Читать книгу In to the Yukon - Edwards William Seymour - Страница 4

Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, B. C.,

August 19, 1903.

Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We left Banff about 2 P. M., following up the valley of the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The rise was so easy, however, that we were surprised when we actually attained the summit of the divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its waters, part to Hudson’s Bay, part to the Pacific. But the descent toward the west was precipitous. Since leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across plains and prairie, and a night and day up the valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of the ascending grade, but now we were to come down the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Norway, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail’s pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, and descending into gorges and cañons and shadowy valleys until one’s hair nearly stood on end. How on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long passenger and short freight trains up these grades for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; that is, shove them up and make the business pay.

At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a dense forest. The tall Douglas firs stood almost trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant slopes looked as though covered with gigantic coverlets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one height and size. And the slopes were green right up to the snow field’s very edge. Our way wound down the profound cañon of the Kicking Horse River, sometimes sheer precipices below and also above us, the road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept out into the beautiful Wapta Valley, green as emerald, the white snow waters of the river – not white foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters of the streams of Switzerland – roaring and plunging, and spreading out into placid pools. At last we emerged through a gorge and came into the great wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from which the province takes its name. A river, even there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melting snows. Behind us the towering granite masses of the Rocky Mountains – a name whose meaning I never comprehended before – their peaks lost in clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering along it. Here and there were indications of a developing mine upon the mountain slopes. We followed the great river until we passed through a narrow gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its rock masses hard against the western flanks of the Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin its long journey southward through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the second and last mountain chain before we should reach the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic and not subsidized by a government, as in practical effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snowfalls and avalanches, which require many miles of snow-sheds to save the road.

We dined about 8 P. M., in a fine large hotel owned by the railroad company at a station called “Glacier,” for it is right at the foot of one of the most gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists tarry here to see it and climb upon it; Swiss guides being provided by the railway company for these adventures. And then we came down again, all night and half the next day, following the valley of the Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal reaches a few miles from Puget Sound.

The Fraser River is a magnificent stream; as great as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Virginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tempestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, watching their nets or drawing them in. And every rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belonging to some individual Indian or tribe, safe from trespass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands of the river are said to also have been recently discovered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in several places Chinamen industriously panning by the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year is said to be unusually large.

As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more prolific, and the Douglas fir more lofty and imposing. A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down-bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their ungainly trunks above every other living thing about. The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nasturtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. Great was the delight of our trainload of Australians. They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gardener and incessant laying on of water. We came across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. Most have been “home,” to England, and had come across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they marveled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the heats of the Australian continent.

The building and maintaining of this railway has been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to the railway company by the government of the Dominion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the promoters and builders, and the Canadian people now hold the bag – but although as a mere investment it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific. It owns its own telegraph lines, its own cars, sleeping-cars, and rolling stock; it owns and runs ten, a dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the people of the United States that it is so.

The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and picturesque of any section of the mountain chain from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the hustling American has begun to find this out. The great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best patronized by the American visitor, and this year the sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and promise another year even greater numbers. And the Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all – all who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard of the English Colony from China, brought over from Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts promise to become the summering-place of the Oriental Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! How these things bring the world together!

Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheatfields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few days climbing and plunging over and down the wildest, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the continent we live on, and which one of these days the people of the United States will inevitably wholly possess!

And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering through Vancouver’s superb Natural Park, among its gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked harbor of the world. I must not say more about this now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only beginning dimly to comprehend what is the future power of our race and people in the development of this side of the earth.

VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN

The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,

August 21, 1903.

We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer “Princess Victoria,” and making the voyage in four hours, – all the way in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. The shores of the mainland high, lofty; – the mountain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope to see one of these salmon stampedes – they often pushing each other high and dry on the shores in their mad eagerness to go on.

Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we consumed seeing the lusty little city.

Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the few extra things needed for the Yukon – among others a bottle of tar and carbolic – a mixture to rub on to offend the yet active mosquito.

Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets the bulk of even this trade.

To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place very English. The capitol building is an imposing structure of granite, surmounted by a successful dome.