CHAPTER V
BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
The Pacific as we crossed it on our return from Japan to America was very different to the Pacific of our outward journey. Instead of being on a small ship, so buffeted by the seas that we could not remain on deck, with hardly another white passenger on board except missionaries, we were on a large ship—the finest which crossed the Pacific in those days—full of “Society” people returning from the East, and the sea was like the traditional mill-pond.
We landed at San Francisco and stayed a week at the Palace to see something of life in the Californian capital. It struck me as very like life in Australia, especially in the character of the buildings and the appearance of the people. But the cold winds of the San Francisco summer have no parallel in Australia.
The chief effect of my visit to California in the development of my writing was that, receiving a contract to write a number of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle, my first prose writing had to be lively enough to satisfy the lively Californian audience. This was a good training.
From San Francisco we went up the Pacific coast to Vancouver, with good opportunities for learning the humours and vulgarities of Western America.
The tail-end of summer and the autumn we spent in working our way back from Vancouver to Montreal, breaking our journey wherever we felt inclined to try the joys of wild life in Canada—at the head waters of the Fraser, the Sicamous lakes in the Kootenay country, various spots on Lake Nepigon and the wild North shore of Lake Superior, Lake Nipissing, the Lake of the Woods, Trout Lake, and so on, besides the chief towns like Winnipeg, and the regular tourist stopping-places at Banff and the Glacier House. At some places we had the opportunity of watching the life of the Siwashes, or Coast Indians, of Esquimaux blood, who live chiefly by catching and drying the salmon which we saw coming up the Fraser like a river of fish in a river of water. At others we saw the lordly Red Indian—Stony or Blood or Blackfoot—and on the Rainy Lake we saw two thousand Ojibways on the war-path—all cartridge-belts and feathers—camped on the outskirts of a Canadian town (without inflicting the smallest scare on the inhabitants), while they were waiting to see if they should have to go and support the Ojibways across the border in their war upon a Baltimore Company, which had infringed their rights.
The Indians, in their shrewd way, first tried their luck in the United States Courts, who decided in their favour, so war was not declared.
At Sicamous we saw eighty fresh skins of black bears, who had been slaughtered while they were feeding on the salmon stranded in shallow water, owing to the failure of the berry crop. In their anxiety to spawn in shallow water, the salmon crush their way up into tiny brooks and ponds where the bears can catch them easily, and the farmers sweep them out of the water with branches.
At the Glacier House, Jim the guide’s slaying of the great grizzly bear, when we were there before, inflamed my imagination. I cultivated Jim. I climbed the great Assulkan Glacier with him after the first fall of autumn snow, and made a vow about glaciers which I have religiously kept; and having a Winchester sporting rifle with me, I went out with him to try and get a shot at a grizzly, whose track he had seen. But we saw no more of that bear, which was, perhaps, fortunate for me, for though I had won many prizes at rifle-shooting, I had not been brought face to face with any dangerous game, and a grizzly decidedly falls into that category.
We had splendid fishing all the way across, and delightful camping out; and altogether had an experience of outdoor life in Western Canada, which is very unspoiled and wild—a snakeless Eden, that certainly told in my development as a writer.