When civilization once grasps the wild, lone spaces of the earth it seldom releases its hold; yet here civilization had once advanced her footsteps, and apparently shrunk back again frightened at her boldness. It was even so; this trail, with its ruined wire, told of the wreck of a great enterprise. While yet the Atlantic cable was an unsettled question, a bold idea sprung to life in the brain of an American. It was to connect the Old World and the New, by a wire stretched through the vast forests of British Columbia and Alaska, to the Straits of Behring; thence across the Tundras of Kamtschatka, and around the shores of Okhotsk the wires would run to the Amoor River, to meet a line which the Russian Government would lay from Moscow to the Pacific.
It was a grand scheme, but it lacked the elements of success, because of ill-judged route and faulty execution. The great Telegraph Company of the United States entered warmly into the plan. Exploring parties were sent out; one pierced these silent forests; another surveyed the long line of the Yukon; another followed the wintry shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, and passed the Tundras of the black Gulf of Anadir.
Four millions of dollars were spent in these expeditions. Suddenly news came that the Atlantic cable was an accomplished fact. Brunel had died of a broken heart; but the New World and the Old had welded their thoughts together, with the same blow that broke his heart.
Europe spoke to America beneath the ocean, and the voice which men had sought to waft through the vast forests of the Wild North Land, and over the Tundras of Siberia, died away in utter desolation.
So the great enterprise was abandoned, and to-day from the lonely shores of Lake Babine to the bend of the Frazer at Quesnelle, the ruined wire hangs loosely through the forest.
During the first two days of June we journeyed through a wild, undulating country, filled with lakes and rolling hills; grassy openings were numerous, and many small streams stocked with fish intersected the land.
The lakes of this northern plateau are singularly beautiful. Many isles lie upon their surface; from tiny promontories the huge Douglas pine lifts his motionless head. The great northern diver, the loon, dips his white breast in the blue wavelets, and sounds his melancholy cry through the solitude. I do not think that I have ever listened to a sound which conveys a sense of indescribable loneliness so completely as this wail, which the loon sends at night over the forest shores. The man who wrote
“And on the mere the wailing died away”
must have heard it in his dreams.
We passed the noisy Indian village of Lake Noola and the silent Indian graves on the grassy shore of Lake Noolkai, and the evening of the 2nd of June found us camped in the green meadows of the West Road River, up which a white man first penetrated to the Pacific Ocean just eighty years ago.