The Wild North Land / The Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America

by Sir William Francis Butler

We have been a long time now in that portion of the American continent which is known as British Columbia, and yet we have said but little of its early life, or how it came into the limits of a defined colony.

Sometime about that evening when we lay camped (now a long way back) upon the hill where the grim face of Chimeroo looked blankly out upon the darkening wilderness, we entered for the first time the territory which bears the name of British Columbia.

Nature, who, whether she forms a flower or a nation, never makes a mistake, had drawn on the northern continent of America her own boundaries. She had put the Rocky Mountains to mark the two great divisions of East and West America. But the theory of natural boundaries appears never to have elicited from us much support, and in the instance now under consideration we seem to have gone not a little out of our way to evince our disapprobation of Nature’s doings.

It was the business of the Imperial Government a few years ago to define the boundaries of the new province to which they were giving a Constitution.

The old North-West Fur Company had rested satisfied with the Rocky Mountain frontier, but in the new document the Eastern line was defined as follows: “And to the east, from the boundary of the United States northwards to the Rocky Mountains, and the one hundred and twentieth meridian of West Longitude.” Unfortunately, although the one hundred and twentieth meridian is situated for a portion of its course in the main range of the mountains, it does not lie altogether within them.

The Rocky Mountains do not run north and south, but trend considerably to the west; and the 120th meridian passes out into the prairie country of the Peace River. In looking at this strangely unmeaning frontier, where nature had already given such an excellent “divide,” and one which had always been adopted by the early geographer, it seems only rational to suppose that the framers of the new line lay under the impression that mountain and meridian were in one and the same line. Nor supposing such to be the case, would it be, by any means, the first time that such an error had been made by those whose work it was to frame our Colonial destiny.

Well, let us disregard this rectification of boundary, and look at British Columbia as Nature had made it.

When, some seventy years ago, the Fur Company determined to push their trade into the most remote recesses of the unknown territory lying before them, a few adventurers following this same course which I have lately taken, found themselves suddenly in a labyrinth of mountains. These men named the mountain land “New Caledonia,” for they had been nurtured in far Highland homes, and the grim pine-clad steeps of this wild region, and the blue lakes lying lapped amid the mountains, recalled the Loch’s and Ben’s of boyhood’s hours. ’Twas long before they could make much of this new dominion. Mountains rose on every side; white giants bald with age, wrapt in cloud, and cloaked with pines. Cragged and scarped, and towering above valleys filled with boulders, as though in bygone ages, when the old peaks had been youngsters they had pelted each other with Titanic stones; which, falling short, had filled the deep ravines that lay between them.

But if the mountains in their vast irregularity defied the early explorers, the rivers were even still more perplexing. Mountains have a right to behave in an irregular kind of way, but rivers are usually supposed to conduct themselves on more peaceful principles. In New Caledonia they had apparently forgotten this rule; they played all manner of tricks. They turned and twisted behind the backs of hills, and came out just the very way they shouldn’t have come out. They rose often close to the sea, and then ran directly away from it. They pierced through mountain ranges in cañons and chasms; and the mountains threw down stones at them, but that only made them laugh all the louder, as they raced away from cañon to cañon. Sometimes they grew wicked, and, turned viciously and bit, and worried the bases of the hills, and ate trees and rocks and landslips; and then, over all their feuds and bickerings, came Time at last, as he always does, and threw a veil over the conflict; a veil of pine-trees.

But in one respect both mountain and river seemed in perfect accord; they would keep the land to themselves and their child, the wild Indian; but the white man, the child of civilization, must be kept out. Nevertheless the white man came in, and he named the rivers after his own names, though they still laughed him to scorn, and were useless to his commerce. Gradually this white fur-hunter spread himself through the land; he passed the Frazer, reached the Columbia, and gained its mouth; and here a strange rival presented himself. We must go back a little.