Stuart’s Lake is a very beautiful sheet of water. Tall mountains rise along its western and northern shores, and forest promontories stretch far into its deep blue waters. It is the favourite home of the salmon, when late in summer he has worked his long, toilsome way up the innumerable rapids of the Frazer, 500 miles from the Pacific.
Colossal sturgeon are also found in its waters, sometimes weighing as much as 800 pounds. With the exception of rabbits, game is scarce, along the shores, but at certain times rabbits are found in incredible numbers; the Indian women snare them by sacksful, and every one lives on rabbit, for when rabbits are numerous, salmon are scarce.
The daily rations of a man in the wide domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company are singularly varied.
On the south shores of Hudson’s Bay a voyageur receives every day one wild goose; in the Saskatchewan he gets ten pounds of buffalo-meat; in Athabasca eight pounds of moose-meat; in English River three large white fish; in the North, half fish and reindeer; and here in New Caledonia he receives for his day’s food eight rabbits or one salmon. Start not, reader, at the last item! The salmon is a dried one, and does not weigh more than a pound and a half in its reduced form.
After a day’s delay at Fort St. James, we started again on our southern road. A canoe carried us to a point some five and twenty miles lower down the Stuart’s River—a rapid stream of considerable size, which bears the out-flow of the lake and of the long line of lakes lying north of Stuart’s, into the main Frazer River.
I here said good-bye to Kalder, who was to return to Peace River on the following day. A whisky saloon in the neighbourhood of the fort had proved too much for this hot-tempered half-breed, and he was in a state of hilarious grief when we parted. “He had been very hasty,” he said, “would I exsqueeze him, as he was sorry; he would always go with this master again if he ever came back to Peace River;” and then the dog caught his eye, and overpowered by his feelings he vanished into the saloon.
Guided by an old carrier Indian chief, the canoe swept out of the beautiful lake and ran swiftly down the Stuart’s River. By sun-down we had reached the spot where the trail crosses the stream, and here we camped for the night; our horses had arrived before us under convoy of Tom the Indian.
On the following morning, the 31st of May, we reached the banks of the Nacharcole River, a large stream flowing from the west; open prairies of rich land fringed the banks of this river, and far as the eye could reach to the west no mountain ridge barred the way to the Western Ocean.
This river has its source within twenty miles of the Pacific, and is without doubt the true line to the sea for a northern railroad, whenever Canada shall earnestly take in hand the work of riveting together the now widely-severed portions of her vast dominion; but to this subject I hope to have time to devote a special chapter in the Appendix to this book, now my long journey is drawing to a close, and these latter pages of its story are written amid stormy waves, where a southward-steering ship reels on beneath the shadow of Madeira’s mountains.
Crossing the wide Nacharcole River, and continuing south for a few miles, we reached a broadly cut trail which bore curious traces of past civilization. Old telegraph poles stood at intervals along the forest-cleared opening, and rusted wire hung in loose festoons down from their tops, or lay tangled amid the growing brushwood of the cleared space. A telegraph in the wilderness! What did it mean?