“A Life for a Bottle of Whiskey.”
About the time of these thrilling experiences the Victoria papers reported a very sad incident, under the heading, “A Life for a Bottle of Whiskey,” which goes to show that the missionary’s concern for his people, and his hatred of the traffic in “fire-water,” were amply justified.
“The coroner’s inquest has decided,” so reads the report, “that William Bailey, the Songees Indian, who was shot on the reservation, came to his death by the discharge of S— L—’s revolver. The whole trouble arose, as do most troubles with savage people, out of whiskey. In defiance of the law, someone had supplied the liquor, having no regard for the consequences of his unlawful act. A life for a bottle of whiskey, that is the total of the lamentable affair. Almost every day some serious trouble is reported from one or other of the reservations. In every case the trouble is directly traceable to whiskey.”
On one occasion, two white men were brought before the Honorable Chief Justice of the Colony, charged with assaulting each other.
The trial was completed, and his Honor was about to pronounce sentence. Turning to one of the men, who had lost his nose in the fray of the night before, he said, “For twenty-five years I have sat on the bench of this colony, and I have invariably found liquor to be the chief cause of all trouble and serious infringement of the law. If an Indian shoots a white man, it’s been whiskey that has done it. If a white man shoots an Indian, whiskey is at the bottom of it. You, my friend, have lost your nose; your brother white man became a cannibal under the influence of whiskey and bit off your nose.” And, giving his sentence, “You will have to bear the penalty, and in the future I advise you to let the whiskey alone.”
Don’t wonder if the missionary, above every other man, should be a strong total abstainer and hate the very sight of liquor or its trade.
CHAPTER XIV.
SOME PERILOUS CANOE TRIPS.
“When passing through the watery deep,
I ask in faith His promised aid;
The waves an awful distance keep,
And shrink from my devoted head.
Fearless, their violence I dare,
They cannot harm—for God is there.”
—C. Wesley.
Soon after I got the language of the people, other teachers took the school work, and I went out travelling from place to place, literally “paddling my own canoe.”
There were few steamers in those days, and none between Nanaimo, the centre of our work, and New Westminster and the Fraser River, where I was often called in my labors among the natives.
These trips were invariably made by canoe, except for the chance of catching the river steamer which journeyed from New Westminster to Yale.
The canoes of the Pacific Coast are of the type usually called “dug-outs,” that is to say, they are mostly cut out of a cedar log. In the south, the large ones were spoken of as “Chinook” canoes, with rather a stub or short stern and a very high bow or neck. There were a great variety of smaller canoes used for hunting and fishing, as well as what they called a “spoon canoe,” flat-bottomed and nearly straight, with hardly any bow or stern, which was used for travelling on very shallow rivers. These latter were often made of cottonwood, while the other types were always made of cedar.
The largest canoes were made in the north. The great war-canoes, with a very heavy bow and stern, and capable of carrying easily fifty or sixty people, were so shaped that, when properly managed, they would sail over almost any sea. The Hydahs of Queen Charlotte Islands made the largest and best canoes; they had larger cedar trees on their islands than could be found on the mainland opposite. These canoes were often from thirty to forty feet long and five or six feet beam, a beautiful model, with gracefully shaped bow and stern, that would in English phraseology be called a “clipper” for sailing. One of the largest of these canoes, seventy feet in length by eight feet beam, was presented to Lord Lorne when he visited British Columbia during his term of administration as Governor-General of Canada.
The medium-sized canoe was the best. With two large sails and well manned, one of these northern canoes would safely ride almost any sea. It was by means of these smaller craft that I made many a toilsome journey up and down the east coast of Vancouver Island, among the beautiful islands which lie along that coast, across the Gulf of Georgia, up the Fraser River, down into Puget Sound, and in and out of the many inlets which pierce the coast of the mainland. In one year I made four trips across the Gulf of Georgia and up the Fraser River and back. Twice I travelled the distance from Nanaimo to Yale and return, a round trip of about 340 miles, paddling the whole way.
In journeying to and fro I travelled over two thousand miles a year in all kinds of weather, braving the dangers of stormy seas and the eddies and swift currents of treacherous rivers, and enduring the discomforts of the wild, open life in a new country. In it all I see the good hand of God saving me from manifold dangers.
In time one becomes used to such toils and difficulties, and, after all, they were only the common, every-day experiences of the miner or the frontiersman of those early days.