Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Indeed, that railway has become so great a booster of the Dominion’s natural show places that it has even been given credit for supplementing nature in the matter of scenery. The story is told of a woman who had just had her first view of the mighty crystal mass of the Illecillewaet Glacier towering thousands of feet above the railway. She stared in open-eyed and incredulous wonder. Then she exclaimed:

“It ain’t real! The Canadian Pacific put it there for advertising!”

CHAPTER XXIX
THROUGH BRITISH COLUMBIA TO THE COAST

British Columbia is the third largest province of the Dominion of Canada. It has an area as great as that of France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland combined. It extends from the United States boundary to Yukon Territory and Alaska, and, except for the northeastern section, it is all plateaus and mountains and valleys. The interior table-lands have an average elevation of three thousand feet. They contain some good farms and dairies, but the chief wealth of the province is in its forests, fisheries, and mines.

I have crossed this great territory often on my way westward, and have at times gone southward from Golden into the Kootenay country. This is far below the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Another line of the Canadian Pacific crosses the region from the Crow’s Nest Pass.

In the mighty hills of the Kootenays I saw the headwaters of the Columbia River. Its source is only a few hundred feet from the Kootenay River, which at this point is a good-sized stream. The Columbia flows north for one hundred and eighty miles, and then makes a sharp bend and turns to the south. The two rivers meet after each has completed about four hundred miles of its course, the parent stream of the Columbia crossing the United States border to the Pacific. Before meeting, the two rivers wind in and out among the hills, now in narrow streams, and now in long, winding lakes that make one think of Como and Maggiore on the borders of Switzerland and Italy. They are walled in by peaks that rise almost straight up for hundreds of feet. Their waters are so clear that one can stand on the slopes high above them and see the fish swimming in the streams far below. The sides of the hills are covered with fir and tamarack, and their tops are often capped with snow.

The Columbia and the Kootenay, by their circling courses, have made a mighty island in the interior of British Columbia. If you will imagine two gigantic wish bones, the tips of which are touching each other, enclosing a diamond of mountainous land larger than the state of Ohio, you will have an idea of the curious formation that Nature has created here. A short canal that connects the two rivers near the headwaters of the Columbia makes the island complete. The valleys of these two streams, containing a million acres or so, are growing in importance as a mixed farming, fruit growing, and dairying region.

The Kootenay country has also some of the richest mineral deposits of the Rockies. It has gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and lead. The coal deposits near the Crow’s Nest Pass are said to contain thousands of millions of tons, and near them are thousands of coke ovens blazing away. Not far distant are deposits of hematite ore, upon which the Canadians may some day build up a big iron and steel industry.

Coming farther on into British Columbia, I took a steamer through Kootenay Lake and stopped at the town of Nelson, which is in the heart of the mining country. There I talked with one of the men who opened up some of the big silver and lead deposits more than two score years ago. Said he:

“There had been a rush to this region, and I came in with five other prospectors. When we got to the camp I suggested that our party see what we could find in a mountain across the valley. We set out with only two days’ provisions. Almost as soon as we started up the hill we struck some float rock that showed signs of silver and lead, and on the following day we discovered a great mass of galena, which was from twenty-five to thirty feet wide. There were boulders of lead ore close by, and we at once staked out our mine. It proved to be a rich one, and was eventually sold for more than a million dollars.”