After being domiciled we proceeded with the resident superintendent to view the company's property, comprising several thousand acres. Rising in altitude, and on different levels, as we approached Mt. Seymour, croppings of coal were quite frequent, the broken and scattered veins evidencing volcanic disturbance. The vein most promising was several hundred feet above the level of the sea, and our intended wharf survey was made, which showed heavy cuttings and blasting to obtain grade for the road. The work was pushed with all the vigor the isolated locality and climatic conditions allowed. Rain almost incessant was a great impediment, as well as were the occasional strikes of the Indian labor, which was never for more wages, but for more time. The coal from the croppings which had been at first obtained for testing, had been carried by them in bags, giving them in the "coin of the realm" so many pieces of tobacco for each bag delivered on the ship. There was plenty of time lying around on those trips, and they took it. On the advent of the new era they complained that "King George men" took all the time and gave them none, so they frequently quit to go in quest. The nativity of my skilled labor was a piece of national patchwork—a composite of the canny Scotch, the persistent and witty Irish, the conservative but indomitable English, the effervescent French, the phlegmatic German, and the irascible Italian. I found this variety beneficial, for the usual national and race bias was sufficiently in evidence to preclude a combination to retard the work. I had three Americans, that were neither white nor colored; they were born black; one of them—Tambry, the cook—will ever have my grateful remembrance for his fatherly kindness and attention during an illness.
The conditions there were such that threw many of my men off their feet. Women and liquor had much the "right of way." I was more than ever impressed with the belief that there was nothing so conclusive to a worthy manhood as self-restraint, both morally and physically, and the more vicious and unrestraining the environment the greater the achievement. Miners had been at work placing many tons of coal at the mouth of the mine during the making of the road, the grade of which was of two elevations, one from the mine a third of the distance, terminating at a chute, from which the coal fell to cars on the lower level, and from thence to the wharf. After the completion of the road and its acceptance by the superintendent and the storage of a cargo of coal on the wharf, the steamer Otter arrived, was loaded, and despatched to San Francisco, being the first cargo of anthracite coal ever unearthed on the Pacific seaboard. The superintendent, having notified the directors at Victoria of his intention to return, they had appointed me to assume the office. I was so engaged, preparing for the next shipment on the steamer.
CHAPTER X.
My sojourn on the island was not without its vicissitudes and dangers, and one of the latter I shall ever remember—one mingled, as it was, with antics of Neptune, that capricious god of the ocean, and resignation to what seemed to promise my end with all sublime things. The stock of oil brought for lubricating cars and machinery having been exhausted, I started a beautiful morning in a canoe with three Indians for their settlement at the mouth of Skidegate River for a temporary supply. After a few hours' paddling, gliding down the river serenely, the wind suddenly arose, increasing in force as we approached the mouth in the gulf. The high walls of the river sides afforded no opportunity to land. The storm continued to increase in violence, bringing billows of rough sea from the ocean, our canoe dancing like a feather, one moment on a high crest by its skyward leap, and in the next to an abyss deep, with walls of sea on either side, shutting out a view of the horizon, while I, breathless with anxious hope, waited for the succeeding wave to again lift the frail bark. The better to preserve the equilibrium of the canoe—a conveyance treacherous at the best—wrapped in a blanket in the bottom of the canoe I laid, looking into the faces of the Indians, contorted by fright, and listened to their peculiar and mournful death wail, "while the gale whistled aloft his tempest tune."
I afterward learned that they had a superstition based upon the loss of many of their tribe under like conditions, that escape was impossible. The alarm and distrust in men, aquatic from birth, in their own waters was to me appalling. I seemed to have "looked death in the face"—and what a rush of recollections that had been long forgotten, of actions good and bad, the latter seeming the most, hurried, serried, but distinct through my excited brain; then a thought, bringing a calm content, that "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late;" and with a fervent resignation of myself to God and to what I believed to be inevitable; then a lull in the wind, and, after many attempts, we were able to cross the mouth of the river to the other side—the place of destination.
In 1869 I left Queen Charlotte Island and returned to Victoria; settled my business preparatory to joining my family, then at Oberlin, Ohio. It was not without a measure of regret that I anticipated my departure. There I had lived more than a decade; where the geniality of the climate was excelled only by the graciousness of the people; there unreservedly the fraternal grasp of brotherhood; there I had received social and political recognition; there my domestic ties had been intensified by the birth of my children, a warp and woof of consciousness that time cannot obliterate. Then regret modified, as love of home and country asserted itself.
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
'This is my native land'—
Whose heart has not within him burned
As homeward footsteps he has turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?"
En route my feelings were peculiar. A decade had passed, fraught with momentous results in the history of the nation. I had left California disfranchised and my oath denied in a "court of justice" (?); left my country to all appearances enveloped in a moral gloom so dense as to shut out the light of promise for a better civil and political status. The star of hope glimmered but feebly above the horizon of contumely and oppression, prophetic of the destruction of slavery and the enfranchisement of the freedman. I was returning, and on touch of my country's soil to have a new baptism through the all-pervading genius of universal liberty. I had left politically ignoble; I was returning panoplied with the nobility of an American citizen. Hitherto regarded as a pariah, I had neither rejoiced at its achievement nor sorrowed for its adversity; now every patriotic pulse beat quicker and heart throb warmer, on realization that my country gave constitutional guarantee for the common enjoyment of political and civil liberty, equality before the law—inspiring a dignity of manhood, of self-reliance and opportunity for elevation hitherto unknown.