I would have liked to write at length concerning the enterprising cities of the province, but, after all, they may be trusted to make themselves known. It is the region behind them which most interests mankind, and the Government has begun, none too promptly, a series of expeditions for exploiting it. As for the cities, the chief among them and the capital, Victoria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its business district wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive appearance, and its detached dwellings—all of frame, and of the distinctive type which marks the houses of the California towns—are surrounded by gardens. It has a beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few years it will have spread to Esquimault, now less than two miles distant. This is now the seat of a British admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose water is of a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At Esquimault are government offices, churches, schools, hotels, stores, a naval "canteen," and a dry-dock 450 feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its entrance. The electric street railroad of Victoria was extended to Esquimault in the autumn of 1890. Of the climate of Victoria Lord Lorne said, "It is softer and more constant than that of the south of England."
Vancouver, the principal city of the main-land, is slightly smaller than Victoria, but did not begin to displace the forest until 1886. After that every house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it boasts a hotel comparable in most important respects with any in Canada, many noble business buildings of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches, a really great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a notable system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The Canadian Pacific Railway terminates here, and so does the line of steamers for China and Japan. The city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an arm of Burrard Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights, and shows no sign of halting its hitherto rapid growth. Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more than naming.
In the original settlements in that territory a peculiar institution occasioned gala times for the red men now and then. This was the "potlatch," a thing to us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is begotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its meaning. It is a feast and merrymaking at the expense of some man who has earned or saved what he deems considerable wealth, and who desires to distribute every iota of it at once in edibles and drinkables among the people of his tribe or village. He does this because he aspires to a chieftainship, or merely for the credit of a "potlatch"—a high distinction. Indians have been known to throw away such a sum of money that their "potlatch" has been given in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have been both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and ornaments have been distributed in addition to the feast.
The custom has a new significance now. It is the white man who is to enjoy a greater than all previous potlatches in that region. The treasure has been garnered during the ages by time or nature or whatsoever you may call the host, and the province itself is offered as the feast.
IX
DAN DUNN'S OUTFIT
At Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in British Columbia, a small white steamboat, built on the spot, and exposing a single great paddle-wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her still few trips through a wilderness that, but for her presence, would be as completely primitive as almost any in North America. Her route lay down the Columbia River a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles to a point called Sproat's Landing, where some rapids interrupt navigation. The main load upon the steamer's deck was of steel rails for a railroad that was building into a new mining region in what is called the Kootenay District, just north of our Washington and Idaho. The sister range to the Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the new highway, which would then connect the valley of the Columbia with the Kootenay River. There was a temptation beyond the mere chance to join the first throng that pushed open a gateway and began the breaking of a trail in a brand-new country. There was to be witnessed the propulsion of civilization beyond old confines by steam-power, and this required railroad building in the Rockies, where that science finds its most formidable problems. And around and through all that was being done pressed a new population, made up of many of the elements that produced our old-time border life, and gave birth to some of the most picturesque and exciting chapters in American History.
It should be understood that here in the very heart of British Columbia only the watercourses have been travelled, and there was neither a settlement nor a house along the Columbia in that great reach of its valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific Railway, except at the landing at which this boat stopped.