Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences

by J. Ewing Ritchie

In the dells and shadows there are tales yet to be told. For instance, here are some remains of the ancient road to British Columbia. Here, a man tells me, last year there was a terrible tragedy. An English gentleman and his son were camping near the spot. There came a forest fire. Awful to relate, when the son had time to look around him, his father was burnt to death. Fearful are some of the solitudes through which the passenger plunges. The bear and the eagle have them entirely to themselves. Few have explored them; fewer still have scaled the mountain heights by which they are girdled. But nowadays one is in search of silver or gold or coal, and has no time to think of mountain grandeur. Cities rise and fall very quickly here. Silver City, for instance, where we stopped last night, was all the rage a year or two ago. It is now deserted. Yet people say silver is still to be found there, and at Calgary, as an illustration of the fact, a ‘prospector’ showed me a fine specimen of silver, at the same time asking me to come and see the shaft. I replied I was as fond of silver as he was, but I sought it in another way.

But to return to the Rockies. I wonder not that in times past the Indians saw in them the home of the gods, or that there the scientist discovers in them the source of the whirlwind or the storm.

I am again train-bound. No one knows when we may have a train from the east, and till we have one it is impossible for me to get away. Physically, perhaps, this is a good thing for me, as it enables me to recuperate. Here I am, 5,000 or 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, breathing mountain air, and luxuriating in mountain scenery. Last night I slept in a caboose, and it was the best night’s rest I have had for a long time. I went to bed at nine and was up again at five. Do my readers know what a caboose is? It is a railway luggage-car on wheels. Mine is rather a superior one, and has an upper and a lower chamber, and has in the upper chamber a row of shelves, which do service as beds. I had one of these to myself, and, as I was well provided with blankets, did not much grieve at the absence of linen sheets.

My dear old friend, Mrs. Moodie, wrote a capital book, called ‘Roughing It in the Bush.’ Assuredly I may, one of these days, write one on roughing it in the Rockies, though the keeper of the caboose, out of respect for my age and infirmities, does all he can to make me comfortable. Already I feel the better for the air. For the first time since I have been in Canada I have felt hungry; for the first time, also, since I have been in Canada I have not had to physic myself with chlorodyne. A month up here in the Rockies would make a young man of me or of anyone else. I must be off before I become as gay as a horse fed on beans. This is, I take it, the real and sufficient reason of the peculiar spirits of the mountaineers, who rather alarmed me with their liveliness at Calgary. Their exuberance is due to air, and air alone. As I sit, a long row of mules files past; a man is riding at the head, the others follow with their burdens packed on their backs. He is a ‘prospector,’ and is on his way to the other side. Already as many as a thousand such have gone the same road this summer.

The mountains are full of wealth—in the shape of gold or silver, or coal or slate, or other precious commodities. Hitherto the cost of conveyance has kept people away. The opening of the C.P.R. will remove that inconvenience. They will have a chance now of getting rid of their minerals, when discovered, and of fetching up their stores from the East at less expense. As it is, things are dear enough in Holt City. For instance, if I send or receive a letter, I have to pay the postmaster a few cents in addition to the usual postage-stamp. Calgary I thought bad enough, but up here prices may be quoted as much higher. Yesterday I had a ride over the mountains. It will be long before I take such a ride again. No English coachman would drive such a road for five hundred a year. No English carriage could stand it, nor English horses either. I expected the buggy, as it was called, to be shattered into atoms every minute—it looked so light and frail, and the horses—a handsome pair, the property of Mr. Ross—to be ruined for life; yet we got safely to the front—where the men are hard at work cutting down trees, removing earth, tunnelling, and pushing on the work with all their might; and there, I must say, there are openings for any number of men who like to come out. Last year little was done in the winter, because the contractors believed the climate would be against them. No one before then had wintered in the Rockies, and everyone believed the climate to be much worse than it really is.

But to return to the ride. I yet feel it in every bone in my body, as all the time I had to hold on to my seat like grim death. Sometimes the coachman was high above me; sometimes I was at the top and he at the bottom; now we were deep in the mud, the next moment high and dry on a formidable boulder, bigger than a hogshead, and came down with a bang, which sent me quivering all over. Here we were with the water up to the floor; and then we came on a mudbank quite as deep. Not an inch of the ground was level. It was all collar work or the reverse. Fortunately we were shaded by the firs which climb all the mountains out here, or the heat would have been unbearable. As to conversation, that was quite out of the question, though the ‘boy’ who drove me came when a child from Devonshire, and had a strong wish to see the old country again, of whose lanes, yellow with primroses, and cottages bright with roses and honeysuckles, and farmhouses green with ivy, he had a very vivid recollection. He made a lot of money, he said. Indeed, he had more than he knew what to do with. Last winter, for instance, he stopped a month in Winnipeg, and spent there four hundred dollars. ‘How did it all go?’ ‘Oh! in treating the boys!’ was his answer. I rather intimated that was a poor way of using his money. ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘they all do it. That is the way of the boys in this country!’ I was glad to hear him say that he thought of taking a farm soon, and was putting by the money for that purpose. The Rocky Mountains cannot be a bad place for a ‘boy.’ One of them yesterday told me how he had vainly written to his father to come out, who was now in the old country breaking stones on the road. Here, at any rate, he would have been better off. It is a long journey, I know, for the British emigrant. We are more than 1,000 miles from Winnipeg, and the ride is a dreary one till you reach the Rockies. The run to Winnipeg from Toronto by Port Arthur and Owen Sound is a real enjoyment. It took us two days and two nights to reach Port Arthur from Toronto, and the trip from Port Arthur to Winnipeg is accomplished easily in twenty hours.

‘Any bears about here?’ said I to the ‘boy,’ in one of the few minutes allowed for conversation in the course of our rough ride yesterday.

‘Not many. I seed one near where we are passing. He was a black bear, and stood up and looked at me, and then I looked at him. I wished I’d had a gun, and then I would have shot him.’

Fortunately I saw no bear, black or brown, in the woods as we drove amongst them; scarcely a bird—only one, an owl I think, on the top of a tree, which never moved, though we were close upon it. ‘Do you make any difference in work on Sunday?’ I asked of one of the men. ‘Oh no; Sunday ain’t of much account here.’ This is to be regretted, if only for physical considerations. Everyone can work all the better for a day of rest. Again, I think the C.P.R. injures itself in this way, that it may lose the services of useful men who like to keep the Sabbath, either from physical or religious considerations. As a matter of fact, I found many did take a rest on Sunday, and it was amusing to see how the morning was devoted to haircutting and shaving and mending clothes in the open air. A man, I know, can spend his Sunday at honest work better than in drinking. But when we think of the wild life of the miners and navvies in the ends of the earth—a life so wild that the C.P.R. has got a law passed to forbid the sale of intoxicating drink, and people are appalled when they read, in spite of the law, whisky is supplied to men who have a large number of revolvers at their side—it seems that a little provision might be made for the religious wants of the community. The philosopher will laugh, I admit. My reply is: Men were lifted out of degradation by the Christian religion in some form or other, and as we root that out we may expect society to retrograde. These men to the front will pay for looking after. They are fine fellows mostly. At any rate, they are the pioneers of modern civilization, and should be reverenced as such. They are to be honoured for their work’s sake. They plant, we gather the fruit. They sow the seed, we reap the harvest, and their work remains a monument of perseverance, of the benefits of the Union, of enterprise, and capital and skill. That Canada has thus carried the railway and the telegraph across the Rockies shows that England and America will have to look to their industrial laurels.

I am alive, I am thankful to say; but it seems to me that I should have left my bones on the Kicking Horse Lake, which lies on the slope of the Rockies, situated in British Columbia, where the scenery becomes grander and the air balmier as it comes up laden with the soft breeze of the Pacific. You see that at once in the superior size of the trees which clothe the sides of that part of the Rockies.