highway_
[Illustration]
_Lord Selkirk,_
_Father of Western Settlement_
[Illustration]
_Fort Douglas, (in background),_
_Where Winnipeg Now Stands_
The Nor’-westers hid their anger, and watched for a chance to pay off
the score. A party of them, on their way to an Indian camp, met a
Hudson’s Bay party bound in the same direction. They started a camp
fire, and began talking and drinking in the friendliest way. The Bay men
took all that was offered them; but the wily Nor’-westers only sipped
their liquor and secretly poured the rest on the snow. At last the Bay
men fell asleep. The Nor’-westers then tied them on their sledges and
whipped up the dog teams, which carried the sleepers safely home to
their fort, while their sober rivals went on to the Indian camp and got
the whole of the furs.
Many deeds of violence remained hidden in the breasts of the
perpetrators. Of those that came to light, the most notorious was the
“Battle of Seven Oaks,” or “Red River Massacre,” in 1816.
* * * * *
It was the foundation of the first white settlement in the West that led
to that shocking event.
Until 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been steadily opposed to any
colonizing of its land. A permanent white population, it thought, would
injure the fur trade. The Company’s officials even declared, and some of
them doubtless believed, that the country was unfit for settlement or
cultivation. But Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, who was Governor
of the Company in 1811, knew better. He had already, in 1803, taken
oversea a party of poor Scottish Highlanders, who established a colony
in Prince Edward Island, and a little later he tried to start a
settlement in Ontario. Seeing prospects of greater success in the West,
he and his relations bought a majority of the Hudson’s Bay shares, and
so controlled the whole of the Company’s operations. His next step was
to buy from the Company 116,000 square miles of land, stretching north
and south across Manitoba into Dakota and Minnesota, and including the
present site of Winnipeg, where the Assiniboine flows into Red River.
The pioneers of western settlement sailed from Glasgow for Hudson Bay on
July 26, 1811, but met “boisterous, stormy and cold weather,” and it was
two months before they cast anchor at York Factory. There, though
unskilled with the axe, they built log huts and spent the winter.
Starting in boats for the next stage of their pilgrimage on July 6, up
Hayes River and through Lake Winnipeg, it took them nearly as long to
reach their Red River home as it had taken to cross the sea. They
arrived on the 30th of August, and the first land was broken for crop
that fall. Other parties meanwhile were coming out to join them, mostly
from the north of Scotland and the Hebridean Isles, but some from
Ireland too.
The North West Company did not like its rival’s new colony, and its
hostility flamed up at last in the “Pemmican War,” which came about in
this way.
The settlers, until they could raise food for themselves, had to live
chiefly on the buffalo. The North West Company’s men, however, had been
used to drawing their supplies of pemmican largely from the same
district, and as the Company’s Métis were skilled hunters the food
supply of the colony was in danger. An order was made that no pemmican
should be taken away from Lord Selkirk’s land. The Métis disobeyed the
order, chased the buffalo out of reach of the settlers, and went on
shipping pemmican out to the North West Company’s trading posts. The
quarrel grew more and more fierce, and the Nor’-westers resolved to
drive the Selkirk settlers out of the country. They burned the
farmhouses and other buildings, destroyed the crops, and chased off any
settlers who refused to go. “The Colony is gone to the Devil,” as one of
the conquerors wrote.
The colonists came back to their devastated farms, however, or some of
them did, and the old Company tried to give them better protection. The
enemy organized a force, including Métis and Indians, for a fresh
attack. The Hudson’s Bay commander, Governor Semple, went out to meet
them, but his party was surrounded. The Governor and a score of the
settlers were killed, and the rest were either captured or put to
flight. So ended the “Battle of Seven Oaks.” Lord Selkirk sent up
reinforcements, and many of the original settlers went back to restore
their ruined homes; some of their descendants are still to be found in
the neighborhood; but for half a century no fresh attempt was made to
colonize the West.
The worst effects of all that fierce competition between the companies,
unfortunately, fell not on the rivals, but on the native races for whose
custom both were struggling. Each side made strenuous efforts to win
over the tribes, and one of the principal attractions offered was
“fire-water.” The red man is even more easily maddened and destroyed by
alcohol than the white, and with spirits thrust upon them at every turn
the Indians were plunging headlong to ruin, when the murderous
competition suddenly stopped. The two companies had become
sensitive—not in the heart, but in the pocket—to the evil effects of
their feud. In 1821, Lord Selkirk having died, the Nor’-westers made
terms and even joined forces with their rivals.
The Hudson’s Bay Company, freed from the dangers and losses of
competition, and reinforced by the Scots who had fought them so
fiercely, began a fresh career of peace and profit. In the same year its
privilege of trading monopoly was extended to cover—for twenty-one
years—the mountains and valleys and islands of what we call British
Columbia, in addition to the plains and forests of the interior, an
extension which was renewed in 1838 for a term to end in 1859. The
Company’s rule now stretched from the Atlantic end of Hudson Strait to
the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
* * * * *
Dotted at long intervals over the Company’s 2,800,000 square miles of
earth stood the forts where the furs were collected, and where the
authority of civilization was exercised by traders largely recruited
from the Orkney Islands. These young men, entering the Company’s service
as clerks, gradually made their way up till they became chief factors or
chief traders. Forty per cent. of the Company’s annual profit was
divided among these officers. The profits were very high, for the goods
sold by the Company cost a mere trifle compared to the value of the furs
received from the Indians in payment.
Even with such a partnership in prospect, the young men found the life
at first very hard to bear. They were cut off not only from home but
from all the social and religious observances which ordinary colonists
take with them from one land to another. No towns were allowed to spring
up. The Company’s men, and the families of mixed race clustering around
the fort, grew vegetables for their own use; but the rest of the
territory was a gigantic game preserve, jealously guarded against the
intrusion of settlers.
A postal service had been organized by the company, but to many a fort
the mail only came once a year, and letters were months old when
delivered. Communication was not difficult—that is to say, there were
no great physical obstacles, at any rate till the Rocky Mountains were
reached; there were rivers navigable by big boats from the Mountains to
the Bay, though broken in the east by rapids where the boats had to be
hauled up by ropes on the way back; there were easy trails over the
prairie—pony and ox carts used to ply between Edmonton and Winnipeg, a
thousand miles; and in winter dog sledges and men on snowshoes could
glide in all directions over the frozen land; yet the immensity of the
distances to be covered made travelling intolerably slow.
* * * * *
They rarely visited their homes in Scotland, these hardy fur traders.
Even those who came down to the forts on Hudson Bay, where the fur bales
were loaded in ships for the old country, knew that they could not cross
the sea and come back in the same year. And the voyage was perilous as
well as long—no one could ever tell how long it might be.
The Bay itself, though not free from risk, was the easiest part of the
way. Getting into the Straits, and through them, and out at the other
end—that was the fearful part of it. The Arctic ice was bad enough by
itself; but masses of rocky ice hurled about by furious storms, or
tossed to and fro on racing tides, made navigation terrible, and when a
blinding fog fell on the turbulent sea the sailors were helpless.
Captain Coats, who for twenty-four years commanded ships sailing between
England and Hudson Bay, from 1727 to 1751, wrote the story of his
experiences for the benefit of his sons, who had taken up his own
adventurous trade. “The tides,” he says, are “so violent and surprising,
especially when disturbed and distracted by ice, that nothing but
experience can comprehend or imagine.” An ordinary spring tide “rises
near 30 foot all along the streights,” “boyling up in eddies and
whirlpools in a most amazing manner,” and “shattering in shivers immense
bodys of ice.” In 1727, near the meridian of Cape Farewell, “two pieces
of ice shutt upon us and sunk our ship.” In 1736 he was “entangled in
ice which shutt upon us, by the tides only (for it was dead calm) and
crushed our sides in, and sunk her in 20 minutes.”
A vessel had to leave England by May 20 to be sure of reaching the mouth
of Hudson Straits by 6th July, and then the trouble began. One year the
captain tried six times to enter the straits, from the 1st to the 12th
of July, and had to stand out to sea every time.
“Sometimes,” he says, “in favorable seasons, we have entred the
streights sooner.” Once he got in by June 26, “and got up with great
labour about 60 degrees, but there we found such banks and walls of ice
from side to side that we did little or nothing untill the 20th July.”
And “as it is very hazardous to enter the streights before the beginning
of July, for ice, so it is dangerous to be in that bay after the middle
of September; the gales of wind and snow setts in for a continuence,
with very short calm intervals; the severe frost are such that you
cannot work a ship;” there are “violent piercing winds, which no
creature can face for a continuence.” Even on shore, at the forts,
“those terrible snowdrifts and dark condensed foggs are hardly to be
guarded against.” “So apprehensive are our people of being caught out in
those frightful drifts that they never suffer a stranger to go a bow
shott from the palisades without a person of experience with them.”
When steamers took the place of sailing ships, the length and the risk
of the voyage were greatly reduced, but nothing could abolish the “dark
condensed foggs” and “immense bodys of ice” in Hudson Straits.
Far less dangerous and disagreeable was the inland water route by which
the North-west Company sent its furs down to Montreal—the route opened
up by the old French explorers; but no risk could be much worse than a
sudden storm when the traders came out on the lakes in their boats and
canoes. There were plenty of other hardships too, on that long voyage;
yet there were plenty of hardy French voyageurs to undertake and even
enjoy the adventure.
Others made the adventure too, on occasion. Sir George Simpson, the
young Scot who was made Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on its
union with the North-west Company in 1821, made the long trip from
Montreal to Manitoba about forty times. He travelled in state, with a
Highland piper to rouse the echoes and excite the wondering awe of the
natives when he was nearing an outpost.
A lively picture of the West is given us by Paul Kane, who undertook
that journey in 1846, not as a trader but as an artist. Paul Kane set
out, as he tells us, “with no companions but my portfolio and box of
paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition,” to make pictures of Indian
life and “the scenery of an almost unknown country.”
Such a journey as it was! Leaving Toronto on the 9th of May, he reached
“Fort Vancouver,” ninety miles from the mouth of the Columbia River—now
in the States, but then “the largest port in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
Dominions”—only on the 8th of December.
From the head of Lake Superior he had to travel practically all the way
by canoe, though occasionally on horseback. His route lay through the
Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, up the North
Saskatchewan to Edmonton House, up the Athabasca to Jasper’s, across the
Yellowhead Pass—through which the Canadian National Railway now
runs—then down the whole length of the Columbia, by the Arrow Lakes and
Fort Okanagan.
At Edmonton he found quite “a large establishment,” forty or fifty men,
with their wives and children, amounting altogether to about 139, all
living within the pickets of the fort. The men were occupied chiefly in
building the company’s boats, sawing timber and cutting up firewood. The
women, all, without exception, either Indian or Métis, were employed
making moccasins and clothing for the men, and converting buffalo meat
into “pimmi-kon.”
The one real settlement in the whole of the West was that of Fort Garry,
extending about 50 miles along the banks of the Red River, and “back
from the water, according to the original grant from the Indians, as far
as a person can distinguish a man from a horse on a clear day.” Here
lived about 6,000 Métis, all speaking Cree and French, though “governed
by a chief named Grant.”
The white folk, about 3,000 in number, were Scottish families, living
“in great plenty so far as mere food and clothing are concerned.”
Luxuries were “almost unattainable.” There was “no market nearer than
St. Paul’s, on the Mississippi River, a distance of nearly 700 miles
over a trackless prairie.”
The Scotsmen were genuine farmers—the fathers of western agriculture.
The Métis of that time—well, they had discarded “the practice of
scalping,” but otherwise Kane says they differed “in very few respects
from the pure Indians.” In fact, when our artist went riding with them
after buffalo, the first game they stalked was a party of Sioux Indians,
of whom they brought down eight at one volley. “They abandoned the dead
bodies to the malice of a small party of Saulteaux, who accompanied
them.” These Indian allies immediately “commenced a scalp dance, during
which they mutilated the bodies in a most horrible manner. One old
woman, who had lost several relatives by the Sioux, rendered herself
particularly conspicuous” in this ghastly work.
When they came up with the buffalo, a herd of four or five thousand
bulls, the chase continued only about one hour, but at the end of that
time five hundred lay dead and dying over an area of five or six square
miles. It was calculated, according to Kane, that the Métis alone
destroyed 30,000 annually.
Farther west, near Fort Carlton, our traveller found the Indians hunting
buffalo in their own way—driving them into an enclosure and then
despatching them with spears and arrows. Some of the bowmen were so
strong that arrows passed right through the buffalo’s body.
This had been the third herd driven into one pound within ten or twelve
days, the disgusted artist says, “and the putrefying carcasses tainted
the air all round. The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable
buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing. Not one in
twenty is used in any way, so that thousands are left to rot where they
fall.” Even the wolves, hovering around while the slaughter was going
on, could not dispose of such a monstrous feast.
Who can wonder at the disappearance of the buffalo, massacred like that?
The Indian might have gone on hunting them on foot with bows and arrows
forever without making much difference to the herd; but first came the
horse, then the gun, and then the crowd of Métis wanting pemmican to
feed white traders as well as themselves—with all these against him,
the King of the Plains could not hope to survive. And other calamities
besides man overtook him. Between Fort Pitt and Edmonton, Paul Kane saw
large herds of buffalo swimming across the Saskatchewan, on their usual
spring migration; but he saw also thousands of dead buffalo strewn along
the banks—so weakened by disease, or by lack of food, that they were
drowned in the attempt to swim the river.
The guns which the Indians got from the white man and used to
exterminate their “best friend, the buffalo,” helped them also to
exterminate each other. The feud between the Iroquois confederacy and
the Hurons in the early days of Eastern Canada was no more relentless
than the feud between the Blackfoot confederacy and the Crees in the
West, even in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Voyaging down the North Saskatchewan one day, below Fort Pitt, Kane
says, “we saw a large party of mounted Indians riding furiously towards
us.” They proved to be “a war party of Blackfoot Indians, Blood Indians,
Sur-cees, Gros Ventres and Paygans—the best mounted, the best looking,
the most warlike in appearance, and the best accoutred of any tribe I
had ever seen.” But—“we had a Cree Indian in one of our boats, whom we
had to stow away under the skins lest he should be discovered.” The
warriors were friendly enough to the white men. “They spread a buffalo
skin for us to sit down upon, depositing all their knives, guns and bows
and arrows on the ground in front of us, in token of amity,” and passed
round the pipe of peace. “After our smoke several of the young braves
engaged in a horse race, to which sport they are very partial, and at
which they bet heavily; they generally ride on those occasions stark
naked, without a saddle, and with only a lasso fastened to the lower jaw
of the horse.”
Yet the sport these men were bent on was nothing less than a war of
extermination against their fellow-countrymen. “They told us they were a
party of 1,500 warriors, from 1,200 lodges, pitching their tents on
towards Edmonton, leaving few behind capable of bearing arms. They were
in pursuit of the Crees and Assiniboines, whom they threatened totally
to annihilate, boasting that they themselves were as numerous as the
grass on the plains.”
The artist “must be a great medicine-man,” the warriors thought, as they
saw him drawing their portraits. As they were expecting a battle with
the Crees next day, they got up a war dance, and with much solemnity
placed him in the best position “to work his incantations” for their
success—that is, to draw his pictures while they danced.
* * * * *
Turn your eyes now to the north. At the very time when the adventurous
artist and his fur-trading friends were floating through the
long-established “North-west boat passage” across the continent, the
search for a north-west ship passage was ending in tragedy.
“We met here,” says the artist, arriving at the Pas on the 12th of June,
1848, “Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, _en route_ to Mackenzie River,
with two canoes, in search of Sir John Franklin,” the great Arctic
explorer.
Three years before, on May 19, 1845, Franklin had left England in
command of an expedition to discover what Columbus and so many other
explorers had vainly sought, a sea-way to the east through the west. In
his two ships, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_, of the British navy, there
sailed 129 officers and men. They were seen in July by a passing vessel
in Baffin’s Bay, and then they vanished. Not one man ever came back.
One expedition after another was sent in search of them—by the British
Government, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, by American friends, and by
Lady Franklin herself when all others had given up the task as hopeless.
In 1853, John Rae—a splendid specimen of the Hudson’s Bay factor, whom
I knew in his later years—met a band of Eskimo who in the winter of
1850 had seen, first a large party of white men dragging southward a
boat and sledges, and, some time after, dead bodies both on the mainland
and on Montreal Island, near the mouth of Back’s Fish River. From the
Eskimo, Rae recovered a silver plate engraved with Franklin’s name, and
many forks and spoons with the initials of his officers.
At last, but not until 1859, Lieutenant Hobson, an officer of Lady
Franklin’s expedition under Captain McClintock’s command, found on King
William Island three skeletons, two of them in a boat on a sleigh. In a
stone cairn, too, he discovered the only written record of the tragedy,
signed by Captain Crozier of the _Terror_. In a few sentences, scribbled
on the edges of a printed form, this told that the ships had been beset
by the ice since September 12, 1846; that Sir John Franklin had died on
June 11, 1847; that on April 22, 1848, the ships had been abandoned;
that twenty-four men, including nine officers, were dead; and that the
remaining one hundred and five were starting for Back’s Fish River. It
was too late. An old Eskimo woman was found who said that the strangers
“fell down and died as they walked along.”
Though Franklin was lost, the object of his search was found. The relief
expeditions added immensely to our knowledge of the north, and filled in
the great blank Arctic map with a labyrinth of islands and straits. In
1850 one British ship, the _Investigator_, rounding Cape Horn and
passing in through Behring Sea, sailed eastward for hundreds of miles
along the north coast of Alaska and Rupert’s Land, before being frozen
in. Captain McClure, with six men in a sledge, pressed on over the ice
through Prince of Wales Strait between Banks Land and Prince Albert
Land, for six days, till they came in sight of Melville Sound, which had
already been entered from the east.
They had discovered, therefore, the existence of a North-west Passage;
but when summer came, and the captain tried to bring his ship through
the narrow strait, he was blocked by ice in mid-August, and had to spend
a second winter frozen up. In April he was reached by a party from
another ice-bound ship, the _Resolute_, which had come in from the
Atlantic. Abandoning their own ship, McClure and his men went back with
this party over the ice to the _Resolute_. That vessel also, and two
others, had to be abandoned, after still another winter in the Arctic;
and the crews were only rescued by fresh ships coming from England in
1854.
As McClure and his men had come over the sea from the Pacific to the
Atlantic Ocean, though not all the way by ship, they won a prize of
$50,000 which the British Government had long before offered for the
finding of the North-west Passage.
Having been found, the North-west Passage was left severely alone. Only
one ship ever went through, and then not by McClure’s route, the Prince
of Wales Strait. On June 16, 1903, in the little yacht _Gjoa_, the
Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had already discovered the South Pole,
left Christiania with his six companions. Passing Hudson Strait by, they
sailed north, struck in west over the top of Baffin’s Land, then turned
south into Peel Sound and Franklin Strait and down the east side of King
William Land. Then, almost doubling on their tracks, they turned west
again and crept along the coast of the mainland, through the length of
Coronation Bay, past the mouths of the Coppermine and Mackenzie Rivers,
and finally got down into the Pacific through Behring Strait. They cast
anchor at Nome, in Alaska, on August 31, 1906.
This voyage proved that if a navigator was prepared to spend a few years
on the trip, including several winters frozen up in Arctic solitude, he
might in the end get through from Atlantic to Pacific by sea, the dream
and heart’s desire of countless old explorers. But if the old explorer
had the chance to-day, and heard he could get through by land in less
than five days by a Canadian railway, the dream would lose its
attraction. A North-west Passage was wanted strictly for use, not to
ornament a map.
CHAPTER V
The Farthest West
WERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships
too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase?
But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from
the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching
from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not
taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the
Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the
south would between them have seized and held it all, till both their
shares were swallowed up by our neighbors of the United States.
It has had a very curious history, this west coast of ours. To begin
with, no one dreamed that there was any “west coast of America” at all,
for the first explorers all thought America was simply an extension of
Asia. Even when they got into the Pacific and sailed up the western
shore of Mexico, they expected any day to see land barring their way and
bending round to the left, so that, by following the coast, they would
presently find themselves among the people of China. They were
astonished at the land persistently keeping on their right, however far
north they sailed.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth, only a year after Frobisher’s attempt to
discover a channel through America in the North-west, his
fellow-countryman Sir Francis Drake sailed round Cape Horn in the hope
of finding the other end of that channel, which imaginative geographers
had already drawn on the maps and called the “Straits of Anian.”
How far north Sir Francis got, nobody knows. Up to Oregon, for certain.
The weather was bad, with “thick stinking fogs” and “nipping cold” in
midsummer; so he turned back, resolved to encircle the globe by going
home round Africa and India instead of around America. First, however,
he landed in California, finding a “convenient harbour” which was
probably San Francisco Bay. The natives were shivering under their furs,
in July, but they gave the white men a warm welcome. In fact, the “King”
or chief came “with a retinue of about 12,000 men,” “humbly desiring of
Drake that he would accept of the Realm,”—putting a feather crown on
his head, and three big chains of bone around his neck.
The great commander accepted the gift, took formal possession of the
country in the English Queen’s name, and called it New Albion, as Albion
was the old name of the Mother-land.
Nearly two hundred years passed before the first settlement on the
Californian coast was made by Spanish missionaries from Mexico. That was
in 1770. Farther north, not a white man was to be found when Captain
Cook arrived on his famous voyage in 1778. James Cook, the runaway son
of an English laborer, had already earned the gratitude of his
fellow-citizens. Exploring vast breadths of southern sea, he had added
Australia to our Empire. The northern sea next attracted him; at that
time the prize offered by the British Government for the finding of a
North-west Passage was $100,000.
Sailing up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he did not find what
he sought; but, by peering into every river mouth and inlet, he added
much to men’s knowledge of the present British Columbia.
Ten years later another inquisitive Englishman visited these coasts; in
fact, Captain Meares went so far as to build a house on Nootka Sound.
The Spaniards, who claimed the whole Pacific side of the continent as
the French had claimed the centre, warned off the “trespassers,” seized
several British ships, and in 1790 planted a little Spanish settlement
on the disputed shore. The governments of the two countries then came to
a makeshift agreement that neither should interfere with the settlements
of the other till the ownership of the soil could be decided. The naval
representatives of Spain and England met on the spot, dined in each
other’s cabins, went on exploring expeditions together, and joined their
names in the title of “Vancouver-Cuadra” Island. Beyond this the rival
powers could not get. The Spanish settlement, however, was soon
abandoned.
In 1819 Spain gave up to the United States all her claims to the Pacific
coast north of Mexico; but the British claims north of California
remained, and for twenty-seven years the two English-speaking
governments, at Westminster and Washington, exercised joint control over
what was known as the “Oregon Territory.”
In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled
in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The
United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement,
but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for
itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to
the Pacific Ocean, as absolutely as the French claims a century before
would have shut off the Americans.
To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out
of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, the _American_, in 1845
visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have
exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak
hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric
glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister,
but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because
its glories at that time were “barbaric.”
The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western
territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course,
Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the
United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a
frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map
from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long
without a break, and the thing is done.
Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power
was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay
Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended
to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for
the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands
than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The
rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize
the native hunters.
A little agriculture was indulged in, so that the Company’s forts should
not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a
certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the
Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On
Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching
company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way
to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for
the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.
“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort
Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French,
Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the
west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he
says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with
bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with
their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank
of the river.
“Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is
Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the
four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of
the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed
chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy
feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone
wedges, but were very smooth and regular.
Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a
brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket
made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedar
bark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur
animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has
now been hunted out of existence.
Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized,
the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and
nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round
pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two
bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess
which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A
player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his
wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves.
[Illustration]
_Coast Indian Mask_
Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between
them, could be kept as a slave; and slaves had no rights, not even a
right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of
wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could
afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight,
or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a
dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the
eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they
hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or
humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as
they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”
The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous
root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and
very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the
coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe,
very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and
smoothed off with stone axes.
One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was
picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an
Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified
his revenge by biting them in return.”
The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated
by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The
infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her
back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the
forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up
steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough
to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. Kane
says that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the
fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced.
Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the
shape of a cone.
About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on
the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with
the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the
Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an
enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold.
The protest was in vain, and in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as a
colony under the Company’s rule. The experiment was an utter failure.
The Company charged $5 an acre for land, while any settler could get 320
acres for nothing on the American side of the frontier. After five years
the white and part-white population of Vancouver Island numbered 450 in
all, and only 500 acres were under cultivation.
A poor little parliament of seven members was elected in 1856, and
assembled at the miniature capital called Victoria; but they had little
power and less revenue. The Company was still the master, and its chief
agent held at the same time the position of royal governor. The settlers
petitioned for direct imperial rule, and in 1858 an event occurred which
compelled the Government in England to grant their request.
This event was the outbreak of the gold fever. Several years before,
Indians canoeing down from Queen Charlotte’s Islands to trade at
Victoria had brought with them specimens of gold, and now a rumor spread
that quantities of the precious metal had been found along the river
bottoms of the mainland. The men who had turned California into a mining
camp pulled up stakes and flocked northward to collect what they
imagined would be easier and richer spoil in British territory.
Victoria, the little provincial capital on Vancouver Island, suddenly
awoke to the noise and bustle of a commercial city. In a single summer
25,000 men landed there, while 8,000 more found their way to the
frontier by land after a three weeks’ ride on horseback. Those who had
come by water deposited their capital—sacks of raw gold—in the office
of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria, and set themselves to build
rafts, boats, and canoes in which to reach the mainland and ascend the
golden Fraser River. Many of them were drowned on the way; and of the
33,000 who reached the river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to
their deserted California.
The three thousand who remained had to be kept in order and provided for
in some way. Governor Douglas, of Vancouver Island, was ready to
undertake this awkward task, but on the mainland he had no authority
except that of a Hudson’s Bay factor. On November 17, 1858, proclamation
was made that company rule over the mountains and islands of the West
was ended forever—surviving the East India Company’s rule over the
plains of Hindustan by just eleven weeks. The Hudson’s Bay Company might
continue to exist, but its trading monopoly on the mainland and its
political supremacy on Vancouver Island were extinguished together.
Douglas, giving up the attempt to serve two masters, resigned his
connection with the Company. He received in exchange the Queen’s
commission as Governor, not only of the island, but of the new colony,
“British Columbia,” stretching four hundred miles eastward from the
Pacific Ocean to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon the inland
plains.
[Illustration]
_On the Cariboo Trail, Thompson River_
The immigrant might well be appalled by his first experience of British
Columbian gold-streams, for these do not meander along gentle valleys,
but pour through gloomy gorges, walled for hundreds of miles by
precipitous mountain sides. At the season when the human tide poured in,
the water was at its highest too, and the sand-bars where men expected
gold were hidden deep under the torrent of the Fraser. Such ground as
still lay high and dry was soon crowded with miners, each hunting for a
fortune in a little patch of earth twenty-five feet square. Those
adventurous spirits who pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream,
and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson River, had to scramble
along trails where mountain goats alone had trod before.
All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a
mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a
diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in
dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the
canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls,
then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and
cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green
solitary pines.
About $500,000 worth of gold was taken out in 1858, but it had cost the
miners a good deal more than that in the getting. The next year’s yield
was estimated at $1,500,000. This, however, was only a preface to the
volume of riches quickly opened to a wondering world. In 1860, a young
Nova Scotian named Macdonald, and two Americans named Dietz and Rose,
left the Fraser and Thompson rivers behind them in search of virgin
gold-fields farther north. In consequence of the discoveries they made,
an unknown and uninhabited wilderness of forest and ravine sprang into
fame as an Eldorado to which the miners of California and Australia and
amateur gold-hunters from all the world were madly rushing.
In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty miles square, yielded
gold worth $25,000,000. In one day five men washed $1,200 out of the
soil; four men in the same short time got $1,850. An old river bed was
found where nuggets could be picked up to the amount of $1,000 per
square foot.
The mountain lion and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mushroom towns
sprang up in the silent hunting grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the
white man’s oath and pistol. Provisions still had to be carried up from
the coast on mule-back, and were often intercepted and devoured by
miners travelling the same road. In the winter of 1861, flour in Cariboo
cost $72 a barrel, and bacon 75 cents a pound. Next year men came in so
much faster than meal that the population was brought to the verge of
famine.
The miners were a rough set for the most part, given to furious gambling
on the gold-fields and to excesses of every sort when they returned to
the comparative civilization of Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the
mining towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their concerts and
debates, and the authority of law was uncommonly well respected. “Gold
commissioners” were appointed to deal out justice promptly in every
camp, and over this whole system presided a judicial genius whose name
was a terror to evildoers.
“Old Judge Begbie soon made them understand who was master,” says an old
miner. “I saw a fellow named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in
California, on trial. He killed a man on Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo
country, who was gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table, a miner
came in, threw down his bag of gold, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist
paid. The man bet again, and won again, flippantly inquiring of the
gambler if there was any other game he could play better, as he drew in
the stake. Gilchrist took offence at the remark, and, lifting his
pistol, shot him dead.
“Gilchrist was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of
‘manslaughter.’ Turning to the prisoner, the judge said: ‘It is not a
pleasant duty for me to have to sentence you only to prison for life.
Your crime was unmitigated murder. You deserve to be hanged. Had the
jury performed their duty, I might now have the painful satisfaction of
condemning you to death. And you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to
say that it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and
every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of
manslaughter.’”
Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly invade an Indian province
without some little trouble from the natives, and one or two fights took
place; but as a rule the two races got on very well together. The
newcomers washing sand along the river beds did not destroy the game on
which the old inhabitants depended for their living; true British
justice was measured out to red man and to white with equal hand; and
the Indians took readily to such work as white employers wanted done. An
American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, has left on record his opinion
that “never in the pacification and settlement of any section of America
have there been so few disturbances, so few crimes against life and
property” as in this British land.
Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was utterly deserted by the
white miners, though the frugal Chinese continued to sift out the golden
dregs left in the district. In those fifteen years many other districts
in the “sea of mountains” had been invaded by detachments of gold
hunters. Some of these acquired fortunes to squander, while many came
out poorer than they went in, and some never came out at all. Of the
three lucky Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago, Dietz died a
pauper in 1877, and the body of Rose was found in the woods, starved to
death while searching for new gold-fields to conquer.
Even coal-mining has had its romantic episodes in the history of British
Columbia. In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson’s Bay outpost on
Vancouver Island happened into the smithy. They were astonished to find
the blacksmith burning coal, and when told it had been brought a six
months’ journey from over the sea they burst out laughing. There was any
quantity of the same “black stone,” they said, at the north end of that
very island. Other deposits were found from time to time, and the
Pacific slope farther south has been glad to draw largely on the British
territory for its coal supply.
In 1864, British Columbia—the mainland territory, that is—was endowed
with a separate Governor and an infant legislature of which only three
members out of thirteen were elected by the people. Two years afterwards
Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united under the latter name;
and in 1871, when the whole colony entered the Canadian Federation, the
political swaddling bands were removed, and the Provincial Legislature
became an elected body, with full control over the Government.
One other striking episode in the history of our Pacific Province must
still be mentioned—an episode that nearly caused a war with the United
States.
When the frontier question was settled, or supposed to be settled, in
1846, a serious omission was made. On the mainland the British and
United States territories were divided, clearly enough, by the 49th
parallel of latitude; but when the sea was reached the line was simply
ordered to follow “the middle of the channel” between Vancouver Island
and the United States part of the mainland. Now there are a number of
islands between Vancouver and the mainland of the United States, and
therefore several channels through which the frontier might be imagined
to run.
The island of San Juan, which belonged to our country or to the United
States according as one channel or another might be considered the
frontier, had been used by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a cattle pasture
since 1843. In 1852, the “Americans” landed a sheriff and a customs
officer on the island and tried to collect taxes from the British
herdsmen, who refused to pay and hoisted the Union Jack.
Here were the makings of a pretty quarrel; and in 1859, when an
“American” settler killed a Hudson’s Bay hog for rooting in his garden,
the naval and military forces of Queen and President came within an ace
of opening fire on each other.
Before this calamity could occur, however, the British Government
proposed arbitration. The dispute dropped out of sight when the energies
of the United States Government were distracted by the Civil War. For
twelve years the settlers and hogs of San Juan were kept at peace by
British and United States detachments of equal strength, and the two
forces got on famously together. At last, in 1871, the German Emperor
was called in as arbitrator, and traced the frontier through a channel
which gave San Juan to the United States.
CHAPTER VI
The Windows Opened
FOR HUNDREDS of years the West had now been explored—inland, to find
new routes for the fur trade, and up in the north to find a new sea
route from Europe to Asia—but no explorer had come in to find new homes
for his fellow-men.
In the middle of last century, however, the Government of Canada sent up
a scientific expedition to find out the real facts about this
country—for one thing, whether it was fit for agriculture. The fur
traders said it was not. People overseas, and most people even in the
Province of Canada, actually believed this, just as a great French
writer a hundred years before had comforted his fellow-countrymen on the
loss of “New France” by asserting that Canada itself was only “a few
acres of snow.”
Some of the more enlightened Canadians, however, were pretty sure that
the common belief was a monstrous delusion; though even they, if any one
had told them the West would yield 900,000,000 bushels of grain in a
single harvest, would have smiled as at a fairy tale.
Even without going very far west, the explorers of 1857 and 1858 saw
enough to convince them that many million acres of the prairie were
arable land of first quality. One of the chief men of the expedition, S.
J. Dawson, wrote:
“Of the valley of Red River I find it impossible to speak in any
other terms than those which may express astonishment and
admiration. I entirely concur in the brief but expressive
description given to me by an English settler on the
Assiniboine, that the valley of Red River, including a large
portion belonging to its great affluent, is a ‘Paradise of
fertility’ . . . Indian corn, if properly cultivated, and an
early variety selected, may always be relied on. The melon grows
with the utmost luxuriance without any artificial aid, and
ripens perfectly before the end of August. Potatoes,
cauliflowers, and onions, I have not seen surpassed at any of
our provincial fairs. The character of the soil in Assiniboia
[now Manitoba], within the limits of the ancient lake ridges [a
great lake covered that region, long ago] cannot be surpassed.
As an agricultural country, I have no hesitation in expressing
the strongest conviction that it will one day rank among the
most distinguished.”
The windows had been opened, though the door was still shut. It was only
a glimpse that the world then got by looking in, but that was enough. “A
Paradise of Fertility.”
The Mother country sent out an expedition on its own account. One of its
objects was to see if a railway could be built through the Rocky
Mountains, as part of a great line on British soil from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. That expedition discovered a pass through which the railway
was finally built, as we shall see. Its discoverer, James Hector, got a
kick from a horse up there, and “Kicking Horse Pass” it has been ever
since. At that time, however, Captain Palliser, at the head of the
expedition, reported after four years’ work that the railway would cost
too much. In 1863 the Red River settlers sent an envoy to England,
begging the Imperial Government to connect them with Canada by rail; but
even that was too expensive.
The door stayed shut, accordingly. Settlers of the more adventurous sort
dribbled in, by the roundabout route through the States, or coming up by
the Lakes. But fur traders and Indians had the prairie and woodlands
almost to themselves for another quarter of a century. The Company went
on bartering, the braves went on hunting—and for some years fighting,
too.
As far back as 1750, Captain Coats had blamed his employers, the
Hudson’s Bay Company, for not trying to convert the natives—“leaving
such swarms of God’s people in the hands of the divill, unattempted, as
well as the other Indians in generall, a docile, inoffensive,
good-natured, humane people,”—“as if gorging ourselves with
superfluitys was the ultimate condition of this life.”
The Indians may not have been so “humane” as the benevolent captain
thought, but, with all their barbarous customs, on the whole they
deserved his good opinion. Fighting to kill for revenge, and to prove
their own courage, they considered the height of virtue. If food ran
short on a journey, they would abandon the aged and sick who could not
travel as fast as the rest, for delay would risk the lives of all the
band. Yet Paul Kane, after visiting many tribes, declared that their
affection for their relatives was very remarkable, particularly for
their children. “I may mention,” he says, “the universal custom of
Indian mothers eagerly seeking another child, although it may be of an
enemy, to replace one of her own whom she may have lost, no matter how
many other children she may have. This child is always treated with as
great, if not greater, kindness than the rest.”
So far as the Indians were savage, that was all the more reason why they
should be taught better. But the Company was afraid of losing their
friendship by interfering with their customs; and we remember how Samuel
Hearne was pushed roughly aside when he tried to stop a massacre of the
Eskimo. Paul Kane tells of a Saulteaux Indian being hung for shooting a
Sioux, in 1845, but that was in the Red River Settlement, which had a
judge and a court-house. The fur traders generally turned a blind eye to
the savagery of their customers. Alexander Henry, who established a
trading post on the Red River at the mouth of the Pembina in 1801, for
the North West Company, and made a little garden there, gives this calm
account of one day’s incidents: “LeBoeuf stabbed his young wife in the
arm. Little Shell almost beat his old mother’s brains out with a club,
and there was terrible fighting among them. I sowed garden seed.”
The Christian folk down east and over in Britain, though they knew
little of what was going on out here, heard enough to make their
consciences uneasy. The churches, one after another, sent missionaries
to convert the Indian. The story of their devotion and sacrifice,
without hope of earthly reward, would fill many books. Most of the
Indians’ education has been carried on by the churches, and still is.
Some of these men were as ingenious as they were devoted. There was
James Evans, for example. In 1836 he not only invented a phonetic
written language for the Crees, but printed it for them, at first
melting down bullets to make the type, mixing soot and water for ink,
and using birch bark for paper. It was hard work. “Christianity to them
seems a Chimera, Religion a design to draw them from the libidinous
Pleasures of a lazy life.” So it appeared to an English writer when the
Hudson’s Bay Company had just started; and far on in the nineteenth
century, though many tribes had been persuaded to exchange their pagan
belief for the white man’s creeds, it was difficult—as it still is—to
wean them from their haphazard ways to the white man’s standard of
persistent industry.
To uproot the Indian’s cherished belief in the virtue of war against a
“hereditary foe” and “traditional enemy” was equally difficult—and not
at all strange, considering how recent is our own awakening to the folly
of that belief.
As I look out on my farm beside the old Edmonton trail, and see the
motors whizzing by, I see in imagination hordes of painted Blackfeet
riding over this very land to slay the Crees, and hordes of Crees again
to scalp the Blackfeet—in my own lifetime, too, though I was too far
off to see it.
The little town over yonder, with its churches and banks and stores,
preserves the memory of those bloody times in its very name—Lacombe.
One winter night in 1865 the missionary Albert Lacombe was the guest of
the chief in a Blackfoot camp. Suddenly the crackle of guns awoke the
sleeping Indians. “Assinaw! Assinaw! The Crees! The Crees!” shouted the
braves, as they rushed out to defend the camp. Bullets whizzed through
the tent; you could smell the powder—the Crees were as close as that.
Now both tribes liked the missionary, as much as they hated each other.
He ran out and shouted to the Crees, but his voice was drowned in the
din. He found a Blackfoot woman, dying of wounds, and baptized her. A
Cree came on her body, scalped her, and killed her child. The fight went
on all night, and half the camp was captured. At dawn the missionary
told the Blackfeet to stop firing, and went out again alone to parley
with the raiders. A spent bullet struck his head, nearly stunning him,
and he fell. “You have killed your friend,” a Blackfoot shouted. Then
the Crees heard, and were horrified. The fight was at an end; the
raiders turned right-about and made off.
Three years later, in 1868, the same Lacombe was in camp with the Crees.
In the middle of the night, their scouts brought word that Blackfoot
raiders were hiding in the brush across the valley. The missionary went
out, and, standing unarmed in the moonlight, shouted—“Hey! Hey! Are you
there and wanting to fight? Then my Crees are ready for you. Come on,
and you will see how they can fight. They are brave, my Crees, if you
come to kill their people!” The voice “sounded big over the great
prairie”—but there was no reply. Not a shot was fired; the raiders
slunk off to their homes.
Though the Indians did not know it, their country was then on the eve of
a great change. The year before, in 1867, the old Province of
Canada—Ontario and Quebec—had united with the Atlantic Provinces of
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form a federation, a “Dominion of
Canada.” To complete the Dominion, to unite all these British lands from
sea to sea for ever in one strong federation, it was necessary first of
all to bring in the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was
done in 1869. The Company gave up all its exclusive privileges for a
payment of $1,500,000 and 45,000 acres of land. The Company also kept
all its forts, with full liberty to go on trading in free competition
with others. This it continues to do, on the largest scale, and the
white settlers whom it used to shut out are now its best customers. As
the furs obtained in two centuries of trading had sold for about
$100,000,000, the shareholders had no cause to complain of their
bargain.
The French Métis on the Red River, however, were uneasy when they heard
of this transference of the country to new rulers, and even some of the
white settlers at first objected to the change, for which their opinion
had not been asked.
The Government, to get the country ready for settlers, sent land
surveyors up from the East. The Métis took fright. Seeing those
strangers running straight lines across the land, the ignorant people
thought their farms were going to be taken away from them—the long
narrow strips of land running back from the river front.
A Governor was appointed by the Dominion authorities, and came round
through the United States, for there was no other railway communication
between Eastern and Western Canada. When he came to the frontier, at
Pembina, he found a barricade across the trail, and was ordered by a
“_Comité National des Métis de la Rivière Rouge_,” or “National
Committee of Red River Métis,” to turn back and go home again. A
“provisional government” was set up; Louis Riel, a halfbreed of some
education but little sense, the leader of the insurrection, seized the
Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Garry, and imprisoned a number of loyal
settlers. One of them, a young man from Ontario named Scott, was tried
by a rebel court-martial and shot; his body was pushed through a hole in
the ice of Red River.
A storm of helpless indignation swept over Canada—helpless because the
rebels were separated from the seat of power and population in the East
by more than a thousand miles of lake and river. An officer then known
only as Colonel Wolseley, later on Commander-in-Chief of the British
Army, was put at the head of a boat expedition, which arrived after a
three months’ journey—to find that the mere news of an army’s approach
had put down the rebellion. The government made it clear to the Métis
that none of their rights would be interfered with: the Red River
district was organized as the Province of Manitoba and gave no more
trouble.
CHAPTER VII
The Mounted Police
NO; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From
little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then
vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,” lay unguarded and unwatched. The
old ruling company had given up its power, and no new ruler had
appeared. The throne was empty.
The Company’s authority over most of the tribes had been extraordinary.
By treating the Indians as its children, with a wise mixture of patience
and firmness, by avoiding interference as a rule and acting swiftly and
sharply when action was both necessary and possible, the Hudson’s Bay
men had won both affection and respect. More than once a young clerk had
walked alone into an Indian camp after a murderer, shot the fellow where
he stood, and walked out untouched without a word.
What was to happen now?
It was the dangerous age of the West. Along the frontier in the south
the risk was great. Over the Blackfeet, in their pride and power, even
the Company had never gained as much influence as it had with the rest.
And now a new danger appeared in that quarter. The neighboring territory
of the United States had been allowed to become the happy hunting ground
of rascals. They snapped their fingers at the law of their own land;
they thought nothing of killing their fellow-whites, and less than
nothing of killing an Indian. What was a frontier to them? Laughing at
the weakness of their own government, they thought they could defy the
British Government too. They did not know our way.
One day a band of these ruffians crossed the line from Montana with a
cargo of smuggled whiskey. Coming to a camp of Assiniboines, they first
got possession of everything the Indians could be persuaded to barter
for the fiery spirit. At night, when most of the unsuspicious red men
were indulging in a drunken dance, the “traders” suddenly poured volleys
of lead into the defenceless crowd. Forty Indians were shot dead and
many others wounded; only a remnant escaped to the neighboring Cypress
Hills.
The liquor was murderous enough, without such massacres. The smugglers
plied their devilish trade unceasingly; who was there to hinder? The
Indians, poisoned and demoralized, fought each other worse than ever. If
this thing had gone on, white settlement would have been impossible.
The story of the swift restoration of peace and order is one of the
finest in Canadian history. It is the story of the North West Mounted
Police.
Rudely awakened by the Red River outbreak, and warned by the Imperial
authorities—who had persuaded the Company to surrender the West to
Canada, and were therefore peculiarly responsible for the welfare of its
inhabitants—the Federal Government took action. A little force of three
hundred red-coats was organized in 1873 and told to keep order in a
territory of two and a half million square miles. Impossible, it sounds.
Yet the thing was done.
The frontier campaign against the whiskey runners in the south-west was
undertaken by half the force, 150 men. In 1874 prohibition was
established for the whole territory, with severe penalties for selling
or giving liquor to Indians. At the end of one year Colonel MacLeod, the
commander, was able to report a “complete stoppage of the whiskey trade
throughout the whole of this section”—which was the worst in the
country. The drunken riots, which had been almost a daily occurrence,
were entirely at an end. In fact, “a more peaceable community than this,
with a very large number of Indians camped along the river, could not be
found anywhere. Everyone united in saying how wonderful the change is.
People never lock their doors at night, and have no fear of anything
being stolen which is left outside; whereas, just before our arrival,
gates and doors were all fastened at night, and nothing could be left
out of one’s sight.” “It is like a miracle wrought before our eyes,”
said the veteran missionary John McDougall, whom I met years afterwards
riding as a volunteer scout in the Saskatchewan campaign. It was chiefly
owing to MacLeod that the Blackfoot tribes in 1877 signed a treaty by
which certain lands were set apart for ever as their Reserves, the
Government agreeing to pay them a yearly subsidy of $5 a head. Such
treaties had already been made with Indians farther east. At a great
gathering of the Blackfoot and kindred tribes, the Governor of the
Territory, David Laird, told them that the Queen was much pleased by the
way they had helped the Police and obeyed the law. “The Great Spirit,”
he said, “has made the white man and the red man brothers, and we should
take each other by the hand. The Great Mother loves all her children,
white men and red men alike. You will always find the Mounted Police on
your side if you keep the Queen’s laws.”
The head Chief, Crowfoot, coming forward to sign the treaty, declared
that the advice given to his people had proved to be good. “If the
Police had not come,” said he, “where would we all be now? Bad men and
whiskey were killing us so fast that very few of us indeed would have
been left to-day. The Mounted Police have protected us as the feathers
of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” And Red Crow, Chief
of the Bloods, who signed with Crowfoot, added that MacLeod had made
many promises to him and kept them all; not one of them was broken. The
town that grew up beside MacLeod’s old fort preserves his memory in its
name; and Calgary, where he built a fort in 1875, was called after his
birthplace on the west coast of Scotland. A French trading post had been
established near the same spot on the Bow River as far back as 1752, by
Niverville, a kinsman of the great explorer Vérendrye.
The most romantic tales are told of the Mounted Police and their
unbeatable pluck. Too romantic to be true, perhaps you think. No; I
might have thought so once. But after seeing these men at work, in peace
and war, I can imagine no duty so hard, so long or so dangerous that
they would shrink from shouldering it or fail to carry it through at any
cost. A single trooper would think no more of walking into the strongest
camp, arresting an Indian and bringing him out, than I would think of
riding into a herd of cattle and cutting out a steer. Next day, with an
equally light heart, he would start off on a six months’ hunt for some
desperate criminal in the ends of the earth, travelling summer and
winter, over land and water and snow and ice, and bringing back his man
or perishing in the attempt.
The Indians quickly learnt that the man in the red coat was “he who must
be obeyed.” They were impressed by the fact that the Police, whether one
or many, had the authority of the “Great White Mother,” the Queen. That
by itself, however, might have forced only a grudging obedience. It was
the character of the police themselves that won for them an authority
over the tribes as remarkable as the Hudson’s Bay factor ever possessed.
With rare exceptions, which were swiftly thrown out on discovery, the
Mounted Police were not only brave but considerate, scrupulously fair,
and neither to be bribed nor wheedled. That is, they upheld the true
British standard of honor. The Indian learnt to trust them because they
proved themselves worthy of trust. I have known tribesmen come to a
police corporal, rather than any one else, for advice in all sorts of
social and domestic difficulties.
Unfortunately, the Indians south of the line had had a very different
experience. There was no great company interested in protecting them,
and no one did protect them, from irresponsible and rascally white men.
Even the Indian Agents appointed by the Government at Washington to
“father” the tribes often proved the worst of step-fathers. The Indians,
swindled and outraged, took vengeance in their primitive way on any one
of the same race as their oppressors. The innocent settler suffered for
the deeds of his guilty fellow-countrymen. Then the army was sent to
punish, not the white criminal, but the red avenger. Long and desperate
“Indian Wars” were the result.
The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, after wiping out a force sent against him
in one of these wars, fled to Canada. That was in 1877. Already, the
year before, 3,000 Indians had come in from the States, saying they had
not been able to lie down in safety for years, and their grandfathers
had told them they would find peace in the land of the British.
The new incursion was decidedly embarrassing. Even if they behaved
themselves in Canada—as they did, under the watchful eye of the Mounted
Police—the name of Sioux had a terrifying sound, and their presence
wandering over the prairie would hardly encourage farmers to settle
there. Besides, the buffalo were being swept off the prairie, and it
would soon be hard enough to provide for our own buffalo-hunting tribes.
The newcomers, therefore, were not given a Canadian reserve to settle
on, and to our great relief they went back to their own country in 1881,
accepting an offer of peace from the Washington Government.
A few years later, a band of our own Indians fled across the line to
avoid punishment for the unprovoked rebellion which I shall soon have to
narrate. When the trouble had blown over, they decided to come back. A
whole troop of United States cavalry escorted them to the frontier at a
point where they were to be handed over to the Canadian Mounted Police.
There they found a corporal and one constable, with an interpreter. The
United States officer was puzzled. “Who is in command?” he asked.
“Myself,” said the Canadian corporal. “But where’s your troop?” said the
officer. “Here they are,” replied the corporal, pointing to his solitary
constable.
[Illustration]
_Fort Chipewyan_
[Illustration]
_Buffalo Herd and Prairie Fire_
[Illustration]
_Mounted Police Chasing_
_Whiskey Smugglers_
[Illustration]
_A Returned Canadian_
_Home Seeking_
Astonished, the officer asked what the corporal would do if the Indians
turned sulky—there were more than a hundred of them. “They won’t,” said
the corporal promptly; “we shall have no trouble with them.” Nor did
they. The tribesmen went quietly back to their reserves, like lambs.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
CHAPTER VIII
Our First and Last Indian War
THERE were only fifteen hundred white folk in Manitoba at the time of
the trouble in 1870, but around them lived ten thousand people of mixed
race. Three-fifths of these owed their white blood to French voyageurs;
the rest drew theirs chiefly from Scots higher up in the Hudson’s Bay
service.
A small but steady stream of white settlers now began to trickle in,
coming from Ontario through the States. The French Métis soon found
themselves in a minority. The wilder spirits sold their land and flitted
to the banks of the Saskatchewan, four or five hundred miles away to the
north-west; but even there the stream of white immigration followed, and
the land surveyors again began to map out the country with ruthless
regularity. The Métis, living along the river bank, from which their
farms ran back in narrow strips, were afraid they might lose their land,
especially as the issue of their patents had been delayed and petitions
to the Government seemed to fall on deaf ears.
In the fall of 1884, it was plain that a storm was brewing. Louis Riel,
after many years of exile, returned from the United States on his
kinsmen’s invitation, and put himself at the head of their agitation for
the redress of grievances. Chiefly, and naturally, they wanted the same
title to their land as had been given to the Métis back on the Red
River. Such grievances as actually existed might have been remedied, and
the threatening storm prevented, if the Federal Government had given a
little attention to the matter. Agitation was allowed to flame up in
revolt, and Louis Riel had proclaimed himself “President of the
Saskatchewan” before the government machine began to stir.
The Métis began, in the spring of 1885, by seizing the persons and
property of their white neighbors at Batoche and Duck Lake. Mounted
Police went to the rescue, accompanied by some volunteers from the
neighboring town of Prince Albert, but were driven back with a loss of
twelve killed, nine being left dead on the snow. The rebels had beaten
the white men!
Imagine what that meant, in a country where the little white population
of peaceful farmers lay thinly scattered among strong tribes of warlike
Indians. The Métis were a mere handful compared to the pure-blooded
red-skins; these numbered, even without the tribes of the distant north,
some 25,000, including braves who had taken many a scalp in tribal wars,
and in fights with white troops south of the frontier. If these tribes
had gone on the war-path, the scattered white population of the
territories might have been wiped out of existence, and the re-conquest
of the country might have involved a long and hard campaign.
Everything depended on the Indians. The Métis knew this perfectly well,
and Louis Riel moved heaven and earth to drag in the only allies who
could give him a chance of winning. Adopting the name David, and
pretending to have supernatural powers, he claimed to be a new Messiah
sent to lead the red men and give them victory over the white. He sent
his envoys all over the plains to rouse the ancient passion of the
tribes for war. Promising impossible gains, and threatening when
persuasion failed, they did their very worst.
The strongest tribes, including the Blackfeet, decided to sit still and
mind their own business. This was partly owing to the fairness with
which as a rule they had been treated by the Canadian Government and the
Hudson’s Bay Company, partly to the influence of missionaries and
Mounted Police in their midst, and partly to their own good sense. The
railway had just arrived; and the spectacle of an army of men
constructing at marvellous speed a road of steel across the prairie was
a most convincing evidence of the white man’s power. But for a while it
was touch and go, even among the Blackfeet. So it was among Piapot’s
Crees near Qu’Appelle.
The flaming words of the new “Messiah” and his apostles had more effect
on the tribes along the North Saskatchewan. The more intelligent chiefs,
like Poundmaker of the Crees, knew well enough what the end of the war
must be, sooner or later; but the younger braves, the hot-headed
extremists, were shouting for a fight, and carried the tribe with them.
An Indian chief will never hang back when his tribe is bent on war,
however crazy he may think it; so even Poundmaker, the white man’s
friend, fought the white man rather than be called a coward by his own
foolish folk.
“The Indians are on the war-path. Battleford is besieged!” That was the
news flashed down to the East before we had recovered from the shock of
the Duck Lake defeat. The whole white population of Battleford town,
with hundreds of refugees from the country-side, crowded into the fort,
standing high on a point of land in the fork of the Battle and
Saskatchewan Rivers. This fort was simply a log stockade enclosing the
Mounted Police barracks, stables and storehouses. The railroad was
nearly two hundred miles away to the south, and the road to it was cut
off by the enemy. The Government telegraph line, the only means of
communicating with the outside world, was cut again and again by an
unseen foe. Imagine the feelings of the beleaguered refugees, watching
the smoke of their burning farmhouses, and wondering whether they
themselves would be slaughtered or starved before any one came to their
rescue!
Within a week, the exaggerations of rumor were rivalled by a terrible
statement of fact brought in by a scout from Fort Pitt. This Hudson’s
Bay post, ninety miles up the Saskatchewan, had been held by twenty-four
Mounted Police under Inspector Dickens, a son of the novelist. Five
miles farther north, on the picturesque shores of Frog Lake, a smaller
Hudson’s Bay post and a Roman Catholic mission had begun to develop into
a settlement, possessing even a mill.
The Crees in that neighborhood, headed by a chief named Big Bear, held a
war dance on hearing of Riel’s victory, and ordered the white folk into
the Indian camp as prisoners. A Government agent, Thomas Quinn, refused
to go, and a furious Cree named Wandering Spirit shot him down. The
Indians had probably not planned a massacre, but this taste of blood
roused their tiger spirit. Nine men in all were shot, including two
priests. Only the Hudson’s Bay clerk was spared. There were two white
women, but friendly Métis paid three dollars and four ponies ransom for
them, and kept them safe.
After the braves had gorged themselves for ten days on stolen victuals,
keeping up their war spirit by frenzied dances, they laid siege to Fort
Pitt. There was no lack of courage in the garrison. Even the girls,
daughters of the Hudson’s Bay factor, William MacLean, shouldered rifles
with the men. But when MacLean went out to parley with the Indians, they
would not let him return; they only promised to protect the white
civilians if the Police cleared out of the fort. MacLean had such
confidence in his Company’s favor with the Indians that he sent a letter
telling his wife and children to come into camp, with several other
white and half-breed families; and he advised the Police to leave, as
the Indians had got fire-arrows ready to burn the fort down.
[Illustration: _Big Bear’s Demand for the Surrender of Fort Pitt_]
His advice was taken. The civilians put themselves at the Indians’
mercy, and the Police made their way painfully down the river, amid
masses of floating ice, in an ancient leaky scow. Battleford welcomed
the two dozen extra appetites with self-forgetting heartiness; and two
days later, on the 24th of April, this modern Lucknow was relieved by an
expedition which had come two thousand miles to save it.
* * * * *
“Would you like to go out as our war correspondent?” the editor of the
Montreal _Daily Witness_ asked me when telegrams were pouring in from
the West begging the Government to hurry up troops or no one would be
left alive to rescue. The editor spoke with hesitation. He had a tender
heart and lively conscience, and hated the idea of sending a young
fellow off “perhaps to be killed.”
The young fellow laughed, and jumped at the adventure—it was well worth
the risk. A few hours later, with a knapsack for baggage, he was rolling
along through the States, as that was before the Canadian Pacific was
finished and the only railway connection between Eastern and Western
Canada was still by way of Chicago.
Canada’s problem, to save the people of the West, was a hard one indeed.
We had no regular army, beyond a few companies at Infantry Schools and
an occasional battery of artillery. The rescuing must be done by
volunteers, who were certainly keen enough, but had little or no
experience of war. Moreover, the troops were not allowed to go through
the States, as I had done.
The Government apparently thought they would have to send the force up
through the Great Lakes by steamer, as there were four unbuilt gaps in
the railway north of Lake Superior, and no passenger cars on the three
disconnected sections of track between the gaps. But spring navigation
was not yet open, and every day’s delay might mean sentence of death to
hundreds of peaceable folk in the West. Van Horne, the manager of the
Canadian Pacific, went to Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister, and
offered to take the troops up at once in spite of everything.
“How can you carry the men without a railway?” said Sir John. “It’s
impossible.”
“Raise the men, and give me a week’s notice of their arrival, and I
pledge myself to do it.”
“What do you pledge?” asked Sir John.
“I pledge my word, and, if necessary, my life,” was the answer.
“Can you do it in a month’s time?” was the next question.
“I will do it in eleven days to Qu’Appelle,” said Van Horne. And he did.
Over the longer gaps the troops were carried in sleighs; over the
shorter, they marched through the snow. They looked as if they had gone
through a campaign already by the time they got to Qu’Appelle—but they
got there in eight or nine days instead of eleven, thanks to the vigor
and capacity of the railway men.
Within a month, 3,000 men had been transported to the West, some as far
as 2,500 miles and the rest about 1,800. With over 1,500 Westerners
under arms, a force of 4,500 was collected; though, as it happened, the
later arrivals had no chance to share in the fighting.
The prairie section of the railway was already built, but it only ran
within about two hundred miles of the rebel centres in the north. From
Qu’Appelle one force under General Middleton had to march against the
Métis at Batoche, near Duck Lake. Another column, under Colonel Otter,
had to go on to Swift Current and thence across the prairie to fight the
Indians besieging Battleford. A third force, under General Strange,
including the 91st Battalion from Winnipeg and a French-Canadian
battalion, the 65th from Montreal, had to march north from Calgary to
Edmonton, and thence reach Fort Pitt by trail and river. Some of them
marched the soles off their boots, but when I came up with them towards
the end of the campaign, doing sentry-go in bare feet near Beaver River,
they were cheery as larks and singing the old folk-songs their
forefathers had sung in the France of the seventeenth century.
Embarking at Qu’Appelle in a caboose with an advance party of Otter’s
Indian-fighters, I landed, one fine April morning, at Swift Current,
then consisting of half a dozen shacks. When the rest of the column
arrived, we found ourselves 500 strong: the Queen’s Own Rifles of
Toronto, in their dark green uniforms; a company of red-coated
sharpshooters, picked from the Governor-General’s Foot Guards of Ottawa;
a company from the Toronto School of Infantry; a bunch of blue-coated
artillery-men from Quebec, with a gatling and two field guns; and forty
Mounted Police.
To reach the beleaguered town we knew we should have to cross 180 miles
of uninhabited wilderness. We had, therefore, to accumulate a train of
farm wagons to carry food for the troops, hay and oats for the horses,
and even wood for our camp fires. Many pioneer farmers of Manitoba and
the territories let their land lie fallow that year and spent the summer
teaming at $10 a day for the Government.
Hour after hour, day after day, the thin line of wagons and horsemen,
four miles long from van to rear, rolled northwards up the trail. Not a
man did we see, nor sign of life, except for the meadow larks and
gophers.
At last we stood on the bank of the Battle River,—and over there we
were thankful to see the old Battleford stockade still sheltering the
refugees we had come to save.
The Indians vanished on our approach, and pitched their camp on
Poundmaker’s reserve, nearly forty miles away in the west. So in the
afternoon of the first of May, leaving half our little force to guard
the town, but taking with us a company of the beleaguered white men who
had organized themselves as a “Battleford Home Guard,” we set out on the
enemy’s track, carrying five days’ rations and little else.
All night we rode, and the sun was sending its first rays up behind us
when we saw at our feet a little valley where Cutknife Creek wound in
and out among bushes through a sandy bottom. From the other side of the
creek rose a gentle slope of bare turf, flanked on either side by a
gully. This was Cutknife Hill, where Poundmaker and his Crees had
defeated Chief Cutknife and his Sarcees, many years before. But since
then Poundmaker had distinguished himself as a peacemaker; it was he who
brought to an end the age-long feud between the Crees and the Blackfoot
confederacy.
A few hundred yards beyond the crest of the hill we knew that Poundmaker
was now encamped, and we hoped that he and all his men were still sound
asleep.
They were—all but one. Do you ask how I know that? Years afterwards I
went over the battlefield with an old Indian named Piacutch, who had
been in the fight. When I asked him how the Indians knew we were coming
that morning, he told me—“There was an old Indian, named
Jacob-with-long-hair, who always got up before anybody else. He went out
over the hill, and his horse put up its ears, and then he listened and
heard wagons coming; so he galloped back and told us, and we strung out
as quick as we could, one by one.”
Scarcely had the head of the column got across the stream when a scout
dashed back with the cry “The Nichis are on us!”
The police were flying up the hill in a moment, with the gunners
galloping at their heels, and gained the top of the hill in the nick of
time, for the Indians were racing for the same point of vantage. Foiled
in this, the painted redskins launched a volley of yells and bullets at
the police, and fell back into a hollow, beyond which lay the Indian
camp. Meanwhile the infantry had leapt from their wagons, and in less
time than it takes to tell were lying in skirmishing order all along the
edges of the slope.
Puffs of smoke began to rise from the gullies on our left, on our right,
and even in our rear. We were completely surrounded by hidden Indians,
every one of them a sniper. If a rifleman so much as rose on his elbow
to fire, he was the target of a dozen marksmen. Cover we had none. The
horses and wagons were just bunched together on the middle of the hill.
The air seemed alive with whizzing bullets, and one by one our men were
dropping.
Do you wonder what it feels like, to find yourself suddenly for the
first time in the middle of a whistling concert of bullets, knowing that
any one of them may get you? Well, some are scared for a moment, and a
few stay scared. Others are exhilarated by the joy of fighting. On
Cutknife Hill that day, I suppose nearly all, though tired with the long
night ride, quickly recovered from the shock of surprise, and felt
little anxiety except to do their duty as well as they could.
Personally, I felt too much interested to be afraid; nor could I be
upset by the sight of death in ghastly forms, for my calling had
hardened me to that in time of peace. My chief feeling was just a keen
desire to see and understand everything that was going on, to gather up
all the incidents of the battle into a living and accurate story, so
that others could read and realize what I had seen.
The volunteers, whatever they felt, seemed in action cool as veterans;
cool of nerve only, for the sun beat down upon them with all its western
might. They wasted a monstrous lot of lead at first, but presently
settled down to more systematic work, and even imitated a favorite
Indian trick—one man holding up a hat as target and his comrade picking
off anyone who rose to aim at it. Those clerks from Ottawa and students
from Toronto were as steady under the deadly hail as if they had fought
through a hundred battles.
A most heroic scene was enacted by a pair of theological students from
Toronto. Three of the Battleford Home Guard, trying to clear out the
enemy from the creek-bed in our rear, were cut off by a bunch of
Indians. Their only way of escape was by reaching and climbing a
perpendicular earthen cut-bank. Two of the University Company in the
Queen’s Own, Acheson and Lloyd, who had themselves got separated from
their comrades, caught sight of the Battleford men from the top of the
bank and realized their desperate strait. Acheson stretched himself over
the edge and hauled up the refugees by main force as soon as they
reached the foot of the cut-bank, while Lloyd took aim in turn at every
Indian that rose to fire at the rescuer—took aim, but dared not let
fly, for he had only one cartridge left.
So hot was the Indian fire that every one of the three Battleford men
was shot as soon as he reached the top of the bank. One of them got a
second bullet in him while Acheson was carrying him back, and they
rolled over together. Acheson was picking the man up again, when a Métis
scrambled up out of the gully and levelled his musket at the rescuer’s
back. Lloyd fired his last cartridge and knocked over the Métis, whose
body carried down with it half a dozen Indians climbing up behind him. A
moment after, a bullet pierced Lloyd’s side, took off a piece of a
vertebra, and stretched him helpless on the turf. Acheson, all his
ammunition gone, sprang to Lloyd’s defence, and stood over him with
clubbed rifle; but neither of them would have lived another minute if a
handful of their comrades had not come up in the nick of time and driven
back their assailants.
It is that same Lloyd, now Bishop of Saskatchewan, whose name is
immortalized by the town of Lloydminster. Acheson is a bishop too, in
Connecticut.
Desperately grave as the situation was, it had its moments of humor. A
bullet scraped the skin off Sergeant McKell’s temple. “Another good
Irishman gone!” he cried as he fell—but picked himself up next minute
on discovering that he was not killed at all.
“What on earth have you been wearing that red tuque for?” a rifleman
asked when he met one of the Battleford men at the end of the fight,—“I
heard there was a halfbreed with a red tuque on, and I’ve been firing at
you all the morning.”
The guns were the grimmest joke of all. The gatling sprayed the prairie
with a vast quantity of lead, and a machine gun is all very well when
your enemy stands in front of it in a crowd; but that is not the
Indians’ way. They had a wholesome respect for the seven-pounders—which
was more than the gunners themselves had, for the wooden trails were
rotten and gave way under the recoil, so that one of the guns fell to
the ground after every shot and the other had to be tied to its carriage
with a rope.
At last our men were allowed to charge down the slopes and clear out the
gullies. The Indians fled before them, and prepared to defend their
camp. But we were not allowed to follow up our advantage. Instead, the
order was given to retire. The teams were hitched up in a hurry, and the
retreat began. We had lost eight killed and fourteen wounded.
Imagine the Indians’ astonishment. We were leaving them masters of the
field. Before half of us had re-crossed the creek, they were pouring
down the hill after us like a swarm of angry ants. Now, however, they
were in the open, and a well-planted shell from our rope-swathed
seven-pounder (its companion had been put to bed in a wagon), with the
cool musketry of our rear-guard, held the pursuers in check till the
last of our wagons had struggled through the creek.
The Indians might have turned our defeat into disaster if they had
circled round and picked us off piecemeal as the long-drawn-out line of
sleepy soldiers wound its way home through the woods. And that is
exactly what they would have done if their chief had let them, as an
Indian explained to me afterwards.
“The young men wanted to,” he said, “but Poundmaker held them back out
of pity for you.” Another old Indian added that the chief brandished his
whip and threatened to flog any Indian who dared to go after the white
man.
We were comforted by the assurance that we had taught the Indians a
lesson; but it was exactly the opposite of the lesson we had meant to
teach them. Up to that time Poundmaker had resisted all Riel’s
persuasions to bring the tribes down and join forces with the Métis
fighting further east, but now he could no longer resist the war spirit
of his elated braves.
The bad news burst upon us with dramatic suddenness one day, when a big
train of nearly thirty wagons, bringing food from Swift Current, ran
into the middle of the Indian army streaming away to the east. It was a
great haul for the red men.
* * * * *
That was “the darkest hour before the dawn.” As hot a reception as we
got from the Indians, the other column got from the Métis farther east.
General Middleton had under his command about 850 men—two militia
battalions, the 90th Rifles of Winnipeg and the Royal Grenadiers of
Toronto, with two batteries of artillery, and two bands of mounted men
raised for the occasion, under Major Boulton and Captain French.
On the 24th of April the force was marching down the valley of the South
Saskatchewan, half on one side of the river, half on the other. They
were bound for Batoche’s Ferry, where the Métis had their stronghold,
defended with many rifle pits. One party of rebels, however, under their
“general,” an old buffalo hunter named Gabriel Dumont, came up the
valley a dozen miles on the south side, to meet the white men and if
possible check their advance. Skilfully choosing the best spot for this
purpose, they took cover amongst the trees and boulders just below the
edge of a gully which the soldiers would have to cross. The rebels were
hard to dislodge, and in that skirmishing fight of Fish Creek ten of our
men were killed and forty wounded.
This checked the advance for a fortnight, till reinforcements
arrived—half the Midland Battalion of Ontarians, and a gatling gun,
brought down the river by the same steamboat which had ferried our
column across on the way to Battleford—one of those stern-wheelers
which are said to “float in a heavy dew.” A corps of surveyors under
Captain J. S. Dennis came up in time to join in the final attack.
Arriving at Batoche on May 9, the troops for four days peppered the
hidden foe, who held their ground and fired back with equal courage.
At last the soldiers were allowed to charge, and they cleared out the
rifle pits at a rush. The battle was won, with a loss of eight killed,
including four officers, and forty-six wounded. Riel escaped, but a few
days afterwards he was caught not far away by a party of scouts. Dumont
fled to the States, and the rank and file of the misguided rebels laid
down their arms.
The news travelled swiftly to the west, and Poundmaker saw that the game
was up. One afternoon, therefore, when I had crossed over to the south
shore of the river at Battleford, I met the most pathetic and
picturesque procession I have ever seen: the Indian chiefs riding in to
surrender.
Here was Poundmaker at their head—tall and gaunt, with a strong hooked
nose, his long black hair hanging down his back in a score of tight
little plaits, each bound round at intervals of an inch or two with
brass wire. His clothing was far from royal; a pair of shapeless blanket
trousers or shaps, a colored cotton shirt, an old tweed waistcoat and no
coat at all. But his keen and dignified face was that of a king, and
though he was too thorough an Indian to show the least sign of his
feelings, I could not help pitying the fallen leader in his deep
humiliation.
[Illustration]
_On the Battlefield—_
_Friends Again_
[Illustration]
_A Horse Ranch_
[Illustration]
_Where no Trees Grew—Forestry_
_Station, Indian Head_
[Illustration]
_Quality Raising Quality—_
_School Fair Prize Winners_
Around him rode his allies and lieutenants. No two of them were dressed
alike. One gentleman wore a black “wide-awake” hat and a long blue naval
frock-coat with brass buttons, hanging over the usual dirty blanket
breeches. Another wore on his head the whole skin of a big otter, its
teeth grinning in front and its tail hanging down behind. Still another
had stuck feathers in his topknot, and a fourth wore a hard felt Derby
hat adorned with fluttering ribbons of many colors. All of them had
washed the yellow war-paint off their faces, discarded their guns, and
rode on, silent and impassive as statues, to meet any dreadful fate that
might be in store for them.
General Middleton, newly arrived from his victory at Batoche, held his
court in the open air, sitting on a campstool for bench, with an
interpreter by his side. Poundmaker sat before him on the ground, the
rest of the prisoners squatting around in a semi-circle at a more
respectful distance.
Poundmaker, being severely questioned by the General, denied having any
intention of fighting; nor had he ever promised to help Riel. He did not
know what Indians had committed murder or robbery.
A very gay young Stoney came forward and squatted right at the General’s
feet,—a regular Indian dandy, covered with bead-work, and wearing a
woman’s black straw hat with a bright green plume. With the utmost
coolness, he confessed to a perfectly unprovoked murder. He and a few
comrades had come across an inoffensive farmer greasing his wagon
wheels, and had shot him down like a rabbit. “I told my people I would
give myself up to save them,” the murderer said.
Another speaker, an old and ragged man, had also a murder to confess.
This was Ikta, the slayer of the farm instructor on Red Pheasant’s
reserve. Ikta wound up by offering to be cut into little pieces, if only
the white men would spare his wife and children and give them food.
At last a woman rose to speak. “Tell her we don’t listen to women,” said
the General to the interpreter. “Then why does your Queen send her word
for us to obey?” asked an Indian. The General muttered that the Queen
had men for her advisers; but the woman was allowed to speak, and put in
a pathetic plea for mercy to the conquered red men.
Then the murderers, and Poundmaker, and three other chiefs, were locked
up in the fort, while the rest of the red men were sent off to repent on
their reserves.
The war was not over yet, though the fighting was. Big Bear was still at
large. To rescue the twenty-six prisoners he had been dragging about
with him since his capture of Fort Pitt, flying columns were sent off to
scour the maze of wood and river and lake in the north. It seemed like
hunting through a haystack for a needle; but it gave promise of fresh
adventures in a country very different from any we had so far seen, and
I attached myself to a troop of Mounted Police and Scouts who seemed
more likely than the rest to catch the runaways.
Our experiences on that wild chase were varied and even entertaining, to
those of us who had a spice of the Mark Tapley in our dispositions. For
hardship, this proved the worst part of the whole campaign.
Leaving the sunlit prairie behind, we plunged into a forest broken by
glades and lakes and sloughs and muskegs. If a lake was shallow and had
a reasonably firm bottom, we waded through; if not, we squeezed our way
along the boggy edge between wood and water. One day we covered only
twelve miles. The mosquitoes had no trouble keeping up with us. They had
never had such a feast in their lives. We ourselves had to feast on hard
tack and salt pork, washed down with sugarless and milkless tea.
Spurred on by the hot pursuit, the Indians fled faster and faster, till
they reached Beaver River, which they crossed in hastily built coracles
of hide stretched on willow frames. We, too, reached Beaver River, a
fine stream flowing through a deep valley between steep, thickly wooded
hillsides. Some of us got across, in a derelict canoe, and struck away
north as far as Cold Lake; but Big Bear had clearly given us the slip.
Great was our rejoicing when a messenger from Fort Pitt came after us
with the news that all the prisoners had been saved.
It turned out that a band of friendly Indians, whom Big Bear had forced
to go on the war path, and who had all along protected the prisoners
from the wilder Crees, had one day lagged behind on pretence of mending
their harness, and set the last of the white folk free as soon as the
other Indians were out of sight.
Big Bear soon afterwards came down to Prince Albert and gave himself up.
He and Poundmaker were sent to prison for a few months, while Riel and
eight Indian murderers were hanged. The Métis were now assured of their
rights, on the time-honored principle of locking the stable door after
all the horses have been stolen. Even before receiving this assurance,
the rebels had settled down, quite as glad as we were to be done
fighting. I wandered about among them alone for a time without meeting
the slightest trace of ill will. The earth was still fresh in the rifle
pits of Batoche, and the bullet scars raw on the trees of Duck Lake, but
the rebellion was dead as a camp fire after a rain storm.
THE NEW TIMES
CHAPTER IX
Opening the Door of the West
DO YOU see that rough man with a key in his hand? It looks like a spade,
you say—and so it is; but it is doing the work of a key. He strikes it
into the soil; he digs up a sod. That is all you observe, till your
imagination awakes—and then you see that he is opening the door of the
West. He has turned the first sod of a railway line from the East.
The saving of the West from destruction, the swift suppression of revolt
when delay might have rallied all the Indians to the rebel flag, was
only made possible by the railway. But when the railway was planned
there was no idea that it would be needed for such a purpose. It was not
built for its military value.
True, the safeguarding of our country and our Empire in case of war had
always been one aim of those far-sighted men who looked forward to a
transcontinental railway on British soil. Such a line, enabling troops
and munitions to be carried from Atlantic to Pacific in a few days,
would clearly be a priceless advantage, and might even be the deciding
factor in a life and death struggle; we know the immense help it gave in
the life and death struggle we were plunged into a few years ago.
Yet the reasons which decided Canada to carry out this tremendous
railway scheme were wholly peaceful—to open up a land of homes for
loyal people on the plains, and to join the East and Centre with the
farthest West; to unite our scattered little communities in one great
Dominion.
There was only one thing uniting these three regions—a sentiment. They
all knew and felt that they were members of one great brotherhood, the
royal republic known as the British Empire. The British Columbians could
have “paddled their own canoe” and remained separate from the Canadians
if they had wanted; but they did not want. Their legislature unanimously
and wisely voted in favor of federating with the newly formed Dominion
of Canada in 1871—on condition that within ten years a railway should
be built connecting that far western province with the railway system of
Eastern Canada.
The colony on the Pacific, with a small population, hemmed in both north
and south, would have found it hard to maintain an independent existence
if she had not joined forces with her fellow-countrymen in the East.
British Columbia, too, was the only possible gateway of Canada to the
West. Without a transcontinental railway, the rest of our country would
have been cut off from its natural and necessary outlet to the trade of
the Pacific, a trade already large and destined to become enormous.
Just as urgent was the need of this railway to open up the land between
the Rockies and the Lakes for the millions of British folk and others
who desired new homes under the British flag, which stood then, as it
stands to-day, for the union of steadfast liberty with steadfast law.
The United States, face to face with the same problem, had just solved
it by completing in 1869 a transcontinental railway system which linked
California with New York and at the same time opened up the western
plains of that country to the home-maker. That was not only an example
but a warning.
The United States, of course, had plenty of land, enormous territories
of its own to fill up; but the evil habit of coveting a neighbor’s
possessions is found among those who have plenty as well as among those
who have little. South of the line were many who looked with covetous
eyes on the fertile land in the north. Their plan to “jump the claim” to
this land might have become a serious danger if no one had been living
here except fur traders and Indians.
What staved off the danger, to begin with, was the settlement of the Red
River district, by the energy and self-sacrifice of Lord Selkirk. The
settlers were only a handful; but they “held the fort” and set an
example, and after a while others began to dribble in, as you have heard
already. The situation would again have become serious, however, when
the Union Pacific Railway brought settlers and adventurers crowding into
the Western States, if an easy way had not been provided for our own
people to settle our own western territory from Eastern Canada and from
overseas.
If the prairie had passed into the control of an alien power, the
Canadian people, and the people coming from overseas to join them, would
for ever have been prevented from expanding westward, just as the
American colonists themselves a hundred years before had found their
westward expansion blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi
valley—only on that occasion, as we have seen, the Americans were able
to break down the obstacle by the British mother-country coming to their
rescue.
The very existence of Canada, then, as a complete Dominion worthy of the
two great enterprising races which had laid its foundations, and worthy
of the civilizing British brotherhood in which it had achieved
self-governing membership, depended on the prompt connection of all its
parts by a national railway line.
The puzzle was, how to do it? The line would have to be built through an
almost uninhabited wilderness, and the cost of construction was bound to
be enormous.
The Canadian people, though rich in faith, in courage, and resources,
were not rich in money. With the strong right arm and heroic heart they
had tamed the wild East, but was their arm strong enough and long enough
to reach out and tame the wild West? At first it seemed not. The
building of the railway, by the agreement with British Columbia, should
have commenced by 1873. It was 1875 before construction began, on a line
from the head of Lake Superior towards the West; and even then the
Federal authorities could only make up their minds to an instalment
plan, giving contracts for the building of sections here and there, and
trusting to navigation on the Great Lakes and Lake of the Woods to
complete a chain of mixed land and water communication between East and
West. No provision was made for the necessary land line north of the
Lakes.
In 1880, when nine of the ten years had gone by and less than 700 miles
of track had been laid, the scheme of a Government railway was given up
as hopeless. A little group of men was found to guarantee the building
of a line by private enterprise and finish it within ten years. Most of
these men were Canadians of Scottish birth, of the same class that had
already done so much for the exploration of the West and the carrying on
of its ancient fur trade. In fact, the moving spirits in the enterprise
were Donald Smith, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had spent
most of his life in the northern and western wilds, and his cousin
George Stephen. Though it was not to be officially a Government line, it
was built to provide the great national highway which the country
required, and Parliament decreed that a majority of the directors must
always be British citizens.
It was a great adventure and a costly one, the building of that line; so
costly, indeed, that again and again the Company was nearly ruined
before its task was done, even with a large grant of money and western
land from the Government. The prophecy that it would never pay for its
axle grease sounds absurd now that the railway has proved itself perhaps
the most conspicuously successful enterprise ever undertaken in Canada,
and one of the most famous in the world. In its early years, however,
the capitalists, outside the group of resolute men who had launched the
scheme, could hardly be persuaded to put any money in it, they thought
its chances of success so small.
Blasting, cutting and levelling, building a track to carry heavy trains
through mountain passes and along the sides of precipices where even a
mountain goat never ventured before, demanded the highest degree of
skill, endurance, and dogged defiance of danger. Towering heights and
raging torrents, hard rock and dense forest, crumbling gravel and
avalanching snow, all were encountered and all were overcome.
Besides the mountains and chasms of the Far West, there was the long
mountainous stretch north of Lake Superior, where the thrilling grandeur
of the scenery may suggest to the admiring passenger some feeble idea of
the tremendous toil which alone made possible his enjoyment or indeed
his very sight of it. Here 200 miles of railway track cost $12,000,000,
of which $2,100,000 was used for dynamite alone. A dynamite factory had
to be established on the spot. The bridges, tunnels and galleries along
the face of the cliff for three miles at Jackfish Bay cost $1,500,000. A
single mile cost $700,000.
There was only one town of any size in the whole length of the line,
from eastern Ontario to the British Columbian shore; and Winnipeg itself
had not 8,000 inhabitants when the work began in 1881. Practically every
company and battalion of the great army of railway builders was hundreds
of miles from its base of supplies. The fighting line, far longer than
all the battle lines on the French, Italian and Russian war fronts put
together, stretched for over 2,500 miles through an almost uninhabited
and untilled wilderness.
With such tremendous energy and enthusiasm was the work pushed on, that
in less than half the promised time it was finished. The discovery of a
useless North West Passage had taken centuries; the creation of an
infinitely useful North West Passage overland had taken only five years.
The first sod had been turned on May 2, 1881; the prairie section
reached Calgary on August 18, 1883; the last gap north of Lake Superior
was closed on May 17, 1885, giving a continuous line of steel from
Montreal to the Rocky Mountains; and on the 7th of November in the same
year the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, 85 miles west of the
Selkirk summit in British Columbia. The first through passenger train,
from the head of Atlantic navigation on the St. Lawrence to the head of
Pacific navigation on Burrard Inlet, left Montreal on the evening of
June 28, 1886, and finished its memorable journey at Port Moody on the
morning of July 4. The great city of Vancouver, twelve miles down the
Inlet, was then but a clearing in the forest scarcely three months old.
It took Port Moody’s place as the Pacific terminus in June, 1887.
CHAPTER X
Our Fathers and Mothers Come In
THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they?
Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must
look back a hundred years to find out.
When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the
Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong;
and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was
self-government, it could and would have been won later on without
secession, as other colonists won it.
Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked
over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and
Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a
considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide
flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon.
The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet
she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were
drained of their people, because the political economists could find
nothing for them to do at home.
It is believed that in the early years of the nineteenth century 25,000
Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while great
numbers were taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and various
counties in Upper and Lower Canada were peopled almost entirely from the
same source. The members of a clan, or the inhabitants of a district,
commonly emigrated together, and took up homes together in the New
World, under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves. In 1804, eight
hundred Highlanders, evicted by landlords who wanted the land for sheep
runs, came over and made a new Glengarry between the St. Lawrence and
Ottawa rivers, where the land would be their own. About the same time an
Irish officer, Thomas Talbot, threw himself with the “go” of a cavalry
charge into an emigration movement, and never rested till he had settled
twenty-eight townships north of Lake Erie.
One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only sent a large company of his own
clansmen to Canada at his own expense, but took up his abode among them
on the township allotted him by the Government. Later, in the early
thirties, we hear of 400 discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a
body, with their old officers at their head, and forming a military camp
in the Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united efforts had cut out
the roads and fields and built the houses of a civilized settlement. In
England, about the same time, Lord Egremont organized an expedition of
760 Sussex folk, who also made homes for themselves in Upper Canada, as
Ontario then was called. The emigrant ships were thick on the Atlantic,
and in four years 160,000 British emigrants landed on Canadian soil.
While the silence of the desert spread over Scottish hillsides, the
Canadian wilds awaked to vigorous life. From Lake Huron to the Atlantic,
Canada was ringing with the settler’s axe. The air was black with
smoke,—fire cleared the land faster than steel. The stones were
gathered into piles, and the plow, driven in and out among the blackened
stumps, prepared the virgin soil for its first crop of oats and
potatoes. The labor which forced the wilderness to blossom as the rose
was enormous; but the men who gave it had strong hearts, and wrestled
cheerfully with nature. Never thinking of ease, they won prosperity.
The children and grandchildren of those hardy eastern pioneers made just
the right pioneering stuff for the newly opened West. They were
reinforced by descendants of the folk their ancestors had left behind in
the Old Country, now coming out to Western Canada direct,—English,
Scottish, Irish, Welsh, even Manxmen and Channel Islanders,
Scandinavians, and others from Northern Europe. These were our nearest
relations on that continent, descendants of the men left behind long
centuries ago when their raiding kinsfolk settled in the British Isles;
and now they sent contingents straight to the British prairies in
Canada. Many of the same stock came in early, beginning long before the
railway opened, from the Norse colony in Iceland which had “discovered
America” five hundred years before Columbus. From the south came
“Americans,” practically all of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons and
Scandinavians, or of the Celtic stock to which most of the Highland
Scots, Irish, Welsh and French belong. Many coming in from across the
line were natives of Eastern Canada who had heard “the call of the West”
while the only West ready to receive them was that of the States.
The newcomers spread over the prairie—spread so fast and so far, in
fact, that they had to endure long isolation before any railway could
reach them. “I had to haul my wheat 80 miles,” one old settler says,
“and then got forty cents a bushel for it.” But he was “a sticker,” and
is now one of the most prosperous farmers in the country. Not owing to
wheat, however; he was a stockman, long before live stock became
popular. Wheat became King of the Plains, and few there were who would
not bow down to him.
The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived,
with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was
ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by
great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large
over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies.
Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and
driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost
the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect
them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the
Indians from whiskey-smugglers.
I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific
had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man
says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first
substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as
the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to
gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had
been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones
were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was
Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago
and other centres for use in sugar refining.
CHAPTER XI
Riding the Plains in 1905
KING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender
when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of
grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences.
This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your
telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride
with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new
Prairie Provinces were just being born.
Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still surviving, with its
lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has just been sold to a syndicate for $6
an acre—five times what its owner paid to the Government twenty years
back—for sub-division into farms. The last 10,000 head of cattle are
being driven off to a range leased from the Government many miles away
to the north.
Wheat is waving, yellow and ripe, on farms newly fenced off the prairie,
close by; and even the ranches up in the foothills, where they thought
themselves secure, find speculative homesteaders cutting off quarter
sections from the “free range.”
Much of the south-western prairie was fit for ranching, and for ranching
only. But newcomers in their haste and ignorance demanded to have it
thrown open for homesteading, and the Government, equally hasty and
ignorant, allowed them to flock in,—presently to flock out again, to
districts where crops are reasonably sure. After many wasted years the
deserted land may possibly be seen alive with flocks of sheep, and in
the end with herds of cattle as in the beginning.
Riding away to the north—though not for lack of a train, if we wanted
to take one—we pass through Calgary, already a city of 10,000, and
after another fifty miles or so of “bald-headed prairie” we enter the
beautiful park lands of Central Alberta. Here, along a railway closely
following our road, the old Edmonton Trail of Cree and Blackfoot, we
find a string of farmers who are neither “ranchers” nor “grain-growers,”
though they raise both grain and cattle. Livestock is their mainstay;
and already, though the day of the big ranch is over, the number of
cattle in the West is greater than ever.
Strike eastward, though. Here, far from any railway line, we might think
ourselves back in the days before the West was discovered even by
Indians. We enter a land where no man dwells. We see the prairie
primeval, as it was when it first arose from the sea and put on its
mantle of green; sleeping on, untouched and unchanged, as it slept when
the first silent red man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to
scan its sunlit sea of grass.
Look close, and we detect the winding trails of buffalo, trod by
uncounted generations in everlasting single file—mere shallow grooves
all overgrown with grass. The buffalo have all been gone these thirty
years. We cannot do as thirty years ago a traveller did—shoot a buffalo
when dinner time came, roast the tongue, carry off the best of the hump,
and leave the rest to the coyotes. We might bring down a prairie chicken
or duck now and then, but we have a long trip ahead of us, and no time
for hunting. Like old Highland clansmen riding to war, we carry each a
bag of oatmeal strapped to the saddle. There is nothing like it. “We owe
to Scotland whiskey and oatmeal,” somebody says, “but the less we take
of the one, and the more we take of the other, the less we lose and the
more we gain.” For this trip we add a trifle of tea and sugar, and
bacon, which our clansman would have thought luxurious.
Here and there we may happen on a square iron stake rising from a little
mound in the midst of four shallow pits, pointing north, south, east and
west. Surveyors have been here and left these landmarks so that
home-seekers can see at once the corners of each quarter section; but
the home-seekers have not yet come.
At last we see two parallel ruts worn smooth and deep through the grass.
We have found the old trail which the army followed on its march to the
relief of Battleford. Here is a little creek, “Fifteen-mile Springs” by
name; it is fifteen miles north of the Saskatchewan River; and camping
beside it we actually find two human beings, with a wagon and team. They
are Minnesota farmers, on their way to join a score of others from the
same State who are settling on homesteads far north-east of this.
“And don’t you want to be ‘Americans’ any longer?” I ask.
“No,” say they both, most emphatically, “we’re Canadians now.”
After a friendly meal of bread and bacon, we leave the good men behind,
and with them leave the modern world. The ancient world opens up around
us as we ride away to the north—the ancient prairie as it was, as it
is, and never-more shall be.
Bathed in a glorious flood of sunshine, a glorious flood of air, the
rolling plain spreads limitless to far horizons. Space, never-ending
space, all round; and silence, but for the music of our horses’ hoofs.
High overhead fly steadily a flock of cranes, in perfect arrow-head
formation, two long lines converging on the leader. Wild duck fly,
straight but scattering, from slough to slough. The little greyish lark
hops everywhere.
The gopher sits bolt upright on the edge of a hole, vanishing downward
like a shot when he thinks audacity has reached fool-hardiness. Twenty
yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouts up where a big
striped badger is digging himself a home. He turns and stares at us,
motionless, till we also stop, when he too disappears. Now and then a
snake slips across the trail, a greenish-yellow innocent.
On the crest of a knoll, outlined against the sky, a great buzzard sits
watching us till we come near, then soars away on the other side. A
coyote steals swiftly over the plain, turning round and stopping now and
then for a good look at us. Again and again, rounding a hillock, we
startle a bunch of antelope; they make off in a leisurely-seeming way,
but their graceful leaps take them out of range with the speed of a fast
train. When the railway later on had to fence its track, the antelope at
first would stop, distressed and puzzled by the mysterious obstacle to
their migration; but they soon learned to clear the barrier at a
bound. . . .
Suddenly we spy a house—then a second house, and a little sod
shack—the only sign of settlement between the South Saskatchewan and
the Battle River valley. It looks like an isolated knot of dwellings,
but we are really cutting across a long thin line. The newcomers left
the railway at Saskatoon—the Canadian Northern, which before the end of
the year will be through from Winnipeg to Edmonton—but, finding the
land near the railway taken up, they have driven on and on to the
south-west, till at last, after 85 miles, they have reached land without
an owner. Others following them have gone on in the same direction, till
now the thread of settlement stretches out to a length of a hundred
miles from the railway.
[Illustration]
_Antelope on the Alert_
The sod shack is the first western home of a farmer from Ontario, whose
family will not be coming up till spring. On the next homestead is a
good frame house, an unpainted and unvarnished shell so far, but showing
taste and means which scorn to shelter even for a time within rough
comfortable walls of turf. This, too, belongs to a born Briton from
Ontario. The third settler is a cheery Perthshire Highlander. He has
spent twelve years in Manitoba, sold his farm at a profit, and come far
afield for a free homestead. He has already got 50 acres broken for next
year’s crop, and finds time to act as baker for the settlers “baching
it” around him.
Again we mount, and plunge into the wilderness. Evening draws in, and
still we ride—in silence, for the joy of living is too deep for words.
On a high hilltop we pause, enchanted by the vista opened suddenly at
our feet. Deep in the darkening east a valley sleeps, veiled in a weird
portentous purple mist.
Beside the next water we camp; that is, we cook our simple fare on a
fire of dwarf willow and wild rose stems, hobble our broncos, roll
ourselves in blankets and go to sleep under the friendly stars, lulled
by the breeze that rustles in the grass, despite the heathen coyote’s
evening hymn.
The next day we see trees ahead, and ride into the heart of Sixty-mile
Bush, a curious isolated patch of wood rising like an island from the
grassy sea, and interspersed with many a slough. Here we find human
beings: two families of Métis. One woman speaks French and Cree; the
other, educated in a convent, speaks English pretty well. Their eight
little children, dark-skinned, black-eyed and very Indian looking, roll
each other over on the floor; active and jolly, though remarkably quiet
in their play.
Presently grandfather comes in: a pleasant-faced man, dark as an Indian,
but bearded like a white man; a stalwart of seventy, without a white
hair. Not a word of English can he speak, though long ago he travelled
as guide with an English hunter through the Rocky Mountains. In quite
good French, he spins out reminiscences. He knew Louis Riel in the
trouble of 1870—knew him so well that he strongly opposed inviting him
back in 1884. But when the invitation was given, and the man he despised
was leading his kinsfolk into hopeless rebellion, our friend took up his
gun and fought like the rest at Batoche.
They are all most hospitable, these dusky folk of Sixty-mile Bush. “If
you want wood for your camp-fire,” says the spokeswoman, “take all you
need from our log pile. And aren’t you tired of sleeping on the prairie?
The stable is dry and clean—the horses run out all summer—and there is
plenty of hay in the stacks. Have you had enough of slough water? Here’s
a pail of fine water from the well.” To be sure they have no yeast
bread, but for a trifle we get one of their mighty bannocks—oval slabs,
eighteen inches by twelve, and an inch thick—with a big lump of
home-churned butter and a jug of fresh milk.
Crossing another stretch of treeless plain in the morning, we notice
fresh wagon tracks leading away from the trail. We turn aside and follow
one of these tracks, but it ends suddenly on the edge of a deep wooded
coulee, where some new settler has gone to cut logs for his first shack.
Exploring another fresh trail, we come upon a brown patch of newly
broken land, with a brand-new box of a house in the middle, and the
beginnings of a well dug beside it; but we have had our trouble for
nothing, for the owner, after doing as much as this in compliance with
the easy homestead law, has returned to the States for the winter,
intending to come back for good next year.
Better luck farther on. Here is a house that is clearly inhabited, for
we see through the window a loaf of bread on a shelf and a pile of wood
by the stove. Now we country folk in the West don’t like a visitor to
turn away just because we are out when he calls, especially near meal
times. We leave the key over the door to welcome him by proxy, and if he
knows anything about our ways he will reach up and find it at once. Most
of us, in fact, don’t lock our doors at all; there is no need. . . . Oh,
yes, there are exceptions. Now and then a low-down individual, or a
whole family without one conscience to the dozen, will descend like a
blight on a neighborhood; until they are driven out or reformed, things
have a habit of disappearing; but in most parts we trust each other
perfectly. . . . Putting up my hand, I find the hospitable key. We go in
and make ourselves at home, lighting a fire for our bacon, and helping
ourselves to bread and butter and potatoes by way of a change.
Departing, we leave twenty-five cents apiece on the table; but we know
that if the hostess had been at home she would almost certainly have
refused the money.
A white spot in the distance attracts us, as twilight thickens. Riding
over, we find it a very small tent—inhabited by a very large man, who
cannot stand upright till he comes out of it. “Good enough for me,” he
says with a laugh. “When I’m not sleeping I want to be out working. I
started plowing the day I got here, and now look at that”—pointing to
his fifty acres of new breaking. “The house can wait till I bring my
folks up from Iowa next April. Then we’ll run up a house together in a
brace of shakes.”
“Why did you leave Iowa? Don’t they call it the finest agricultural
State in the Union?”
“So it is, but no better than this’ll be. And anyway I’d only a rented
farm, and I wanted one of my own. My next neighbor here came from down
there too, and he had a good farm; but his boys were big enough to want
farms too, and land prices went soaring out of sight, so he sold out for
enough to stock half-a-dozen new farms up here.”
“You won’t find it strange to become a Canadian?”
“There’s nothing strange about it. Friend of mine down there said to me,
‘I ain’t going to have no king riding over me!’—Well, there’s some
folks think no ways good but their own ways; and that’s the worst kind
of ignorance. I told him the King was just a president, and brought up
to the business, as no in-and-out president ever was. We have to elect a
new one every four years, and you just elect a new one when you see
there’s need. I know history, and I know how you give a bad king the
air, and choose a new one and tell him to go ahead and be the sort of
king you want and teach his son to do likewise—which he takes mighty
good care to do. He’s just as much the people’s choice as ours is, and
then some! And the best of it is, chosen and brought up as he is like
that, you’ve always got a president that’s never been a party man and
never can be, so all parties can trust him. Mighty sensible plan, seems
to me.
“Then your king never goes against his people and parliament. He hasn’t
anything like the power of our president. Once a president gets in, he
appoints what ministers he likes—the House hasn’t a word to say about
it though the Senate has—and there they are, planted for four years no
matter what happens, congress or no congress. Here in this Dominion of
Canada, your Prime Minister is the only man that has anything like the
power of our president, and even he has to do what parliament says—or
get out. Talk about self-government! They’ve got it in England, and
you’ve got it in Canada, a sight more of it than we have.
“There’s another sensible thing I like about your British ways. Whether
you make much better laws or much about the same, if a man breaks them
you get after him, and give him his medicine quick. We call ourselves
hustlers! You don’t give your scallywag a thousand miles of rope and let
him play around dodging the law as long as he can pay a lawyer.”
“As for the King, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” I remark. “If
everybody looked for the facts as you do, without prejudice, half the
differences of opinion on all sorts of questions would simply vanish.
There is no nation without a king. Our neighbors, as you say, elect a
King every four years and call him a President—we elect our President
whenever we see cause, and call him a King. King George holds office
entirely by authority of an Act of Parliament, and so will his son;
though we are always glad to remember that they inherit the blood of
Alfred the Great. We are a practical people, though we know well the
value of sentiment and high tradition; and we have found the greatest
practical advantages in possessing an independent and impartial
president, who has no party bias, favors no class or sectional interest,
and belongs not to the mother-land alone but to every country of our
world-wide brotherhood. He, as no one else can, unites and represents us
all.
“As for our laws, they are not perfect, and I’m afraid we have not
caught all the rascals yet; but on the whole the impression you have got
is well justified.”
Half a mile away, in the darkening air, we see the outline of a house,
with a cheerful beckoning light in the window, and we gallop across to
see who is there. We find a French-Canadian couple who left Quebec in
their youth and have just come back to their native land. Monsieur is
unhitching his ox team in the dark. His habit is to rise at three, put
in at least six hours’ work on the land before ten, rest through the
mid-day heat, and then stick to the plow or harrow as long as he can see
the animal’s horns. The house is a perfect model of cleanliness and good
order. It has only one room, but is well if plainly furnished, and every
utensil, bright as a new pin, hangs from its proper hook on the neatly
plastered wall.
The man has made the house, from door-step to chimney-top, with his own
hands. He admits that he spent $30 on window sashes, planed wood for
door and floor, and the necessary nails; but otherwise the whole
building has cost him in cash only the twenty-five cents charged by the
Government for leave to cut logs in Cutknife Valley. He has brought a
year’s rations, besides his eight work oxen and milch cow, so he is well
able to wait till the second year for his wheat crop. Madame is packing
all the eggs and butter she can gather and make for winter use. Between
them they find time to read three weekly papers, one French and two
English.
“I suppose you are a bit lonely out here as yet,” I remark.
“Lonely? Oh, dear no!” says our host, pointing to a fiddle on a shelf.
“We had a couple of dances this summer in my father’s house, and all the
girls came from twenty miles around.” There is quite a colony of these
“original Canadians” here already, and not one home without plenty of
children.
We ride over to the battlefield in the morning. Twenty years have passed
since the Indians caught us on Cutknife Hill, but the grassy slope is
still strewn with empty cartridge shells. An old Indian who took his
share in the fray goes over the battlefield with us, exchanging
reminiscences where once we exchanged hot shot, and “reconstructing” the
scene by creeping up the slope with an imaginary gun in his hand. Then
the enemies of a bygone day sit down and take pot-luck
together—pot-luck being a couple of prairie chicken brought down with
one shot.
To-day, it seems, the painted warriors of ’85 are a peaceful community
of farmers. Here comes one, driving by in his wagon with a good team of
horses. Instead of picturesque blanket and bead-work, he wears what we
have the conceit to call civilized clothes, and differs only in
complexion from his European neighbors. On the edge of a poplar bluff we
meet another Cree brave, who comes forward smiling to have his
photograph taken when he has put up his horses in their log stable. His
summer dwelling stands close by,—a genuine tepee, but made of canvas
instead of buffalo skin—and in front of the door is a wash-tub. Think
of it!
Still more remarkable than the wash-tub is the big threshing machine. A
little later, and it will be hard at work pouring golden wheat into
wagon after wagon. The whole outfit, steam engine and all, was bought by
the tribe with their own earnings. The land is still held in common, but
any tribesman who wants to fence off part of it as a farm is free to do
so.
Through the park lands of the Battle River Valley we now ride for many
hours—a country as rich as the prairie, and rich not only in soil, but
in wood and water. High on the bank of a clear and rapid stream, in the
shade of a beautiful grove, an old Ontario farmer and his sons, with an
eye to the picturesque as well as the profitable, have built their
mansion. Between them, they have taken a whole section, 640 acres, and
have over 150 acres broken this first year.
“A grand country,” says the farmer’s wife, bringing out a jug of cool
milk for the riders when their broncos have drunk their fill at the
creek. “It’s as beautiful as where we came from, and that’s saying a
lot. My husband and I wouldn’t live without trees. There was a man
driving through to-day that said he wouldn’t live _with_ them—says he
feels choked in the brush. He’s taken a homestead where you can plow the
whole half-mile furrow straight without a turn. Well, it takes all sorts
to make a world.”
CHAPTER XII
Learning to be Canadians
OUT ON the prairie again we ride, by the old freighting trail from
Battleford to Saskatoon. But we only meet one freighting outfit all the
way, a wagon drawn by two plodding oxen. “It was a big business, that
freighting,” says a Scottish blacksmith who has built his shack and
smithy beside the trail, “but it didn’t last long. The freighters made
good money from the time settlers began to come in thick, but now the
railway is open the trail is dead.” He might have said “barred and
buried,” for it is not a surveyed road, and again and again we find
ourselves charging into a wire fence and have to turn aside and make the
circuit of some new farm.
He is a townsman, this swarthy smith; he has about as little farm
experience as cash; but he is the sort of man that makes a successful
farmer all the same. He is rich in brain and in brawn. From the mating
of these, all wealth and welfare spring. The blacksmith put in a few
acres of oats and potatoes last year, in the intervals of shoeing
freighters’ teams, and then went off to work at his trade all winter in
a lumber camp north of the Saskatchewan; this winter he will do the
same—“and when I come back to the farm with a bit of money I’ll make
things hum, as the Yankees say.”
The wife smiles, rocking her little girl to sleep. “Do you never wish
yourself back in Scotland?” I ask, thinking of her winters spent alone
with her infants in the prairie shack. “Never!” says she. “We’re all so
much better in health out here, and going to be better off too, in good
time. Look at this lassie. She was always ailing, over there, and now
she’s nearly as strong as the rest.”
There’s no such medicine in all the drug stores as the life-giving air
of the West.
The hamlet of Saskatoon, where I found a bare hundred inhabitants four
years ago, has three thousand now in 1905, and dreams of 30,000—a dream
that we shall see come nearly true before our story ends. The town is a
“jumping-off place” for hundreds of home-seekers bound for points
south-west, where paper railways will presently be turned into steel.
Every railway station, for the matter of that, is a jumping-off place
for new settlers. Here is one with neither a station building nor even a
platform; just a siding; yet a couple of Norwegians are loading up
wagons with furniture from a box car, while their wives cook dinner on
the turf and a dozen children play in and out of two little tents. These
people speak pretty good English, for they have spent five years in
Dakota since they left their motherland. South-east of Edmonton there is
already a large colony of Norwegians, a “New Norway” in fact.
As we ride west and north-west, however, we find ourselves among folk
who know no English. “Galicians,” or “Galatians,” they are commonly
called. Some of them come from Galicia in the Austrian Empire, but
others are Ruthenians or Ukrainians from South-western Russia, and many
from Poland, too. They belong, like the Serbs and Croats and
Montenegrins, the Czechs and Slovaks, and nearly all the Russians, to
the great Slavic Race.
But who are the Slavs? Just a branch of the same white race that we
ourselves belong to. Their ancestors, like ours, poured through Europe
in waves of barbaric invasion from some far eastern home, but settled in
Russia and neighboring lands, as our forefathers had passed on to settle
on the shores of the Atlantic. The very name “Galician” reminds us of
the real kinship between the Galicians of Austria-Hungary, the Galatians
of Asia Minor to whom St. Paul wrote his epistle, the inhabitants of
France whom Julius Cæsar describes as Gauls, and the Celtic Gaels of the
British Isles.
Long separated from us, they have come to join us again. They come poor
in money, as nearly all our fathers did; but having to work up “from
nothing” is the best guarantee that they will work up to something. It
was only in 1894 that the first Galicians arrived, nine families in all.
They sent home such good reports of the country that now in 1905 there
are 75,000 of them thriving here. Thriving in spite of their poverty?
No—because of it.
Here is one just beginning. His home is a long low hovel, one end built
of poplar logs roughly plastered over with brown mud, the other part
made of sods, with grass sprouting from every joint and growing freely
all over the roof. The owner, a tall good-humored Galician, has to stoop
coming out of the door to welcome us. A distaff is under his arm; we
have caught him spinning linen thread for a shirt, which he badly needs.
The one and only door leads into the stable; we have to pass through
this to reach the solitary living room, where the furniture consists of
a home-made table and a bedstead of round poplar logs covered with a few
scraps of blankets. But he is a bachelor.
The ordinary Galician is a well-married man with a large family. The
walls of his house are smoothed and white-washed; the high-pitched roof
is of straw thatch, and rises in a series of steps at the corners.
Beside one of these picturesque cottages we find the owner, with a red
fez on his head, reaping oats with the primitive “cradle,” a scythe with
three or four sticks projecting from the handle to catch the stalks as
they fall. Most of the men, however, are still away; for the poor
Galician, as soon as he has built his house, and perhaps dug up a little
garden, goes off to earn money, generally on railway construction. His
wife and children, having neither plow nor beast to draw one, do the
best they can with the spade, and raise a little crop of oats, rye and
potatoes.
The father’s earnings will buy an ox and plow, and with these he really
begins to farm. Many a Galician farmer already has from 20 to 200 acres
under crop, and from 10 to 100 head of live stock. In winter, he fills a
rough box sleigh with grain and sets out for the nearest market, no
matter how far it is. At night, he saves hotel or “stopping place”
charges by sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have heard of men
who thought nothing of a fortnight’s journey of this sort. In three or
four years, such a man is poor no longer.
These people raise practically everything they eat. Their clothing, like
their furniture, is of the simplest. They go bare-foot all summer, and
in winter they wear shoes out of doors only—sometimes not then. Of
ventilation they know nothing except as something cold to be shut
out—an idea not peculiar to Galicians! To tell the truth, Cousin Slav
is much more like his English neighbors than he is different from
them—and a difference is not always a defect.
A saddle girth breaks as we near a village, and one of us (I won’t say
which) rolls over on the ground. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
The hour we spend held up in that village is one of surprise and
delight. This is no haphazard collection of dwellings, with untidy
little shacks and ambitious modern houses putting each other to shame.
There is no distinction here between rich and poor; there are no rich
and no poor; or rather, all are rich, though not one has more than
trifling possessions.
The whole village has been built on an intelligent design, not allowed
to spring up anyhow. The houses are symmetrically arranged in two long
rows, with a broad avenue between. Each cottage, standing on its own
lot, comprises “a but and a ben,” as they say in Scotland. The gable of
the ben, or better end, faces the street, while the doors open sideways
into the yard. The walls, substantially built of logs, present a neatly
smoothed surface of white-washed earth. The roofs also are covered with
earth, but even they are clean and neat. A raised ledge of earth runs
along the foot of the wall, under the wide overhanging eaves, to form a
sort of veranda seat. A little red and green pattern over each window
adds a pleasant touch of color to the whole. Just outside the village is
a ring of hard smooth earth, with a mound in the middle; this is the
flax-breaking floor, the flax straw being crushed by a big wooden roller
with small logs nailed lengthwise on its surface like cogs on a wheel.
They are a pleasant folk, these villagers. A woman, embroidering linen
at her cottage door, rises to welcome us. She is ignorant of our tongue,
and we of hers, but we both know the ancient universal language of
signs, invented long before words. She guides us to the community
saddler, and while he fixes the girth she takes us home and spreads
before us bread, from an enormous rye loaf, butter, wild raspberry
preserve, and milk—a royal feast.
Jutting out from one corner of the room is the great clay oven, which
projects into the next apartment too, and has sleeping accommodation on
the top. A shining table and benches, with a long bench around the wall,
are the only furniture. Everything is marvellously clean: we might eat
our dinner off the floor.
Music floats in at the open door; seven girls have come to entertain us,
sitting on the ledge outside and singing hymns while we eat. For this is
a village of Doukhobors.
We have all heard of the little gang of fanatical extremists bearing
that name, who now and then make trouble for the police. The members of
the Doukhobor community, as a whole, are distressed by such proceedings,
for which they are often blamed. The saddler, when we go for the mended
girth, expounds their views in quite good English. “When a criminal
lunatic calls himself a Presbyterian or Catholic,” he protests, “you
don’t hold up your hands and cry ‘Oh, those dreadful Presbyterians and
Catholics!’ I know we have peculiar ideas, and we have suffered for
them; but we are not criminals and we are not mad.”
They are like our Quakers in their opposition to fighting, and in the
simplicity of their religious observances as well as their daily life.
Each family has its little personal belongings; but the land, live stock
and implements are owned by the community. “The co-operation that we
preach they practise,” an observer says, who knows them well, “and we
should be honestly thankful to them for trying to live up to high ideals
in a too materialistic age. Though they cultivate an almost primitive
simplicity of life, in the cultivation of the ground they are by no
means primitive, but keen to adopt the most scientific methods, which
their strong co-operative organization enables them to practise with
admirable success. They are industrious workers. Their cleanliness and
good health are remarkable. The value of all this to our country is so
great that it should not be impossible, with sufficient good-will and
elasticity of law on our part, to allow them to work out their system
side by side with our own—especially as their number is not large, for
many leave their community rather than submit to its rules and
restrictions.”
But the bugles are calling at Edmonton; we must be up and away. It is a
long, long ride, and we can hardly resist the temptation to stop and
chat with new settlers by the way. Here, for instance, is a farmer who
keeps a stopping place—a common practice along trails where there is
nothing like a hotel. Fifteen cents for a “noon” and twenty-five cents
for a square meal, that seems the regular tariff.
These are evidently people of taste. The old gentleman and his
grandchildren have already taken time, in the intervals of chores and
attendance on hungry travellers, to lay out a garden, where asters,
poppies and mignonette bloom in a setting of elk horns and buffalo
skulls. In the parlor of the comfortable log house is a well-used
library of a hundred books, including Dickens, Kipling, and a strong
contingent of religious authors.
What a story of age-long adventure it is, the history of that family.
The man has a French name, though he speaks no language but our own. His
distant ancestors, hunting with chipped stone spears like our Indians,
and moving on as they did from one hunting ground to another, wandered
through Europe till they came to the Atlantic and settled on the coast
of France. Centuries passed; America was discovered; two centuries more,
and the family, good civilized French folk, continued the westward
migration of their pre-historic tribe whose course had been barred by
the sea. They settled under the English flag in North Carolina. Another
century, and one of them made his way inland to Tennessee, where our
friend grew up. Presently he moved north-west to Illinois, where he
married; west again to Kansas, where his children were born; south-west
into Oklahoma; and north-west at last to Alberta, where he is so much
better satisfied than in any of his former homes that he is ready to
sing, “Here all my wanderings cease!”
That is the story of thousands of Western families, mostly of the
British, Scandinavian and German branches of our race. They come over
from Europe, settle on the Atlantic sea-board, pull up stakes and strike
inland; pull them up again to go farther in, and so on indefinitely;
halting perhaps for a year or two, perhaps for generations, but always
moving westward and generally northward too.
Among the old-timers, in a well-settled district that we presently pass
through, is a Nova Scotian who has been farming up here for a dozen
years. “My grandfather,” he says, “was a United Empire Loyalist. He had
been a leading citizen of New York, and lost everything in the
revolution. He knew nothing of country life beyond his garden in
Manhattan. But he never kicked; he got right down to it, and when some
poor West Highlanders came in, more used to fishing than farming, it was
the city man that showed them how to build log houses and clear the Nova
Scotian forest.
“I thought of him one day, soon after I came up here, when I butted in
to a family of newcomers from England. There were three brothers, all
university graduates, who had never done a hand’s turn of work except in
their sports, I reckon. Now they were trying to work three quarter
sections, in partnership. They weren’t baching it like some high-toned
‘remittance men’ I’ve seen, who wouldn’t sweep out the shack or make a
bed once in a year, for all the elegant way they’d been raised. No; one
of them had a wife, and, though she’d been used to servants doing
everything, she got down to it like a good one and kept the house as
clean as her baby. But the men were trying to farm before they learnt
how, which is a mistake.
“Well, I saw one of them plowing with a team of oxen, and there was
something wrong with the plow and he couldn’t find out what, let alone
make a straight furrow. The others were picking up stones and carrying
them quite a ways, and the skin was almost flayed off their tender
hands. I fixed the plow, and told ’em to wear gloves, and helped ’em
make a stone-boat. Of course they must have me stay for supper—dinner,
they called it. I opened my eyes, I tell you, when they all came to
supper dolled up in evening dress, London style; and her ladyship served
up a dinner to match, winding up with black coffee and cigars. But they
didn’t let their ‘style’ interfere with their work. That first year they
broke 200 acres and had the luck to raise enough wheat for seed, besides
oats enough for four horses; and the second year they had a splendid
crop. There never was any doubt about their success, from the word go.
They were good mixers—no starch, except in their shirts—they made
themselves liked; and to-day, if you please, it’s those city boys that
show half the newcomers around them how to live in the West.”
CHAPTER XIII
The Tree of Freedom
THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for
to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up
to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within
the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to
14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London
or Toronto.
In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-General of Canada
proclaim the birth of a new Province with Edmonton for capital, we look
in vain for beaded redskin or shaggy voyageur. We discover one cowboy,
got up for the occasion, in buckskin coat and fringed leather shaps, and
he looks as singular in such a gathering as a canary among sparrows—or
a sparrow among canaries—for the ladies’ dresses and the fluttering
Union Jacks make up a scene as bright as anything in the bird creation.
And side by side with the cowboy’s bronco stands—an automobile. If we
ask for the Hudson’s Bay Company, we are directed to a modern department
store; yet, on investigation, we discover the old fur-trading Edmonton
still busy behind the scenes. A million dollars’ worth of furs pour in
every year from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and
packed for the markets of the world.
Settlers look longingly up the trail by which the furs come down, and
already all the surveyed land for eighty miles north, except the heavy
brush, is taken up. In fact, pioneers are squatting twenty miles beyond
the survey. But many of the late arrivals at Edmonton are men of some
means who will buy land within easy reach of a railway. Among them are
scores of families who have abandoned California, many good Dutch
farmers from Pennsylvania, and hundreds from the Western States. At the
same time, the “Galicians” are being largely reinforced, and they cannot
afford to be as particular. They take brush land without hesitation,
clear it, and, having spent much toil transforming it into farms, take
root as firmly as the toughest willows they have just pulled out.
Our ear catches fragments of many tongues, therefore, in this expectant
crowd, till the platform fills and the ceremony begins.
* * * * *
Think of what this ceremony means, both here and at Regina, which to-day
becomes the capital of the new Province of Saskatchewan and will have
its own festivities as soon as the Governor-General can arrive.
It is the blossoming of a tree of freedom, planted many years ago. In
early days the Hudson’s Bay Company was the autocratic ruler of the
West; but in 1835, finding it difficult to keep order in the growing Red
River Settlement and along the frontier, the Company formed fifteen
leading residents into a “Council of Assiniboia,” which appointed
justices of the peace and organized a volunteer force. In 1870, as we
have seen, southern Manitoba became a Province, electing its own
legislature for local affairs and members of parliament to share in
making laws for the whole Dominion. Its Lieutenant-Governor, appointed
by the Federal Government, was also Governor of the territory beyond,
from Manitoba to the Rockies.
In 1876, this territory was put under a separate Lieutenant-Governor,
with a Council, in which elected representatives of the people had a
share in the law-making. Battleford was chosen as the capital. In 1882,
the southern part of the territory was divided into three Provisional
Districts—Assiniboia, Saskatchewan north of that, Alberta west of both,
and Athabasca in the north-west; Regina, which could now be reached by
rail, became the capital. In 1888 a regular Legislative Assembly was set
up, all its members being elected, though without complete provincial
powers. And now, in 1905, the old districts have been abolished, and the
land is divided between two full-fledged Provinces, ranking with the
older Provinces of the East, with Manitoba, and with British Columbia,
which has been a Province ever since it joined the Federation in 1871.
This tree of freedom—how shall we cultivate it? This power to pass our
own laws, to make and unmake our Governments—how shall we use it? The
Tree of Freedom must have constant care and cultivation, or it cannot
yield good fruit; just as an orchard tree needs water, and fertile soil,
and eternal vigilance against devouring parasites. The orchardman has to
study, and learn the best thing to do, and do it with energy, or his
trees will die, and his business too.
Human beings—ourselves—are more interesting to us than anything else.
The art of politics, which is the art of free human beings living
together, is therefore the most interesting of all arts. It can only
seem dry and dull to us if we don’t see what it is and how it concerns
us.
We can’t possibly “keep out of politics,” for as long as we are alive we
have to live in the same world with all sorts of other people, who don’t
all like the things we like, and can’t all earn their bread in the same
way; and the art of arranging for different kinds of people to live and
work in harmony together is simply “politics.”
“Good politics” is unselfish. Even if there were only one family in the
world, its members would not all think alike, or have exactly the same
interests. They would constantly have to give in to each other. If each
member insisted on its own likes and interests, the family would break
up at once. No man can “be a law to himself” alone; nor can a country,
still less a part of a country. We are all “our brother’s keeper,” and
bound to think of his interests as well as our own.
Step by step, our great human family has made great progress in the
first essential art of civilization, the art of living together. The
tribes of England, for instance, after hating and fighting each other as
fiercely as the tribes of Canada did a few years ago, not only made
peace, but united in one English nation. The tribes of Scotland did the
same; even the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, speaking different
languages, saw the folly of fighting, and united in one Scottish nation.
England and Scotland went on fighting each other, but presently they too
saw the folly of it, and united to form one Kingdom. Each country, each
county, each village, may have its own ideas, even its own conflicting
interests, but recognizes these as small compared with the joint
interests of the whole, and allows no local or sectional desire to
lessen its overwhelming loyalty to the duty of Union.
In Canada we have learnt the same lesson, though we meet some
individuals who have not yet completed their education in the art of
good citizenship. In the earliest days, Quebec was jealous of Montreal.
Later on, Lower Canada, including both Quebec and Montreal, was at
daggers drawn with Upper Canada, or Ontario. The Maritime Provinces were
reluctant to federate with “the Canadas”—but did. It was a magnificent
step forward when our whole country became united from sea to sea, and
no step backward now can be dreamed of without shame.
British Columbia has some interests and ideas which are not shared by
the Prairie Provinces; the desires of the western and eastern ends of
the prairie are not always the same; the West as a whole has many
discussions with the East as a whole, just as various parts of the East
have still great differences among themselves. For that matter, two
cities or two districts in the same Province, either East or West, often
have differences, sometimes petty and sometimes grave. But every
difference between district and district, Province and Province, East
and West, however great it seems when we think of our individual
interests alone, is small in comparison with the greater interests, the
nobler duties, which unite us all. No difference can be allowed to
interfere for a moment with the supreme and sacred duty of Union. And
every difference can be settled, with difficulty or with ease according
as we are careless or enthusiastic in the devotion of thought, study,
ingenuity and unselfish good-will, to perfecting ourselves in the
essential art of living together.
A greater union is ours to-day, greater even than the union of all our
Provinces in one Dominion. We may be a long way yet from “the Parliament
of Man, the Federation of the World”; but we must set our faces steadily
in that direction, for the nations of the world cannot go on jostling
and “daring” each other without disaster. No nation can ever again be
absolutely “independent” of the rest, even if that were a high ideal,
and not, as it is, a low one. The nations must learn the art of living
and working together. Recognizing others’ interests as well as their
own, they must join to study and perfect arrangements which will make
the idea of war between them as absurd as it would be to-day between
England and Scotland, Kansas and Iowa, Alberta and Saskatchewan, or
Canada and Australia.
We have our feet securely now on the first well-tested step of the
ladder. We have the priceless possession of a united commonwealth of
self-governing nations which we call the British Empire; and what we
have we shall hold. No force of reaction and dissension can rob us of
that firm footing and separate us from our sister-nations, unless we
fall asleep. We are trying a second step, the League of Nations, and
hope it will bear; we must do our best to strengthen it; but meanwhile
we have our own British league of nations, and that has stood the test
of the hardest knocks in history.
The next step may be an arrangement between our Empire and that of the
United States—which is just as much an “empire” as ours, if anyone is
bothered by mere names. This West of ours, containing so many thousands
born or long resident in the United States, can do much to strengthen
the ties between these two empire-commonwealths. But, until our
neighbors awake from the dream of irresponsible isolation, and come
forward boldly to take their sister-empire by the hand, we must all make
it perfectly clear to them that neither bribes nor boycotts can break
our union or shake our independence.
In the future an international patriotism will flourish, to the
confusion of strife-makers and to the great satisfaction of the
peace-loving mass of mankind, whose essential one-ness is already an
axiom of science and religion. Until we can have the greater patriotism,
let us carefully cultivate the less.
CHAPTER XIV
On the Wings of the West
“_Cela est bien dit; mais je sais aussi qu’il faut cultiver
notre jardin._”
“_That is well said, but I also know that we must cultivate our
garden._”
AFTER many adventures, the speaker of these famous words at last found
satisfaction, which nothing else had brought, in winning his daily bread
from a little patch of earth.
Our “garden” is so big that we should still need months of travel to see
it all, even now when trains are running over 20,000 miles of western
railways. Our lawns and beds are measured by the million acres; our
shrubbery, the forest, by the million acres too; with mountain ranges
for our ornamental rockery, an ocean for our fish-pond. As the crow
flies, a thousand miles divide a Manitoba farm on Lake of the Woods from
an Albertan farm on Peace River; and the bird would have another 500
miles to fly before he saw the end of the West on the British Columbian
coast. Fifteen hundred miles—nearly the breadth of the Atlantic, from
Newfoundland to old Ireland.
Let us take an airplane, and beat the crow. In a space so vast, there
are vast differences, of climate and soil, of people and their ways; but
in a zig-zag flight, with sharp eyes and ears, we can discover a good
deal of what is being done in various ways to “cultivate our garden.”
There are four of us—a Manitoban, a Saskatchewander (the name is his
own invention, he says), an Albertan and a British Columbian. But I
think our airplane will carry a few guests without a breakdown. Let us
offer a ride to our visiting brothers and cousins from the East. The
trip will do them good, and we shall enjoy their company.
Sir Sandford Fleming, the engineer, who came west in 1872 to spy out a
route for the promised railway, took thirty-six days of hard riding,
over forty miles a day, to reach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains
from the Red River. Eleven years later, as he tells us, he made the trip
by Canadian Pacific in fifty-six hours. To-day a traveller by the same
railway does it in thirty hours. We shall cover three or four times that
distance in thirty minutes.
We rise from the sea where the sun has a habit of setting, and steer for
the coast explored by Captain Cook. At the foot of Vancouver Island we
hover above the Jewel City, the city of flowers, Victoria. Do you smell
the roses? A gem of architecture, the Parliament Building of British
Columbia, rises from its garden on the shore of a land-locked port.
Flying over fields of strawberries, we circle a high, wooded hill
crowned by a shining watch-tower. From its revolving dome looks out the
sleepless Eye of Canada, the priceless telescope, famed among
astronomers, busy discovering suns that shone before the world was born.
Our practical country is no longer a mere hanger-on of the international
brotherhood of science and literature and art.
We leap the straits, alive with salmon, and steer for a clump of giant
trees, cedars and Douglas fir towering 250 feet in air. Big ships are
steering that way too, for those trees are the gateposts of the
Dominion. There is a steamer just going in, the fastest on the Pacific.
In a few hours her precious cargo of oriental silk will be speeding
across the continent from Vancouver by special train. Here is another,
coming out, bound for Australia and New Zealand. Here come two more,
both laden with grain, one for Japan and the other for England by way of
Panama. In twelve months fifty million bushels of prairie wheat have
passed through this western gate.
That silent ship with a few blue-coated figures on deck—she carries no
grain, but every ounce of grain is carried under her protection. The
prairie farmer, a thousand miles from salt water, carries on all his
business under the sheltering flag of the British fleet. Without that
protection a few years ago our wheat trade would have fallen to ruin in
a night; the freedom of the seas would have vanished—and with it the
freedom of the world. Neither the mother-land herself, nor Canada, nor
even the United States, could have sent her army to the rescue, but for
the splendid efficiency of the British fleet. We call it an engine of
war, but its chief duty and pride is to keep the peace. Its quiet patrol
of the sea is the most effective insurance against the risk of war; and
for this protection we Canadians pay not one cent. The British
blue-jacket is feared only by war-lovers and law-breakers. He is the
guardian of the peace at sea, as surely as the policeman is its guardian
on land.
Vancouver, where forty years ago scarce an axe had broken the silence of
the forest, is a great city now, and likely to be the greatest sea-port
on the west coast of America. This Province, by the way, owns 1,900
ships—more than any other Province in the Dominion.
Over the verdant coastal plain we fly, with its rich berry farms and
dairy farms, and away up the narrow sea, beloved of tourists, between
numberless islands and the mainland pierced by many a mountain fjord.
Hundreds of fishermen are out in their little boats, catching halibut,
which in a few days will appear on the dining tables of St. Paul or
Chicago. British Columbia catches $20,000,000 worth of fish in a year,
with salmon heading the list and halibut next. No other Province comes
near that total.
Those mighty forests on our right, too, furnish $30,000,000 worth of
wood, which means nearly 450,000,000 cubic feet of standing timber cut
down. Quite as much as that probably goes up in smoke. Are we so gorged
and bloated with riches that we must burn up our possessions to get rid
of them? By the careless act of a moment we destroy wholesale the gifts
that nature has taken centuries to grow for our use.
Sweeping into a picturesque fjord, we see a little town clinging to a
steep hillside, with a huge mill covering the shore: a paper town,
sending out shipload after shipload of transformed forest to be covered
with printer’s ink.
Another arm of the sea brings us to a famous silver mine. In gold and
silver mining, and in mineral production as a whole, this Province is
second only to Ontario. In lead and zinc the score is “British Columbia
first and the rest nowhere.” At Prince Rupert, the ocean terminus of the
Canadian National Railway, we strike inland and follow the track for
hundreds of miles. The land is neither mountainous nor so heavily
timbered: open spaces appear.
The sound of hammering comes up from a pioneer settlement. A farmer is
building a new barn. Now he stops. Mrs. Settler is just home with the
wagon, from the creamery. “They were asking if we couldn’t send in more
cream,” she says. “I’ll buy another cow,” says Mr. Settler, “while the
buying’s good. And half that $300 I made trapping last winter is in the
bank yet.”
Children come running out of the house, three of them; a fourth, a small
boy, has been helping his father; Mrs. Settler goes indoors and comes
out with a fifth in her arms. This looks good. I think we must land
here.
We all sit down and chat under the shade trees that father was careful
to leave when he cleared the land for his garden. It turns out that the
man and his wife were a country boy and girl who drifted into the city,
as so many do. “But when the babies began to come,” says the lady, “we
both made up our minds to get out where they could grow up in freedom as
we did, and learn to do things for themselves, as they never would in
town. That more than makes up for not having quite such a good school,
even if we hadn’t the education to help them keep ahead of the school
work all the time, as we do. And as for us, we’re not crazy about the
white lights and all that; we get all the white light we want from Mr.
Sun—when he gets up he don’t wait long for us! No, we’ve never
regretted coming out here, and only wish we’d come sooner.”
“You don’t find the work too much for you, then, with your five
children?”
“Five! There’s seven—the two biggest are out stacking hay, Jim on the
stacker and Jenny riding the sweep. They just love to handle the teams
alone, without being interfered with, and made me promise to take the
cream to-day so they could. They seem to think the farm work is just a
big sort of play.”
“I guess they find it pleasant because they never hear you and your
husband talking as if it was unpleasant.”
“No, indeed; why should we? Of course, we don’t let them overdo it—nor
ourselves either. We study, and plan, and find out all sorts of
labor-saving dodges and devices; and we cut out the frills, too, in
clothing and cooking and everything else. I reckon we’ve got the ‘simple
life’ down to a pretty fine point, and enjoy it all the more. The West
has got to work out a way of living for itself, and not make itself
miserable trying to follow fashions that grew up where people had
servants to do everything for them. We’ve got to choose: we can either
have children and happiness and health, with the simplest possible life,
or wear ourselves out with drudgery, trying to ‘keep up with the
Joneses’. If the Joneses talk to me about a ‘high standard of living,’ I
say that’s just what we’ve got and they haven’t.”
Yes, the high standard of living we have to set before ourselves, and
before the people we ask to join us, is a high standard of working, a
high standard of learning and thinking, with a high standard of family
life and public spirit. In these we shall enjoy a high standard of
living indeed.
“The wife is right,” says her husband, laughing, as I look to see how he
is taking all this. “I wouldn’t say so if she starved us, or sent the
children to school in rags, would I? But it seems to me, the more she
has to do, the better she gets things done. Planning does it, I
reckon—just thinking and planning.”
“Use your brains and save your hands, eh?”
“That’s the size of it. Next time the Prince of Wales comes out to his
ranch, you send him along, and I reckon she’d cook him a four-course
dinner on a chip-and-a-half of firing, if he was keen on style, which he
doesn’t seem to be. Of course we’ve got a fireless cooker; she planned
it from one she saw in a paper, and little Jim made the box. But,
listen! There they are.”
Melodious sounds are echoing through the woods—“Comin’ through the
rye,” sung in unison by two robust young voices, and jingling tug-chains
for accompaniment.
With that music echoing in our ears, and the “three cheers” of the whole
happy family as we take off, we sail away down the middle of the
Province to the South.
* * * * *
There’s the Okanagan Valley, with its beautiful houses, set gem-like in
their gardens, looking out on battalions, brigades, whole army corps of
apple and cherry and plum and peach and apricot trees, knee-deep in
vetch and alfalfa; on spreading fields of tomatoes, onions and celery,
and potatoes; all watered from the mountain streams close by. And this
is only one, though the chief, among the fruit valleys of this rich and
corrugated Province.
“They used to laugh at us,” an English orchardman says, “and what they
called our ‘style’—‘Piccadilly in the Wilds,’ and all that—but we know
how to work.” No, if we ever laughed we stopped when we saw 3,400
men—3,400 from a total population of 15,000—pouring out of this valley
to fight for our common cause. When those thousands hurried off to the
War, those who were left doubled up and did their work for them, as far
as human beings could. . . . Of the 590,572 men in the Canadian
Expeditionary Force, we do not forget that 200,569 came from these four
Western Provinces, besides 2,327 from Yukon. British Columbia sent
51,438, Alberta 45,146, Saskatchewan, 37,666, and Manitoba 66,319.
* * * * *
Turn east again, across a labyrinth of mountain and forest. A blast of
hot air rises from one spot—a highly effective kind of hot air, too.
That smelter pours out sixty million pounds of refined zinc in a
year—nearly the whole zinc production of Canada.
That broad valley where two rivers meet, the Columbia and the Kootenay,
was filled with dense jungle a few years ago. It has been transformed
into a garden, by the co-operative industry of the Doukhobors. This is
the headquarters of their community. That black snake winding for miles
up to the head of a waterfall is their new irrigation pipe-line, and
that big building beside the railway is their jam factory.
Higher, now! Ten thousand feet up, and still we have to twist and turn
to avoid the higher peaks. We are nearing the Great Divide of the
Continent. A sea of Rocky Mountains, piercing the azure sky with spires
and domes and pyramids of white and grey, till sunset magic changes all
to flaming red; mountains towering over glaciers and snowfields, which
pour their torrents down through pine-clad glens and dark ravines. A
lake of brilliant blue, set in a royal ring of snow-soft pearls and
glacial diamonds. That is Lake Louise: many travellers call it the most
beautiful spot in this rich land of beauties. More lakes, more
cataracts, more glaciers, more peaks that pierce the sky; a land of
myriad marvels; a treasure house of all that is grand and beautiful.
The crack of a rifle, and a mountain lion rolls down the slope, as the
echo volleys from cliff to cliff. The big-game hunter’s paradise, this;
the paradise of tourists, alpine climbers, artists, and all who cannot
be satisfied with anything short of perfection.
“I have been there and still would go,
It’s like a little heaven below.”
Hundreds of peaks have never yet been climbed, and many daring alpinists
come in every year to win fresh victories over the mountains, with the
help of Swiss guides who live in those picturesque chalets perched on a
height overlooking the Columbia, back there at Golden.
We are not the only navigators of the upper air to enjoy this bird’s-eye
view of the earthly paradise. As we glide down the eastern slope of the
mountains another airplane sweeps up to meet us—and now it is past and
away to patrol the high forest. It comes from High River, near the
Prince of Wales’s Canadian home. There, as well as at Winnipeg and
Vancouver, the Department of National Defence keeps up stations of the
Royal Canadian Air Force. Its fliers carry out many useful operations,
such as patrolling the coast against drug and liquor smuggling and
illegal fishing; carrying surveyors and their supplies, and treaty money
for Indian tribes; aerial photography, especially for the survey of
water-powers; and, most of all, patrolling the forest on the watch
against fires. Many a fire that might have done untold mischief has thus
been discovered and checked before it could get beyond control. By
wireless telephone a flying plane has sent back word of such a fire to
the station 190 miles away.
CHAPTER XV
A Flight Across the Plains
AWAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A
farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their
chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do
without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and
tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone.
Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off
the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth
we have scarcely begun to touch. Look at those coal mines on the
mountain slopes—down south and up north, and away out on the plain.
One-seventh of all the coal in the world is right here in Alberta.
Already she digs out more than any other Province in Canada.
“When we came in first and dug our well,” an old settler once told me,
“we threw out two wagon loads of coal. One time we made a little camp
fire at night and were surprised to find it still burning in the
morning. We had made our fire of sticks on a bed of coal, without
knowing it.”
British Columbia, richer in water-power, and with plenty of coal within
easy reach, will one day be the busiest manufacturing workshop of the
whole Pacific slope. But Alberta and Saskatchewan have great water-power
too, and Manitoba has more than all three put together.
It is hard for any one to believe, who thinks of the Prairie Provinces
as flat, that their streams have “fall” enough to create the tremendous
water-power which careful measurement shows them to possess. But look!
One of the streams that join to make the Bow River starts at a height of
6,775 feet above sea level. Even from Calgary the water falls 2,150
feet, and from Edmonton 750 feet, to the meeting place of the North and
South Saskatchewan; from that point it falls 540 feet more before
entering Lake Winnipeg; and between the Lake and the sea at Port Nelson
is an additional fall of 710 feet. In the south-east, the water from
Lake of the Woods has to fall about 350 feet to reach Lake Winnipeg.
“Liquid gold,” the brown water deserves to be called, now running to
waste in all our rivers. We only use a minute fraction of it all, to
make electric light and power. One day we may use it, as they now do in
Norway, to extract from the air all the nitrogen we need to put back in
the land, to replace what we have taken out in wheat. The richest soil
cannot be drained of its riches without becoming poor.
It is not lack of power that keeps even the prairie from developing
great manufactures, but only lack of a great population to buy the
goods. Long haulage of raw material does not prevent large-scale
manufacturing in other “purely agricultural” regions.
You don’t like statistics, perhaps—I don’t exactly love them
myself—but a few picked figures now and then are good to chew on. Take
these, for instance:
Already the manufactures of Western Canada amount to $333,000,000 in a
year. British Columbia stands first with $149,000,000, Manitoba next
with $94,000,000, then Alberta with $51,000,000 and Saskatchewan with
$38,000,000. “Vegetable products” account for $88,000,000, including
$42,000,000 from flour and grist mills; “Animal products,” for
$73,000,000, including $31,000,000 from slaughtering and meat packing,
and nearly $21,000,000 from butter and cheese; “Wood and paper,” for
$88,000,000, of which British Columbia contributes $62,000,000. Textiles
exceed $17,000,000, and iron and steel industries $13,000,000.
· · · · · ·
The foothills past, we sail out over the plain in company with the balmy
Chinook. A wonderful wind this zephyr, as the Greeks called it—
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea.”
In the middle of winter it has come to my farm, a hundred miles east of
the mountains, and driven the mercury up to 75. Not “in the shade,” of
course; but why stay in the shade when you can be out in the warm sun?
The city of Calgary, as we fly over it now, has five times the people it
had when we rode through it twenty years ago. And the face of the
country east and south has completely changed. The West is not satisfied
with new roads and railways, it must have new lakes and rivers too. The
Canadian Pacific Railway Company has tapped the Bow in two places, and
the streams flowing out spread over a three-million-acre block in 4,000
miles of irrigating ditches and canals. It is the biggest irrigation
scheme in the world, except a few carried out by powerful Governments.
The farmers of several neighboring districts have now co-operative
irrigation systems of their own, with the Provincial Government’s help.
What a contrast, between the waist-deep sea of green alfalfa and the dry
land still untouched by the life-giving water of the Bow! Southern
Alberta does not lack moisture: an inexhaustible supply pours down from
the mountain snow in never-failing streams.
Look at that three-acre picture, set in a broad green frame of maple,
ash, willow, poplar and dainty caragana, and filled with melons,
tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, giant cabbages, onions and
potatoes—all watered, like the farm beyond, from the St. Mary River,
near Lethbridge. “I thought there was no such color as green up here
when we came in first,” says the farmer’s wife, “but that was before we
turned the water on. And look at it now!” It is a sight for sore eyes.
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage
yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild
hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is
a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the
neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon
what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic.
Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten
million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of
Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and
heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of
Montreal, 2,000 miles away.
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not
quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that
shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful
new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his
neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts
rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for
that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the
winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of
times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest
Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy
owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand
for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that
for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their
lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes,
weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six
years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175
pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality
pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.
We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building
in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile
of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City
of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a
beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is
made of fine white Saskatchewan clay, the only deposit known in Canada.
But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of
Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would
you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we
rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of
golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and
schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of
elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other
transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now
merged in the Canadian National.
Nearly all the sod shacks have gone. From most of the log cabins the
people have moved into new frame houses, though many of the old
dwellings have been cased in to make the new. The frame house itself has
been vastly improved, in looks as well as convenience. The natural taste
for beauty is finding expression, as it was seldom allowed to in hard
pioneering days. Hundreds of prairie habitations are pleasant to look
upon, tasteful in color and form, with shady verandas, and gardens
neatly fenced.
I wish it could be said that the average prairie farmhouse was provided
with a bathroom, hot and cold water, and drainage, and kept comfortably
warm in the coldest spells of weather; but only an exceptional district
here and there has a majority of its homes as well equipped as that. Ten
years from now, such a district will be no longer exceptional.
Look at that network of wires along the roadsides, and running into
nearly every house. This Province uses 96,000 telephones, Manitoba
68,000, Alberta 64,000 and British Columbia 79,000. That means 958,000
miles of wire. It is not as if we were short of post-offices; over 4,200
serve these four Provinces; with 350 rural delivery routes, so that many
thousands of country folk get their letters, and papers, and even “cash
on delivery” parcels, without going to any post-office.
Do you notice another change? The “bald-headed prairie” is not so bald
now. It was not always so bald as we saw it a few years ago, but the
Indians took to setting the prairie on fire to drive the buffalo. Where
this was checked and the trees had a chance, they spread fast.
Most of the pioneer settlers were too busy at first to think of planting
trees to beautify their new homes. Many, unfortunately, had no intention
of making permanent homes here; they would make just enough
“improvements” to get their patents, and then sell their homesteads and
go off to repeat the process farther afield; they were “land
speculators” just as truly as those who bought large tracts to hold it
for high prices. Some of the real home-makers, however, had enough
foresight to plant trees around their shacks at the very start.
Look at that charming picture. A neat white farmhouse, with a wide
veranda, green lawns and flower-beds, divided from the barnyard by a
hedge of blue spruce and lilac. The whole range of buildings is
sheltered on the north, west and east, by a thick grove of maples and
poplars thirty or forty feet high. That has all grown up in twenty
years. The farmer began planting trees the year after he reaped his
first crop.
Westerners discovered after a while, and especially after soil drifting
had become a nuisance, that trees were needed to protect our fields from
the wind. The Dominion Government and the Canadian Pacific both started
tree nurseries, distributing millions of seedlings and cuttings to
farmers, who plant them in shelter belts along their fences. In 1924 the
Government Forestry Stations supplied 5,215,800 of these young trees, to
4,593 applicants.
This Province grows more wheat than any other in the Dominion, than any
State in the Union to the south. But listen!
There is a grain-grower speaking. “I had a hard time at first,” he says,
“and left for the States. I found things worse in the farming line
there, as indeed they are to-day. Thousands quit this country, like me;
we didn’t know how to get a crop. We had thought of the West as a sort
of big ready-made farm. ‘All you have to do is tickle the earth with a
plow and she laughs with a harvest,’ we used to think. We were too new
to the country; and we were mostly young men, and in too much of a
hurry. We hadn’t a lot of old farmers around us, as people have in older
countries, to tell us that hard times were always followed by good
times.”
“No,” say I, “we were a nation of newcomers; and we are not much more
now, for what is half a century in the lifetime of a country? Besides,
we had pulled up stakes somewhere else to come here; so it seemed the
simplest thing to pull them up again and go somewhere else. We had to
learn the good habit of ‘sticking it.’ Some men here are simply nomads,
throw-backs to our pre-historic hunting tribe, and they will go on
moving for ever. Perhaps when they have sampled the whole of this
continent and find they can’t get farther west than the Farthest West,
they may try the Farthest East and settle in China till they are ready
to start a fresh migration on the track of their early ancestors,
through Asia to Europe again!
“Perhaps they will find the perfect climate, somewhere. I have sampled
all sorts of climate in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and never
found one that escaped fierce criticism from the inhabitants. I met a
man the other day who had thought to find it in Southern
California,—‘lie on your back and let the fruit drop into your mouth,’
you know. He had come back a wiser man. And he showed me a story by an
eminent American author, in the most popular magazine of his country,
describing a personal experience at Los Angeles. Here are his very
words:
“‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath
in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of
shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh;
of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of
that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead
things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the
sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with
invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns,
vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“Every climate may have a fit of sulks or temper now and then; but ours
at its worst never inflicts anything like that. It may put an extra edge
on our appetite, but not on our nerves. It is a magnificent nurse of
hardy, healthy men and women.
“We can always find plenty to grumble at, if we think grumbling will
improve our digestions, wherever we go. You remember the sporting offer
that the Premier of this Province made to one of his people who said he
was ‘fed up and wanted to quit’—‘Tell me when you’ve found a better
place and I’ll lend you the fare.’ When the man had studied up
conditions in every country in the geography, and taken a glance at
Mars, he turned back quite cheerfully to his own Western farm and
hitched up his team for the fall plowing.”
“Yes,” says our friend, “the man who stayed, or came back as I did, and
took pains to learn what the earth really wanted, is the happiest man
to-day.
“We learned to select and test our seed grain, and that accounts for the
high proportion of number one wheat that makes the Canadian West famous
now. We learned to summer-fallow a third or a half of our land every
year, to preserve moisture for next year’s crop. But that’s a terribly
wasteful plan, besides turning the fibry soil into dust that blows off
and takes the young crop with it. We’ve got to go on learning, that’s
all, and get out of the old rut, and go in for regular rotation of
crops, or at least lay down the fields in pasture, turn and turn about,
to give the land a chance to recover. That means more livestock, and
some of us won’t take the trouble. But it has to be done, for the sake
of those who come after us. The country won’t die when we do.”
“True for you! Fortunately we are getting ashamed of the old false idea
that when a man has bought a piece of land, or got it as a homestead, he
has a right to do as he likes with it. That land is a piece of Canada.
The land of Canada is all that the people of Canada will have to live
on, to the end of the world. Who are we, that we should dare to spoil it
for all who come after us, taking out of it in thirty or forty voracious
crops of grain the plant food which nature has taken thousands of years
to accumulate?”
[Illustration]
_From the Russian Oven_
[Illustration]
_At the Spinning Wheel_
[Illustration]
_The Old House and the New—On_
_a Ruthenian Farm_
[Illustration]
_A Family from Poland_
There’s a man driving a dozen cows out to pasture. He has evidently
learnt the livestock lesson. Let us pay him a visit. “Yes,” he says, “I
learned that much years ago, and it was all right as far as it went. I
didn’t keep all my eggs in one basket, and if wheat was poor Mrs. Cow
would always keep our heads above water. But that was nothing to what
she could do, as I soon found out when I studied the matter, and learned
to select and test the cows, and weed out those that didn’t pay for
their board. Breeding up, and feeding right, I call this herd my little
gold mine.”
Quality, again! Quality all the time.
“And I don’t spend the gold on gas,” he adds, as an automobile speeds
by. “Think of it! Over 63,000 passenger autos in this Province
alone—one to every three or four grown-up people—40,000 in Alberta,
nearly as many in Manitoba, and 32,000 in British Columbia. Every man
must judge for himself, but living as I do, only three miles from town,
I couldn’t give ‘business’ as an excuse for keeping a car. What with the
cost in money, and the time a man is tempted to spend running around
when he’s wanted at home, some of us have been kept pretty tight pinched
by our cars.”
“You wouldn’t call the West extravagant, on the whole, would you?”
He laughs. “No and Yes. You know as well as I do, we farmers didn’t
spend over much on ourselves at the best of times. You wouldn’t call a
telephone an extravagance, would you, or a gramophone?”
“Not for the world! I should be sorry to see the poorest farmer give
them up. It’s things like that, and now the radio, with good roads, and
the auto when you live a long way out, that have ended the ‘isolation’
we used to complain of. They bring us the advantages of city life
without its disadvantages.”
“That’s right. And so far as we farmers have spent too much, it has
generally not been for pleasure, but for business. We have taken too
much land, and bitten off more than we can chew—that was the way of the
country, and we had to learn better. We’ve often bought more and bigger
machinery than we could profitably use—that was partly because everyone
was begging us to raise more grain during the war, partly because we
were too easily persuaded by professional salesmen. We haven’t had a
business training, worse luck.”
“No; we’ve been too busy with the producing end of our business to study
the commercial end of it. Think of the work we put in to raise the crops
we do! Of the 1,956,000 people in the Prairie Provinces, 1,652,000 are
classed as ‘rural,’ but they include all the old folk and women and
children on the farms, and even villagers. Yet our handful of country
folk managed to raise in one year a good 10,000,000 wagon loads of
grain, not to speak of hay and potatoes, and the rest. If you put those
wagons in procession, so close together you couldn’t cross the street
between them, that string would be so long that Mother Earth could tie a
girdle around her waist with it and have spare ends left long enough to
trip over.
“It’s a big manufacturing business, this agriculture of ours, making
food out of earth and air and water and a little seed. In any other big
manufacturing business, do you think the men who make the goods in the
factory have to sell them over the counter—or buy the machinery, for
that matter? The concern must have its buying experts, and its selling
organization as a matter of course.
“We have made some progress on the selling side, with grain and cattle
and wool and fruit and butter and eggs; but it is only a beginning. It
is too much to hope that every experiment will succeed at once. An
infant can’t run till it has got some practice in walking, and it can
never learn even to walk if it stops trying after a fall or two.
“We need co-operation—not between food-raisers at the food-eaters’
expense, but co-operation in each class, leading to complete
co-operation between both classes. If that is a dream, it is one that
must come true when we all awake to the need of working together for the
good of the whole community.”
* * * * *
Off again. Do you see what that boy is digging, down there? Sweet
potatoes. They are called “semi-tropical.” As a fact, we have a
semi-tropical climate; not for long at a time, but long enough for corn
and tomatoes and tobacco, through a big stretch of the prairie—to say
nothing of the coast. We have discovered that sunflower makes about as
good fodder as corn, and grows a tremendous weight of crop. But the corn
line, like the wheat line, is pushing farther and farther north. For
this, and for a hundred other most practical benefits, we have to thank
the quiet, ceaseless work of the experimental farms, started long ago by
the Dominion Government—work now carried on by the Provincial
Governments too, at their universities. We don’t all make the use of
these that we might, we are so busy. Fortunately they come to us, if we
don’t go to them, sending out “extension lectures,” and manning the
“Better Farming Trains” which the railways lend.
Every Western Province has its own full-fledged university, a centre of
light and leading, besides its normal schools for training teachers.
Just over yonder, at Saskatoon, is the University of Saskatchewan.
Eastward again we fly, and look down on Manitoba—no longer a “postage
stamp province,” for it has been growing in size, as well as in every
other way. One extension followed another till in 1912 Manitoba pushed
up to Hudson Bay, and the Province covers 232,000 square miles.
Saskatchewan has 243,000 square miles, Alberta 253,000, and British
Columbia 353,000.
Big figures these. The West is a big place, as I have observed. That is
nothing to brag about. Its bigness should inspire us with a humble
determination to do big things with it, and for it, each in our own
little corner of it, looking beyond our own little corner, too; for if
we have a broad country we are bound to take broad views.
A big country indeed, endowed with land and railways and roads and
schools and all the machinery of Government for countless millions of
citizens. We hold the West in trust, a sacred trust, not for ourselves
and our children alone, but for the millions who might be here to use it
with us. We shall gain, as well as they, by their coming; though even if
we had nothing to gain, we cannot escape the responsibility of holding a
realm so much vaster than we can use.
Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, to develop our
enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or
half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is
plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to
devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of
agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural
manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale
of raw material. Every possible avenue must be explored, every resource
of human ingenuity taxed to the utmost, brushing aside all obstructive
traditions and conventions, and thoroughly testing every plan with one
glimmer of hope in it, to get and keep a large and permanent, because
successful and contented, body of people doing this vital work.
It is not the big wheat farm or cattle ranch that means big population,
but just the opposite.
Most of the new settlers we can hope to get will be poor. Small farming,
and often very small farming, is the only kind possible to them. What of
that?
It was the small man, the poor man, with little or no capital beyond his
own body and brains, who built up this country from the beginning. It is
the small man, reinforcing us in his hundreds of thousands from the
mother country and from many other lands, that we must get to build it
up with fresh vigor from now on. Yes, and we must give him a better
chance than he ever had under the broadcasting, go-as-you-like,
sink-or-swim homestead system, which so often allowed him to sink, with
grievous loss both to him and to the country.
There is no fear for the wheat supply. Any cutting down of the present
wheat acreage, beyond what may be required from time to time to prevent
over-production, will be made up for by the multitude of small wheat
fields on the multitude of small farms that will now come into
existence.
The small farmer, if he thinks and plans his way carefully, is not only
self-supporting—able to feed his family even if the rest of the world
should sink under the sea, and independent of labor costs, which are the
last straw on many a big farmer’s back; he is also independent, to a
degree which few yet realize, of the foreign market, and of unfortunate
conditions abroad that keep that market down.
Such men are to be found in every Province already. Here is one. He has
cut his coat strictly according to his cloth. He does not try to farm
one acre more than he can handle with his own small capital,
supplemented by very little credit. He works no more land and carries no
more stock than he can thoroughly cultivate and care for in normal times
by himself, or with such help as his family can give—and occasionally
the neighbors, to whom he lends his help in turn. He spares neither
brain work nor hand work to produce—not simply the largest quantity,
but the most that can be got of the highest quality, so as to secure the
highest net cash yield per acre and per hour.
I know his family are well dressed and well fed, for I have more than
once dropped in unexpectedly, about meal times. There is always plenty
of variety on the table, but you notice, even in winter, that almost
everything on the bill of fare was raised right there. A little tea and
sugar are their only imports; British Columbian apples are the only food
from outside the farm.
This man has been improving his land steadily from the start, till
almost the last inch of his quarter is under cultivation. He is a hard
worker, of course; “but I don’t kill myself,” he says; “what’s the use?
I don’t want the moon.” Yet he is by no means lacking in ambition. He
had a very high ambition from the beginning—to be independent—and he
has got more than he aimed at; while thousands who aimed at something
much bigger have overshot the mark, through over-ambition, and are not
even independent, but struggling in the chains of heavy debt.
Small men, or rather men with small means, can do big things by working
together, as the Danes have shown us by the wonderful results of their
combination of scientific dairying and hog-raising with nation-wide
co-operation in marketing.
This Province of Manitoba has been learning fast in the last few years.
She still grows over two million acres of wheat—Saskatchewan has twelve
million and Alberta nearly six—but no longer stakes her whole existence
on that crop. In 1920 butter and cheese factories received from
Manitoban farmers the milk or cream of 24,600 cows. By 1923 that number
had risen to 107,200, yielding 10,730,000 pounds of butter and 231,000
of cheese. In the same year Alberta sold 17,870,000 pounds of butter and
1,865,000 of cheese, from 158,000 cows, while Saskatchewan’s output,
from 95,400 cows, was 10,870,000 pounds of butter and 119,000 of cheese.
A few years ago we were importing butter to the prairie; now we are
exporting butter from this same prairie to England, and the people there
are delighted with its quality.
The prairie farmers’ takings for the year, from these factories, came to
nearly $13,000,000. British Columbia’s factory output of 2,960,000
pounds of butter and 290,000 pounds of cheese, from 39,000 cows, gave
the farmers over $2,000,000. These figures take no account of the
enormous quantity of milk sold in its natural state, or used on the
farms.
Winnipeg alone must need a big supply. The little settlement which had
such a stormy and romantic infancy has grown into the largest city of
the West, with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, including 30,000 Slavs,
14,500 Hebrews, 6,700 Scandinavians and 6,200 Germans and Dutch. It is
noticeable, by the way, that seventy per cent of the people in the five
biggest prairie cities—Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and
Edmonton—are of “British” stock, including “Americans” of British
descent; though they are only fifty-six per cent of the whole population
of the three Provinces. That is, the English-speaking folk tend to
gather in cities much more than the Slavs, and very much more than the
Scandinavians and Germans.
Winnipeg holds all the railways bunched together in her hand, before
they spread out east and west. The largest railway “yard” in America is
here—the Canadian Pacific’s, with 258 miles of track in it; and the
Canadian National has 200 miles of yard track too. In twelve months
225,000,000 bushels of western wheat have passed out through this
eastern gateway.
Here is a Parliament Building, stately and fine enough for a Dominion,
not to speak of a Province. “When Canada has a bigger population than
the little mother-land, as one day she certainly will have, and the
Empire wants a more central capital than London, Winnipeg will be all
ready with the equipment,” a hopeful Westerner remarks.
She is certainly ready with the golf links, where eminent statesmen are
said to find their chief recreation. There must be a dozen such courses
around this city, and some of them are owned not by clubs but by the
community, so that here, at any rate, golf is not only the rich man’s
game; any one may play who can.
We have little leisure out on the Western country-side, and get all the
healthy exercise we need on the farm; but hundreds of country villages
have their baseball and tennis clubs for summer, and hockey for winter.
The cities and towns, of course, have their organized sports and healthy
athletic clubs of all kinds, with enthusiastic musical and literary
associations too. The churches and schoolhouses, in town and country
alike, are centres of social activity.
If there is one country school in the West where the children are not
any day to be found playing and shouting as children should, I have yet
to find it, and hope I never shall. Many school gardens are cultivated
by the pupils; and large numbers of farm boys and girls are now active
members of juvenile societies which give prizes for the best-bred and
best-fed steers, heifers and hogs, or the best samples of grain. That
youngster of eleven, captain of the soccer team, “pitched on” the hay of
an eight-acre field the other day, by himself, when a sudden emergency
called his father away and it “looked like rain.”
Corps of Cadets and Boy Scouts flourish in scores of country centres, as
well as in the larger towns. There are over 18,000 Boy Scouts in these
four Provinces (that is more than the number in the East), besides 7,500
“Wolf Cubs,” or Junior Scouts. There are nearly 21,000 Cadets, in 340
companies, besides other organizations which likewise aim at helping
each new generation to develop the health of mind and body Acquired for
good citizenship. The Cadets are connected with our Department of
National Defence; but they include in their programme lectures on
citizenship, and organized games, as well as physical training,
“first-aid” work, scouting and signalling.
“We love peace as much as any Quaker,” says a Western war veteran who is
now an enthusiastic officer in the Canadian Militia, “and warmly
sympathize with every movement, international conference, or anything
else, towards the abolition of war. Peace is the chief interest and
foundation principle of our Empire—_pax Britannica_. If we train
ourselves to be ready for emergencies, in the present state of a world
we can’t help belonging to, we look forward persistently to the growth
of commonsense and good feeling which will make emergencies few and far
between.”
As a matter of fact, we have no “standing army,” except a little force
of 4,000 or so, for the whole of this vast Dominion. In the Western
battalions of the ordinary “Non-permanent Militia” about 13,000 men are
enrolled.
CHAPTER XVI
Up to the North and Home Again
THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers
and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William,
as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The
crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light
and power for the city and the towns beyond.
Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping
in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface
breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers
pull out the fish.
Now for a long swift spin to the farthest North. Leaving Manitoba
behind, we soon leave the woods behind too. Beneath us lies a treeless
rolling plain.
Astonishing! We were brought up to believe Northern Canada a “frozen
wilderness.” We find it contains great stretches of green pasture, gay
with innumerable flowers, alive with birds and beasts and butterflies.
Even the Arctic islands, which most people imagine covered with
perpetual snow and ice, we find carrying much vegetation and fattening
herds of musk ox and caribou. A large part of Alaska, and nearly all
Greenland, are mountainous. These keep their mantle of ice the year
round because of their height and snowfall; but they are not in Canada.
For periods varying from two to four or five months, as the explorer
Stefansson tells us, most of our northern land is a picture of green
prairie and flowering meadows; the flowering plants are much more
conspicuous than the mosses and lichens which many people imagine are
the only specimens of vegetable life to be seen.
The summer is short up here, if reckoned by months, but not if reckoned
in hours of sunshine. Where the sun never sets, for weeks or months at a
time, the summer warmth is continuous, unbroken by the cooling of night.
In polar regions you may experience a temperature of 95 to 100 in the
shade.
One day, as Stefansson predicts, this continent will draw a large part
of its meat supply from vast herds of reindeer grazing on these northern
prairies of Canada. The caribou is simply a variety of reindeer, and as
easily tamed.
The 1,280 reindeer brought over from Siberia to Alaska, between 1892 and
1902, have increased beyond all expectations, and now number more than
200,000, after 100,000 have been killed for their meat and hides. And
Alaska possesses only one-tenth of the area available for this purpose
on our vast northern plains.
Our children will smile at our notion that this north land is “useless.”
We have not learnt to use it; that is all.
Rising again, and skimming over Hudson Bay, we overtake a ship of the
Company making her yearly voyage to England with a cargo of furs. Yes,
it is the same old Corporation of Adventurers, carrying on its ancient
trade. Times have changed even up in the North, but the change has been
very slight compared to the transformation of the South under the
magical touch of steel rails. Steam has long taken the place of sails,
at sea; stern-wheelers ply at intervals on the Peace, Mackenzie and
Stikeen Rivers; but everywhere the stout rowboat and fragile canoe in
summer, the dog cariole in winter, are still the express trains of a
country thousands of miles wide, from British Columbia to Labrador. On
the shores of all three oceans, and at scores of posts between, the
Company goes on bartering goods for the furs brought in by Indians and
Eskimo.
On and on we glide, over the land of the midnight sun, with its Eskimo
encampments. We leave the continent behind, but the land is still almost
continuous: we are crossing the Arctic Archipelago, and some of its
islands are huge. Threading its way among them goes a little steamer,
apparently on its way to the North Pole. No, but it goes within seven
degrees of the Pole, on its yearly voyage with supplies for the Canadian
Mounted Police stations and post-offices on the east and north shores of
Baffin Island, on North Devon, and on Ellesmere, the most northerly
island of all.
It is only when we reach the top of this island that we look down on the
northern boundary of Canada, and realize that our Dominion has enormous
breadth as well as length. From this point to the southern boundary of
Manitoba is about 2,450 miles in a straight line; to the south extremity
of Ontario, 2,650 miles.
We are scarcely tempted to spend the winter up here, though the Police
would be very good company. Turning back towards the mainland, we fly in
silence to the west, a vast expanse of sea on one hand, a barren shore
line on the other. The whole world may be dead, for all we see of life,
except the life of the birds.
Hark! In the midst of this utter solitude, the virgin air gives birth to
a still, small human voice. Incredible, yet true. It is a wireless
message giving us news from home, two thousand miles away, and telling
also of events that happened a few hours ago in Europe, in India, in
Australasia. Speeding on, we see at last the explanation. There on
Herschel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, is a wireless station, the end of
a chain of aerial communication stretching south to the prairies of
Alberta, west to Dawson City, Prince Rupert and Vancouver, east to
Norway House, Winnipeg and Ottawa, and keeping this outermost sentinel
of Canada in touch with the whole civilized world. The Mounted Police
wave a greeting to us as we pass.[1]
-----
[1] This may be called prophetic. The ship of 1924 carrying the wireless
apparatus round to the Arctic was caught in the ice and abandoned; but
another set is being got ready, and should be at work before this book
is many months old.
We have reached the north-west corner of the Dominion. The yearly
steamer bringing supplies from British Columbia, round through Behring
Sea, has just arrived. Inland, we catch a flying glimpse of Yukon
Territory, which blazed into fame as the gold-seekers’ Mecca in 1898.
Now, striking up the valley of the Mackenzie, we pass a string of
outposts where the fur traders, the Mounted Police and the missionaries
live and watch and trade and teach among the Indians. The braves no
longer fight, but they live as they did by hunting and trapping the
beaver and the rest of the fur bearing folk.
A noble valley this, now spreading wide, now narrowing to a canyon where
the Ramparts rise hundreds of feet sheer up from the river’s edge, now
opening again to show green meadows and woodland. Here, a mountainous
region is densely clad with spruce; there, light birch and poplar
restore life to a stretch of brulé; jack-pine and tamarack vary the
scene; and yonder a gaunt escarpment of bare rock climbs to a height of
3,000 feet.
If we followed the Mackenzie through all its windings, we should find it
the longest river in Canada, 2,500 miles to the head of the Finlay. Let
us be content to strike a bee-line of 1,000 miles from the Arctic Sea to
the Peace River.
Another noble valley this, and, where we strike it at the “head of
steel,” dotted not with fur traders’ forts but with farmhouses, schools,
and villages. Here is a Canadian farmer whom I saw a dozen years ago
setting out from Edson, on a 300-mile drive through the backwoods to
reach this “land of promise.” He has a great farm now, with 300 acres of
fine wheat and oats, and the railway is almost at his door; when it
pushes through to the coast he will be satisfied, he says. “But we’ve
got a creamery at the Crossing, now, and that’s been a godsend. They
reckoned on making 40,000 pounds of butter in a year, and they got up to
that in three months. In the first two months they had paid the farmers
$6,600 for cream, which brightened things up considerably—that year was
dry as we had never known it up here before.” Another Peace River farmer
is filling a silo with sunflower for his aristocratic herd of pure
Jerseys.
* * * * *
Southward again we fly, but swerve a little to the east. Those little
log shacks in the brush remind us that the pioneering spirit is not by
any means extinct. As a matter of fact, as many as 2,576 homesteads were
taken up in this Province in 1923 and 1924, besides 3,507 in
Saskatchewan and 1,121 in Manitoba.
“If you are a great people,” as Joshua told an Israelite tribe when it
wanted more land, “then get up to the wood country and cut for
yourselves there in the land of the giants.” Only there are no giants,
either men or trees, to be encountered in the prairie backwoods.
Still keeping a south-easterly course, we come out of the woods again
and rub our eyes. Are we back in the middle of last century? Buffalo in
thousands roam the plain beneath. Newcomers? Yes, but the oldest of
old-timers, too. Not one was to be seen when we passed here twenty years
ago. But the Dominion Government bought up a few hundred surviving in
the United States and fenced in a prairie “park” at Wainwright as a
sanctuary for these original inhabitants of the West. They have thriven
and multiplied fast. A wonderful sight, that shaggy monarch of the
ancient plains and all his wild barbaric following. . . . And over
there, a few miles away, a fair-haired girl is milking a sleek imported
Shorthorn, a cow with a pedigree of thirty proud generations. . . . The
old and the new, the native and the immigrant; and what a contrast! They
are not so different as their skins appear. Some interesting alliances
have been made between the wild buffalo and tame cattle. But more
success is hoped from a union arranged between buffalo and yak, the
long-haired cattle of the cold Himalayas.
The good old buffalo “robe” is again on the market, for hundreds of the
band have now to be killed every year. The park is becoming a fur farm
as well as sanctuary.
[Illustration: _Lake Louise—Rocky Mountains National Park_]
[Illustration: _Mount Robson—Jasper National Park_]
[Illustration: _The E. P. Ranch, High River, Alta.
The Prince of Wales and his Canadian Home_]
Scores of private fur farms, nearly all devoted to fox raising, have
been established in the West, though the East has still ten times as
many. This will become one of our leading industries. Trapping, in
comparison, is a wastefully laborious and crude as well as cruel method,
though still by far the chief source of the Dominion’s fur supply—and
Canada is “the last great fur preserve of the world.”
In 1924 Saskatchewan sent out 1,161,805 pelts, Manitoba 711,778, Alberta
503,070, British Columbia 180,844, the North West Territories 164,903,
and Yukon 50,070, or 2,772,470 in all.
Of the 70,029 beaver, British Columbia contributed 21,509, Alberta
coming second with 20,057, and Manitoba third with 14,806. Of the
233,037 ermine or weasel, Saskatchewan sent 82,437, Manitoba 63,054,
Alberta 57,962, and British Columbia 25,128. The muskrat numbered
2,121,929, of which 1,006,863 came from Saskatchewan, 554,716 from
Manitoba, 331,144 from Alberta, 108,632 from the North West Territories,
and 85,670 from British Columbia. The beaver catch showed a great
increase over the previous year’s figure, 51,737; but the muskrat total
fell heavily, as the number taken in 1923 had been 3,100,074.
The total value of the western fur catch in 1924 was $8,798,773, of
which $1,970,013 is credited to Alberta, $1,927,914 to Saskatchewan,
$1,908,354 to Manitoba, $1,529,376 to the North West Territories,
$1,116,037 to British Columbia, and $347,079 to the Yukon. The whole
Dominion’s total was $15,643,817, for 4,207,593 pelts, and included
$2,542,992 for 169,172 beaver and $3,440,363 for 2,985,395 muskrat.
Sometimes a fur farm does not need to be “established”; it establishes
itself. On the banks of the Red Deer, away there in the south, you can
see—if the telescope is strong enough—a beaver gnawing at a tree. Now
he has finished, and skips to one side. Down falls the tree with a
crash. The enterprising farmer who owns that land, when he found the
beavers coolly colonizing his water-front, adopted them under special
licence, and supplements their diet of bark with a dessert of carrots,
for which they will presently pay him with their skins.
Turning back from these oldest Canadians to the newest, we plunge into
the thick of the “Galicians” whom we watched coming in. Twenty years
have made a great change here too. Many of the thatched cottages have
been abandoned for modern houses, which, however, are scarcely so
picturesque. The little plots dug up with a spade and reaped with a
scythe have expanded into broad farms worked with the most modern
machinery.
In agriculture, these “New Canadians” have been more than willing, and
many of them keen and quick, to learn the ways of our country. Their
natural thriftiness, ingrained by the poverty of bygone days, has
largely saved them from branching out in the fatal course of
over-ambition. Then the kind of land they have generally settled on, the
brush land, has helped to keep them in the safe path of mixed farming.
There is something in the woodland that seems to fix a family to the
soil with peculiar tenacity—partly, no doubt, because we value most
what we have taken most trouble to secure. Then the Slavs have come to
us with no idea except to make a permanent home. “In the brush country
they can’t be beaten,” says an observer of experience. “It is
wonderful,” says another who knows them well, “what a transformation
they have made; how they have developed the country as well as their own
homes.”
Those who live near the unifying railway and the town easily pick up our
language, and also have a chance of visiting a “better farming train”
and hearing an agricultural lecturer. But the folk away out in the back
country, who need most help, get least of it.
Look at this little schoolhouse, where a young teacher is playing with
the boys and girls. It is in their free hours out of school, quite as
much as in their “lessons,” that they learn our spirit and our ways as
well as our speech. This young woman has such tact and sympathy and
sense that the parents love her, as the children do, and come to her for
information and advice on all sorts of subjects quite apart from school
work. But she is absolutely alone; to every one else in this district
English is a foreign tongue; our Canadian spirit and ideals are
unfamiliar.
Lectures are valuable, when they are listened to and understood; books
and papers, if they are read, and read with ease. But living interest,
personal friendship and sympathetic insight, have ten times the
attracting and stimulating force of all other influences put together.
Without the power of winning affection by giving it, the strongest
intellect is feeble at a task like this—to make the “New Canadian” not
only at home in our country but at home with ourselves; to make him one
of us. It is not paternalism that will do this, but fraternalism.
We must back up those solitary teachers, and, doing that, we shall back
up those New Canadians themselves who are already keen to see their
whole people on the highest level the best of us have reached. We cannot
wish them to adopt our faults when they adopt our language. We have
something to learn from them, as well as they from us.
It is not unnatural uniformity we want. If we got it we should not like
it; and we are better without it. The highest music is not unison, but
harmony, in which our varied voices play their natural parts. Unity is
our aim, not monotony.
We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the
national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us
together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of
them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire
others with them.
Whether by casual neighborly intercourse, by travelling among them as an
unassuming friend, by large and carefully thought-out systems of
intensive education, or by establishing among them little community
settlement houses in which the teachers of several districts and others
who see the need and the opportunity would live together—or by all
these means and any others which good-will and good sense united can
devise—this aim can and must be achieved.
Achieving this, we shall have laid the sure foundation of a splendid
future for our country, every diverse element joining, in mutual
appreciation and respect, to form one great harmonious community.
* * * * *
Once more we find ourselves approaching Edmonton. When we rode up to it
in 1905 we were just in time to see it raised to the rank of a capital
city. Since then it has adorned itself with a lordly Parliament House,
which crowns the northern bank of the deep wooded valley, and a fine
range of university buildings on the opposite heights.
We slow down over a garden, charmed by its harmonious blend of colors.
There is something uncommon about it too. Half the flowers are natives;
half are immigrants. “Like me and father,” says mother, with a rake in
her hand. “He came from England; I was born here in the West; so I put
in the nasturtium and mignonette and sweet peas and morning-glories that
he loved over there, and he begged me to bring in the goldenrod and wild
aster and Indian paint-brush and wild sunflower, the prairie rose and
wild violets and Canada lily that I grew up with. There never was such a
country as this for wild flowers, he says, and he has been all round the
world. The finest of all are the little ones, like the ‘shooting star’;
dainty and delicate as a piece of embroidery worked by the fairies.”
Perfect in harmony, rich in variety.
Listen again. The city is holding a musical festival. The grandeur of “O
Canada” follows the glorious simplicity of “God Save the King.” Perfect
harmony again; and many of those blending voices had never sung or
spoken a word of English, a few years back. These folk who come to us
with other languages are said to be more musical than the rest of us.
They have practised singing more in their daily lives, perhaps; but
nearly all of us have musical capacity, if we will only train and use it
as we might. Music will be one of the great forces to weld us together.
As if to echo our thoughts, that lad on the gang plow below breaks out
in song—a song of Robert Burns, the plowman poet. I know teams that
would jump at such an outburst, but these beasts are used to it.
Let us go down. We have time for one more visit. The city is far behind,
the journey almost ended, and the sun still high.
A very modest farmhouse is this we have come to: not much of it, but
spick and span, what there is. Barn and sheds all painted; beasts, not
many of them, but all good. The house-wife is singing as she comes to
the door, and only stops when she catches sight of her unexpected
visitors. No need to ask why the boy sings at his work.
She is “sorry to have nothing better” than deliciously cool butter-milk
to quench our thirst—as if there could be anything better, on a hot
afternoon like this! Will we let her make us a cup of tea? Not on any
account.
Happily, this seems the only thing she has to be sorry for. She and her
husband have had difficulties, she admits when asked, but she brushes
them lightly aside for cheerful topics. “Everyone has difficulties, of
course,” says she, “but they were made to be got over.” And we can
imagine how that spirit of hers smoothed the way over them. “Anyway,”
she adds, “why worry about difficulties when there’s so much to be
thankful for?”
Her husband is one of her chief “things to be thankful for,” we discover
at once. And where did he come from? Oh, his parents came out here from
some corner of the old Austrian Empire, and settled next door to an
Ontarian farmer with a Nova Scotian wife. These must have been the best
kind of neighbors, for they treated the newcomers like brother and
sister. Well, that Canadian couple, having a wealth of natural affection
and no children to spend it on, had adopted three orphans, who were part
English and part Scotch, with a dash of Irish; and our hostess was one
of them. Her elder brother also had married into the Slavonic family.
“And a good family they are,” she exclaims; “there’s none better;
right-down good Canadians”—thanks largely to the “neighboring” they got
when they first came in.
We look at each other. One of our party smiles. “I’m what they call a
pure Scot,” he says, “and never heard of a single ancestor who wasn’t.
But if I could see a little farther back I know I should find Norsemen
among my forbears, besides Celts, and the folk who held Scotland before
the Celts came in, and fought them like Indians. To tell the truth,
there’s no such thing as a ‘pure’ race in the world—or, if there is,
it’s a poor one, too. I hadn’t thought of it before, but with such a
threefold inheritance I’m thrice as rich as if I had only one.”
“Then my children are richer still,” says the mother, laughing.
“To be sure they are—a dozen times as rich; for every one of the races
they inherit from is a blend in itself.”
“And when neighbors ask what ‘race’ my children belong to,” the mother
goes on, “I say I can’t guess a riddle—they belong to so many, and all
good. But this I know, the children are what their father and mother
are, just pure Canadian.”
The mother is right. We need not and should not forget the roots from
which we spring; we cannot pull up and burn those roots, if we wanted,
and we should not want. Every cause for love and pride that we have in
the lands of our past, we ought to cherish. Those who best remember the
past and rightly value it are the least likely to forget their duty to
the present and the future. Valuing our distant roots, we shall value
more highly and love with more devotion the tree which has sprung from
them, this many-rooted, many-gifted tree, the united brotherhood of the
Canadian people.
A last flight through the air, and we glide to rest on a gently sloping
hillside. At our feet is a lovely picture, reminding me of a famous view
in the garden of England, in spite of differences in detail. A picture
of softly undulating green and gold; wide fields of yellow grain, with
many a copse of poplar and willow, and here and there a darker grove of
stately spruce; herds of fine cattle, teams of big horses—and yonder a
big school, chief glory of a little town. We have done with adventures
of travel; we must plunge once more into all the adventures of Home.
See the children playing under the maples, beside that gabled farmhouse
on the knoll. That is Home. The biggest boy, a son of the Stars and
Stripes, runs a sister flag up to the mast-head. Wherever we were born,
we are all true Canadians now. True Westerners too. The better
Westerners we are, the better we can serve Canada; and the better
Canadians we are, the better we can serve the West.
That is the flag of our own world-wide brotherhood, our royal
commonwealth,—his flag, and yours, and mine—the Union Jack. It is a
signal. The children are running to meet me at the gate. As soon as I
have landed you other Westerners at your own doors, I must get into my
overalls—only first we must see our visitors off by train.
“No,” they protest, “we had rather stay and get into overalls
ourselves.”
There is only one answer to that—“Brothers, Welcome!”
THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST
_“What is the Spirit of the West?” I was asked when I began to write._
_You have read the book? Then you have seen the fruits of that Spirit,
in its actions and achievements. If that is not answer enough, here is
the Spirit of the West as I have seen it; here are the dominant ideals
of Western life._
_The Spirit of Courage. The brave heart for a short heroic dash, and for
persistence, more heroic still, through the long march to a distant
goal. The spirit that never flinches at an obstacle or set-back, but
fights its way through to victory. The spirit that finds pleasure in
other toils than play, and saving humor in grave events which overwhelm
a dull and bitter mind._
_The Spirit of Independence. The spirit that takes pride in swimming the
creeks in its way without waiting or shouting for some one else to fetch
a boat._
_The Spirit of Ambition—often hasty and overgrown in our exhilarating
air of boundless possibilities, but, when turned by buffeting experience
from the goal of quantity to that of quality, capable of winning both._
_The Spirit of Truth. The ideals of frankness, candor, straightness and
fair play. The spirit of scorn for crookedness, trickery, graft, lying
and pretence, in business, politics and social life. The spirit that
wants to think straight as well as act straight, refusing to deceive
itself by prejudice and conventional parrot-phrases. The spirit of
open-mindedness, of quick willingness to learn._
_The Spirit of Unselfishness. The ideals of hospitality, sociability,
geniality, generosity, and neighborly helpfulness._
_Selfishness, envy and suspicion, an ill disposition to blame anyone but
ourselves for every wrong; a passing frown of discouragement and
complaint, sometimes with fair excuse; these you may find in the West,
as you may strike a misty morning on the sunny plain or a hard frost on
the balmy coast; but they are foreign to the Spirit of the West._
_Without that Spirit, though the land should rise to gorgeous heights of
moneyed wealth by perfecting its science of material production and
commercial organization, the West would be poor and mean, a body without
a soul._
_Therefore, of all the proud ambitions of the West, the proudest is to
keep that noble Spirit strong._
_The Spirit has hours of weakness, but it soon revives, to proclaim with
the strength of a giant refreshed—_
_“In the fell clutch of circumstance_
_I have not winced nor cried aloud._
_Under the bludgeonings of chance_
_My head is bloody, but unbowed._
_“It matters not how strait the gate,_
_How charged with punishment the scroll._
_I am the master of my fate,_
_I am the captain of my soul.”_
THE END
I N D E X
Adventures, life full of them, 2.
Agriculture, 54;
ranching, 127;
mixed farming, 129;
fruit, 164;
irrigation, 169;
bees, 170;
improving livestock, 171, 177;
“We have to Learn,” 174;
enormous production, 178;
need of co-operation, 178, 183;
“semi-tropical,” 179;
the small farmer, 181;
grain growing and dairying, 183, 191.
Air patrol, 166.
Animal and plant life: pre-historic, 4;
modern, 14, 15, 131, 197;
beaver, 35;
his achievements and value, 35, 192, 193;
buffalo, 18, 20, 45, 48, 54, 129;
wholesale slaughter, 61;
collecting his bones, 127;
present increase, 192;
caribou, 46, 187;
coyote and antelope, 17, 131;
dogs, 10, 20;
bred for wool, 72;
horses, 19, 23;
maize 11;
trees, 140;
far north, 188.
Arctic Ocean: Hearne’s arrival, 47;
Mackenzie’s, 50.
British brotherhood of nations, 28, 156, 200.
British justice, 79, 137.
British Navy’s task, 160.
Calgary, 105, 129, 169.
Climates, 169, 175, 179.
Coats, Capt., 47, 58, 85.
Columbia River, 50.
Coppermine River, 46.
Dominion formed, 88;
width North to South, 189.
Edmonton in 1846, 60;
in 1905, 151, 196.
Empires, British and United States, 156.
Eskimo, 10, 47;
massacred by Indians, 48.
Exploration, Spanish and British, 25;
Norse, 26;
French, 26;
Cartier, Champlain, 26;
La Salle, 27;
Frobisher, Hudson, 28;
Radisson and Groseillers, 30;
Vérendrye, 41;
Kellsey, Hendry, 44;
Hearne, 46;
Mackenzie, 49;
Thompson, 50;
Fraser, 51;
Lewis and Clark, 51;
Franklin, 64;
McClure, 65;
Drake, Cook, 69;
Palliser, Hector, 84;
Amundsen, 66;
Stefansson, 188.
Fisheries, 161, 187.
Fleming, Sir Sandford, 159.
Forest, 15, 161;
fires, 161;
air patrol, 166.
Fort Carlton, 61.
Fort Chipewyan, 49.
Fort de la Corne, 45.
Fort Cumberland, 48.
Fort Pitt, 62.
Fort Rouge, 42.
Fort Vancouver, 72.
Fossils: giant lizards, 5;
trilobites, 7;
mammoth, 8;
horses, 19.
Fraser River, 49, 51.
Freighting, 141.
French Cession of Canada to British, 27.
Fur trade, 26;
French monopoly, 32;
buffalo skins, 35;
beaver in fashion, 37;
scene at trading post, 39;
“Free Traders,” 41;
the traders’ life, 56;
sea otter, 73, 151;
fur farming, 192;
statistics, 193.
Gardens, 147, 197.
Gas, natural, 170.
Great Slave Lake, discovery, 48.
Hudson’s Bay, 28;
Company formed, 33;
its powers, 37;
French raids and competition, 40, 49;
traders sent up country, 44;
Scottish-Canadian rivals, 45;
North West Company formed, 49;
Companies at war, 52;
the rivals unite, 56;
Company’s rule extended to Pacific, 56;
Simpson’s journeys, 59;
Company and Indians, 85, 91;
Territory enters Dominion, 88;
Company continues, 151, 188.
Hudson Straits navigation, 57.
Indians, origin of, 9;
southward migration, 11;
industry and art, 11, 12, 21, 74;
baking and gardening, 12;
Mexican and Peruvian civilization, 12, 13;
the Six Nations, 13;
lacrosse, 13;
Algonquins, 14;
mound builders, 16;
a night raid, 16;
travoys, 20;
agriculture, 16, 21;
story telling, 22;
dancing, 64, 74;
racing and betting, 63, 73;
slavery, 73;
Flat-heads, 74;
kindness and barbarity, 85.
Indian tribal fighting, 21, 23, 85;
Sioux and Cree, 31;
Saulteaux and Sioux, 61;
Blackfoot and Cree, 63, 87.
Indian treaties, 93;
refugees from United States, 95;
Sitting Bull, 96.
Indians and Métis, 99;
Indians farming, 139.
Kane, Paul: artist’s journey in 1846, 60.
King and president, 136.
Lake and river route to West, 59.
Liquor and Indians, 55.
Mackenzie River, 49, 189, 190.
Manufactures, 167, 168.
Métis, the, 49;
revolts, 89, 98;
a hospitable family, 133.
Migrations of men, 2, 9, 24, 148.
Minerals: coal, 7, 81, 167;
copper, 21, 46;
gold, etc., in B.C., 75, 161, 165;
potters’ clay, 171.
Missionaries: Evans prints in Cree, 86;
peacemaker Lacombe, 87.
Mississippi, 27;
discovery, 31.
Mountains, birth of, 7;
first sight of Rockies, 43;
an Alpine paradise, 165.
Mounted Police and frontier crime, 91;
force organized, 92;
Col. MacLeod’s reign of law, 93;
in the Arctic, 189.
Northern Territory and Islands: caribou pasture, 187;
reindeer, 188;
Government stations, 189;
wireless, 190.
North-west Passage, 26, 29;
Franklin’s last voyage, 64;
passage discovered, 66;
Amundsen gets through, 66;
Captain Cook’s attempt, 69.
Ogilby, John, his book, 36.
Pacific Coast: Mackenzie’s arrival, 50;
Hudson’s Bay Co., 56, 71;
claims of Spain and United States, 70;
frontier agreement, 71;
early ranching, 72;
Kane’s visit in 1847, 72;
Coast Indian ways, 73;
colony under company, 75;
gold rush, 75;
company rule ended, 76;
Cariboo trail, 77;
Judge Begbie keeps order, 79;
Province of British Columbia formed, enters Dominion, 81;
United States and San Juan Island, 81;
the Province to-day, 159.
Peace River, 189, 191.
Pemmican, 19;
war, 54.
Politics: the art of living together, 153.
Portage la Prairie, 42.
Prairie primeval, 14;
first inhabitants, 16;
the prairie in 1905, 129;
to-day, 167.
Prince Rupert, 33, 161.
Provinces formed: Manitoba, 90;
British Columbia, 81;
Alberta and Saskatchewan, 151;
Dimensions, 180.
Railway, Transcontinental, proposed, 84;
its necessity, 117;
built by Canadian Pacific Co., 120;
last spike driven, 122;
irrigation, 169;
C.N.R., 60, 161, 172;
Winnipeg yards, 184.
Regina, 127, 171.
Red River rising of 1870, 89.
Riel rebellion of 1885, 98;
Duck Lake fight, 99;
Frog Lake massacre, 101;
Big Bear and Fort Pitt, 102;
army from the East, 103;
Cutknife Hill, 106;
Fish Creek, 111;
Batoche, 112;
Indian chiefs’ surrender, 112;
battlefield twenty years after, 139.
Rupert’s Land, 38;
enters Dominion, 88.
Saskatchewan rivers discovered, 43.
Saskatoon, 142.
Schools and colleges, 180, 185, 195.
Settlement: Lord Selkirk’s pioneers, 53, 85;
door opened by railway, 124;
Eastern Canadians, 124, 132, 140, 148;
British newcomers, 126, 133, 141, 149, 164;
from United States, 130, 135, 147, 152;
French-Canadians, 138;
Scandinavians, 142, 187;
Slavs, 142, 152, 194;
Doukhobors, 145, 165;
a pioneer family in the North, 161;
“The land is Canada’s,” 176;
new plans needed, 181;
homesteading, 191;
brush land, 192, 194;
Canada and “New Canadians,” 195;
racial blending, 198.
Shipping, 160.
Territorial Government, 153.
Thompson River, 49.
Trade, Oriental, 25, 160.
Travel, ways of, 20, 57;
in 1872, 159; 189.
Unicorn, 36.
Vancouver, 123, 160.
Victoria, 159;
observatory, 159.
War, the, 164.
Water Powers, 167, 187.
Western Canada: size and variety, 3, 158, 180;
pre-historic state, 4;
ignorance of its capacity, 83;
S. J. Dawson finds a “Paradise of Fertility,” 83;
the West in 1905, 128;
Central Alberta, 129;
hospitality, 135;
a stopping place, 147;
the country now, 158;
children, 162, 185;
simple and high living, 163;
better houses, 172;
telephones, 172;
tree planting, 173;
nomadic instinct survives, 174;
automobiles, 177;
“Extravagance,” 177;
recreation, 185;
national defence, 185;
music, 197;
“The Spirit of the West,” 201.
White men reach America, 23.
Winnipeg: Fort Rouge founded, 42;
Kane’s visit, 60, 184.
Wireless, 166.
Yukon, 190.
[Illustration]
_Sketch Map of_
_Western Canada_
THIS BOOK IS A
PRODUCTION OF
[Illustration: Ryerson Press]
TORONTO, CANADA
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.
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