HOT SULPHUR SPRING, BANFF, ALBERTA.
XIV
BRITISH COLUMBIA, THE PACIFIC PROVINCE
THIS most westerly province of the Dominion makes a strong appeal to the imagination. Until the recent extension of Quebec and Ontario, British Columbia was the largest of the provinces, with its area of 395,000 square miles, or more than that of the British Isles, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland taken together. Of its sea of mountains, two hundred thousand square miles in extent, might be made twenty-four Switzerlands, but those who know the far-famed land of the European mountaineers are impressed with the fact that as yet man has gained no such hold upon the Rockies and the Selkirks and the Coast Ranges as upon the Alps. There are no picturesque châlets clinging to the sides of these Canadian mountains, and for the most part the snow-capped monarchs of the ranges lift up their heads from a land that seems almost as much outside the dominion of man as the blue heavens themselves.
On every hand “unconquered peaks” challenge the daring climber; and, hidden away amongst their recesses, lie lakes which seem the very acme of loneliness. The hunter, the scientist, the recluse, the seeker for adventure, can each strike out a trail for himself in British Columbia, or, if he so desires it, can shut himself up apart from other men in the wilderness of mountains; and sometimes stern necessity compels wild journeys through the unexplored maze of height and precipice and canyon.
Not long ago I heard of two men sent by a railway company across a mountain range to find—if they could—a possible pathway for the “iron horse” of civilization. For a hundred miles or more of unknown country their journey had to be performed on foot, with no hope of shelter or food save what they could carry with them. The former was represented by a frail tent of silk which could be thrust into a pocket, and the latter chiefly by beans sewn into narrow bags slung across their shoulders; for the food value of beans is high, and they dared not burden themselves with one ounce of superfluous comfort.
Romance is with us still, and, as Kipling suggests, may be found in “dock and deep and mine and mill”; nor does it need a poet to find it in the building of a railway, which here climbs by a corkscrew road up a forbidding mountain side, there plunges downward to the western ocean through a cut with which a tumultuous torrent has been busy for thousands of years.
It is just a hundred and twenty years since Alexander Mackenzie, one of the indomitable Scots who took up fur trading and exploring as their life-work, crossed the mountains from the east, and so with his party was the first to reach the Canadian Pacific coast overland. Others of his contemporaries and successors made memorable journeys down the furious rivers of the Pacific slope, and little by little gleaned some knowledge of the interior of the province, as, a few years earlier, Cook and Vancouver had begun to explore the inlets and the straits between the islands that for most of the way along the coast make a mighty breakwater against the ocean surges.