To the builders of the highway, that skirt the canyon's brink,
To the men that bind the roadbed fast,
To the high, the low, the first and last,
I raise my glass and drink!—EVELYN GUNNE.
As yet, there is no passenger service from Edson to the End of Steel. Several day coaches are run, but they are chiefly for the use of the engineers and workmen. This is how I happen to be the only woman aboard pulling out for the mountains across this newly-made trail.
Do not misunderstand me; it is the railroad that is new. The trail that runs by its side was an old one when Columbus discovered America, and beaten deep with feet, and also it is a long trail, for it leads through to the Pacific Ocean. For centuries, it was the only mark of human interference in this waste that is world-old. It is a trail of lean hunger and bleeding feet, one that has ever been prodigal of promise, but wary of accomplishment. Surely this is so, for once over it stumbled and swore those half-mad men known as the Caribou Stampeders—these, and other unwept, unhonoured fellows who fared into the wilderness for what reasons even the wise Lord knoweth not. If the bones of the red and white folk who have travelled this long, long street were stood upright, I doubt not they would make a fence of pickets for us all the way.
I have no sooner thought this thing than it happens there is a dry stirring and, in an eye-wink of time, the dead men have taken on flesh and colour. They must have been keenly near. Grim, plainish fellows are they, not unlike the gang around me, but rougher-clad and more hairy. They are powerful and full-lifed men, I can see that, and the rough-necked one with the trail stride and mop of curly hair is Alexander MacKenzie, a Scotchman from Inverness, but late of Messrs. Gregory & Co.'s counting-house. He is "down North" endeavouring to open out a trade with the Indians, obtaining a foothold they doubtless call it; his masters, the Nor'-West Fur Company—for monopolists are always sensitive to terms. His is a continental errand (mark this well), for he is the first white man to cross the Rockies, and to tell us what lies over and beyond the hills where the sun goes down. Honour to Alexander MacKenzie, Esq., of Inverness, say I! Some day, when Messrs. the Publishers give me fuller royalties, I shall surely build a cairn to him on the height of land e'er it falls away to the Western Sea.
This man lived more than a century ago, and yet, as his figure fades back into nothingness, we see this other figure close by. It is David Thompson, the Welshman, who has recently discovered a river, and has called it by his own name. Also, he has captured the Astoria fur-trade, and has established a trading post, which future generations will know as Kamloops.
And here is Sir George Simpson, Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. He likes to travel with pipers who go before him, piping as he enters a fort in order that Lo, the Red Man, may be properly impressed.
The ugly person with the harshly aggressive features is Sir James Douglas. He looks as fully open to convincement as a stone pavement. This spalpeen near by is none other than young Lieutenant Butler of Ireland. He is gathering material for a volume he proposes to call The Great Lone Land. I like the way he carries his head. Who runs may read him for a fighter with a fighter's build.
But on they go, and on, this long procession of pioneers, till we can only call out their names as they file by—Dr. Hector, Daniel Harmon, Viscount Milton, Alexander Henry, Dr. Cheadle, and other lean, laborious fellows, long since passed into the shadows. Dead men do tell tales. You may hear if you care to listen.
And what a strange thing has come to pass in these latter months! The tenuous, twisting trail—that very old trail—has been superseded by a clean white road that is like to a long bowstring. Its impotent, creeping life has given way before the gallant onslaught of pick and spade, chain and transit, and before monstrous lifting machines which have other names, but which are really leviathans.
Hitherto, it may be said of this land what was once said of Rome, that the memory sees more than the eye. This is no longer true. Before we realize it, Baedeker will be setting down a star opposite the name of a fashionable hotel in the Athabaska Valley, and the whole of this morning world, from end to end, will be spotted with a black canker of towns. Right glad am I to go through it this day with a construction party, and for my own satisfaction to mentally tie together the threads of the Past and Present. And who knows but in a century from now some curious boy in one of these towns may find this record in an attic rubbish-heap, and may rejoice with me over the knotted threads. (I love you, boy! you must know this.)