Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched his tent midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden tamaracks, and with a wonderful background for “camp shots” both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light he wanted on the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Then he hoped to get at least a negative or two that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life’s work—a complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. It is a privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal. A number of Harmon’s scenic pictures of the mountains where the Columbia takes its rise are so much better than the best of my own of the same subjects, that I am giving them place in a work which it was my original intention to illustrate entirely myself.
We returned to our camp at the head of Horse Thief Creek that night, and set out on our return to Windermere the following morning. Save for a rather sloppy passage of the main ford, the journey was without incident. With light packs, we pushed right through to the head of the wagon-road—something over thirty miles—the first day. The seventeen miles to Invermere we covered in a leisurely fashion, reaching the hotel at three in the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, the twentieth of September. Here I found a wire from Chester, stating that it had finally proved impossible for him to get away from business, and asking me to go ahead and see the Big Bend trip through without him. In the event I decided to continue on down the river he would be glad to have his cameraman accompany me as long as the weather and light were favourable for his work. A letter with full instructions covering the two pictures he desired made had already been dispatched.
CHAPTER V
CANAL FLATS TO BEAVERMOUTH
Chester’s instructions respecting the two new pictures he wanted us to work on came through to Roos the day following our return to Windermere. One of these was to be confined entirely to the Big Bend voyage. Essaying again my role of “gentleman-cum-sportsman,” I was to get off the train at Beavermouth, meet my boatman, launch the boat and start off down the river. The various things seen and done en voyage were to make up the picture.
In the other picture I was to play the part of a young rancher who was farming his hard-won clearing on the banks of the Columbia near its source. With the last of his crops in, he is assailed one day with a great longing to see the ocean. Suddenly it occurs to him that the river flowing right by his door runs all the way to the sea, and the sight of a prospector friend, about to push off with a sack of samples for the smelter many hundreds of miles below, suggests a means of making the journey. And so the two of them start off down the Columbia. What happened to them on their way was to be told in the picture. The introductory scenes of this picture were to be made somewhere in the vicinity of Windermere, but the thread of the story was to be picked up below the Arrow Lakes after the Big Bend voyage was over.
Hunting “location” and rainy weather kept us four or five days in Windermere and vicinity, giving an opportunity we otherwise would have missed to meet and become acquainted with the always kindly and hospitable and often highly distinguished people of this beautiful and interesting community. From the time of David Thompson, the great astronomer and explorer of the Northwest Company who wintered there in 1810, down to the present Windermere seems always to have attracted the right sort of people. The predominant class is what one might call the gentleman-farmer, with the stress perhaps on “gentleman.” I mean to say, that is, that while a number of them have failed of outstanding achievement as farmers, there was none that I met who would not have qualified as a gentleman, and in the very best sense of the word. Sportsmen and lovers of the out-of-doors, there was this fine bond of fellowship between all of them. Nowhere have I encountered a fresher, more wholesome social atmosphere than that of this fine community of the upper Columbia.
That genial and big-hearted old Scot, Randolph Bruce, I recall with especial affection, as must every one of the many who has known the hospitality of his great log lodge on a bay of the lake below Invermere. An Edinburgh engineer, Bruce was one of the builders of the Canadian Pacific, and as such an associate and intimate of Van Horne, O’Shaughnessy and the rest of those sturdy pioneers who pushed to accomplishment the most notable piece of railway construction the world has ever known. In love with the West by the time the railway was finished, he built him a home in the most beautiful spot he knew—such a spot as few even among the Scottish lochs could rival—and associated himself with various projects for the advancement of the country. At the present time he is the owner of the Paradise mine, one of the richest silver-lead properties in British Columbia, and the head of an enterprise which purposes to bring the Windermere region to its own among the grandest of the playgrounds of North America.
We made the preliminary scenes for the “farmer” picture at a gem of a little mountain ranch in a clearing to the west of Lake Windermere. Shooting through one of his favourite “sylvan frames,” Roos picked me up violently shocking hay at the end of a long narrow field which the labour of a young Scotch immigrant had reclaimed from the encompassing forest. (As a matter of fact the hay was already in shocks when we arrived, and I had to unshock a few shocks so as to shock them up again before the camera and thus give the impression that this was the last of my season’s crop.) Then I threw up a couple of shocks for him set up at closer range, with more attention to “technique.” (This latter came easy for me, as I had been pitching hay for a fortnight on my California ranch earlier in the summer.) Finally I stopped work, leaned on my fork and gazed into the distance with visioning eyes. (I was supposed to be thinking of the sea, Roos explained, and in the finished picture there would be a “cut-in” of breakers at this point.) Then I registered “impatience” and “restlessness,” hardening to “firm resolve.” At this juncture I threw down my fork and strode purposefully out of the right side of the picture. (The cabin to which I was supposed to be striding was really on my left, but Roos explained that some sort of a movie Median law made it imperative always to exit to right.) Then we went over to make the cabin shots.