The chief put his pole down in the mud and anchored his canoe, as he supposed, and we went to sleep on board the craft. Next morning we found we were high and dry in the mud on a bar that seemed to be miles away from any water. Oh, the mud, mud! There is nothing that compares with the mud of the Fraser for slimy stickiness when the tide is out. It was near noon the next day before the tide again reached us, and there we were all those hours in the scorching sun, a disconsolate crowd indeed.
At that time there was no white man to be found settled on the Delta lands of the Fraser. Soon after this the Ladner brothers took up land on the south bank of the river and gave their name to the place. Then followed Ferris on Lulu Island, and Boyd and Kilgour on Sea Island, and others at different points, every one of whom was voted a fool for “taking up” these swamps with cat-tails and bulrushes and frog-ponds. Now these districts are covered with some of the most beautiful and productive farms to be found in any part of the world. The shores are lined with large canneries for the packing of salmon, and thousands of people occupy these old-time mud-banks.
An Old Croaker in a Canoe.
It is the easiest thing in the world to find fault with people of whose conditions and circumstances we know nothing. And sometimes a little taste of the trials and toils which others have to endure is the best cure for such unfair complainings. We had an old friend, a Yorkshireman, on that coast, who was very apt to find fault with others, and especially with the ministers.
“Thoo knoa thease preeachers have good teams wi’ theeir fat salaries,” he would say. And then, seeing the gleam in my eye, he would hasten on: “Ah dean’t mean you, thoo knoas. Ah mean thease men ’at ez t’ big fat salaries; they can sit roond an’ dea vary little.”
“Stop your noise,” I would say to him. “I am a preacher, and don’t like to hear you find fault with the ministers.”
On one occasion he came to me and asked when I was going to New Westminster. When I told him and inquired why he wanted to know, he said:
“Ah would like to gang wi’ you.”
“You can go with one understanding,” I replied.
“Weel, what is that?”