British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and averages 400 miles in width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges, the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700 miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered marketable.
The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies, but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth. Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors," have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity. But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the Pacific, lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets, which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islands, and receive the discharge of almost as many streams and rivers—a wondrously beautiful region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of metals, whose value industry has not yet established.
It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild, and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours the traveller sees, across the majestic cañon of the Fraser, the neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony, for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascades, turbulent streams, and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.
But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part, lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-grass valleys in the south he would see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man. A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country, where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale, and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo (lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close together, he would see more than half the population of the province.
AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA
Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay Company, where the endless forests and multitudinous lakes and streams are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then, hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else there is a can for between-times!