I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded $236,000 in 1887, and may yet be decided to be exclusively an American and not a British Columbian source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the extraction of oil from herrings and from dog-fish and whales, all of which are small channels of revenue.
I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a civil engineer of high repute who has explored the greater part of southern British Columbia—at least in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not to place too high a value upon the printed matter put forth in praise of any new country, I was especially pleased to obtain this man's practical impressions concerning the store and quality and kinds of timber the province contains. He said, not to use his own words, that timber is found all the way back from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of those mountains and on the west slope of the Coast Range. The very largest trees are between the Coast Range and the coast. The country between the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Range is dry by comparison with the parts where the timber thrives best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between the Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tamaracks reach six and eight feet in diameter, and attain a height of 200 feet not infrequently. There are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though not very many) in this region. There is very little leaf-wood, and no hard-wood. Maples are found, to be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves westward the same timber prevails, but it grows shorter and smaller until the low coast country is reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests occur again. This coast region is largely a flat country, but there are not many miles of it.
To this rule, as here laid down, there are some notable exceptions. One particular tree, called there the bull-pine—it is the pine of Lake Superior and the East—grows to great size all over the province. It is a common thing to find the trunks of these trees measuring four feet in diameter, or nearly thirteen feet in circumference. It is not especially valuable for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short-lived when exposed to the weather, and is therefore not in demand for railroad work; but for the ordinary uses to which builders put timber it answers very well.
THE POTLATCH
There is a maple which attains great size at the coast, and which, when dressed, closely resembles bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the vine-maple. The trees are found with a diameter of two-and-a-half to three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above forty or fifty feet. The wood is crooked. It runs very badly. This, of course, is what gives it the beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner or later, find a ready market for it. There is plenty of hemlock in the province, but it is nothing like so large as that which is found in the East, and its bark is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for nothing larger than railway ties, and the trees grow in such inaccessible places, half-way up the mountains, that it is for the most part unprofitable to handle it. The red cedars—the wood of which is consumed in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes—are also small. On the other hand, the white cedar reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet of thickness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraordinary to find these cedars reaching 200 feet above the ground, and one was cut at Port Moody, in clearing the way for the railroad, that had a length of 310 feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the wood of these trees is what is consumed, and usually the trunks, hollow and empty, stand grimly in their places after the fire would otherwise have been forgotten. These great tubes are often of such dimensions that men put windows and doors in them and use them for dwellings. In the valleys are immense numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood species, white birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but they are not estimated in the forest wealth of the province, because of the expense that marketing them would entail.
This fact concerning the small timber indicates at once the primitive character of the country, and the vast wealth it possesses in what might be called heroic timber—that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way to market even from out that unopened wilderness. It was the opinion of the engineer to whom I have referred that timber land which does not attract the second glance of a prospector in British Columbia would be considered of the first importance in Maine and New Brunswick. To put it in another way, river-side timber land which in those countries would fetch fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British Columbia would not be taken up. In time it may be cut, undoubtedly it must be, when new railroads alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests.
A great business is carried on in the shipment of ninety-foot and one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to the great car-building works of our country and Canada. They are used in the massive bottom frames of palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reached in this industry is not in the size of the logs, but in the capacities of the saw-mills, and in the possibilities of transportation by rail, for these logs require three cars to support their length. Except for the valleys, the whole vast country is enormously rich in this timber, the mountains (excepting the Rockies) being clothed with it from their bases to their tops. Vancouver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. It bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it has the oak-tree, and does not possess the tamarack. The Vancouver Island oaks do not exceed two or two-and-a-half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir (our Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, especially on the north end of the island. In the old offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Vancouver are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across, showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was forty feet in circumference. Tens of thousands of these firs are from eight to ten feet in diameter at the bottom.
Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, the wood of which is not very valuable; Englemann's spruce, which is very like white spruce, and is very abundant; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow cypress; crab-apple, occurring as a small tree or shrub; western birch, common in the Columbia region; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Vancouver Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abundance and of large size in the Peace River and upper Fraser regions; dogwood, arbutus, and several minor trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance in various districts or all over the province are the following: hazel, red elder, willow, barberry, wild red cherry, blackberry, yellow plum, choke-cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, bearberry, currant, and snowberry, mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mulberry, and blueberry.