“You don’t miss much until toward morning; and that you may get a fair idea of by moonlight if you sleep on the right-hand side of the car. We are getting entirely past and away from the mountains now, into a plateau country of grassy hills where farming (except by irrigation) has small success, but grazing is a great industry. At midnight we go through the important town of Kamloops, the headquarters of this grazing region, which extends for hundreds of miles southward, and is interspersed with many gold and silver mining localities. Then we pass Kamloops Lake and get into the cañons of the Lower Thompson River. There the scenery is very curious. This is a dry country—looks like California—and the rocks and earthen river-banks have been carved by wind and occasional deluges into the most fantastic and gayly colored of monumental forms, through which the waters of the racing Thompson mark a sinuous line as green as the purest emerald. It’s a very extraordinary, grotesque landscape, but having seen it once in daylight, I, for one, am satisfied to go through henceforth by night. After we leave the mouth of the Thompson at Lytton, however, and begin to descend Fraser River, the scenery becomes very grand and beautiful; so you must get up early once more.”
How shall I tell in a few words what those Fraser cañons are like? They are not like the thin, abysmal clefts of Colorado, nor the weird corridor through which the Missouri makes its way.
The Fraser is the main water-course of British Columbia, and comes from the far northern interior. It is a broad, heavy, rapid stream, flowing between steep banks sloping ruggedly back to the mountains, whose white and shapely peaks stand in splendid array before us at Lytton. The railway is at first on the eastern bank, and high above the turbulent yellow river, which is soon compressed into a narrow trough, where the hampered water rushes and roars with frightful velocity. Cliffs rise for hundreds of feet with out-jutting buttresses that almost bar the passage. Huge rocks, long ago precipitated into the water, have been worn “into forms like towers, castles, and rows of bridge-piers, with the swift current eddying around them.”
Near Cisco advantage is taken of a particularly narrow strait to cross the river upon a huge cantilever bridge, the farther end of which rests in a tunnel. The scenery here is savage, but the air is soft and the sky clearest blue. As we proceed, the cañon rapidly becomes narrower, deeper, and more terrific; the river, a series of whirlpools among knife-edged rocks. The railway pierces projecting headlands in short tunnels, springs across side-chasms, and is supported along sharp acclivities by abutments of natural rock or careful masonry. Finally the constantly heightening wall on the opposite side culminates in the crag of Jackass Mountain, which rises 2,000 feet in a well-nigh perpendicular mass—a second Cape Eternity. Nearly 1,000 feet above the boiling torrent, and often overhanging it, the wagon-road built years ago to connect the Fraser River gold mines with the coast creeps about its brow; and the little party of Indians trotting along this airy pathway look like pygmies or gnomes who have come out of some stony crevice to see us pass. Yet four-horse stages were driven here for many a year, and before the road was built men traveled afoot over the trail which preceded it, passing places like these on swinging pole-bridges, something like the foot-ropes under a ship’s yard-arm. Thrilling stories of that trail and road in the fierce old mining days of ’58 and ’64 are recorded in books and told by the “mossbacks” one meets up and down the coast. But since the building of the railway the wagon-road is little traveled, though the Cariboo district northward, and other districts south of the line, still yield gold and silver bountifully under systematic mining.
ON THE BROAD WATERS OF THE FRASER.
As we roll steadily onward through long shadows projected across the gulf by the rising sun the cañon alternately expands and contracts, but never loses its grandeur. The queer little figures of Chinese gold-washers dot the gravel-bars here and there (we can’t help wondering how they got down there!), and on almost every convenient rock near the river’s edge are perched Indians with large dip-nets, industriously scooping in an eddy after loitering salmon. Their rude bivouacs are scattered about the rocks; and their fish-drying frames, festooned with the red flakes of salmon-flesh, among which the curing smoke curls as lazily as Siwash smoke might be expected to do, add the last touch of artistic color to the picture.
TYPES OF WESTERN STEAMBOATS.