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LARGER IMAGE
SCENERY OF THE FRASER CAÑON.
But a painter will be attracted constantly by the form and color of the bronze-brown chaotic rocks, the tawny, foam-laced river, the gaunt, desperately rooted trees, and the brilliant azure of the sky. And everywhere he will find handy a foreground-bit of “life”—gold-diggers, mule-trains, Chinese red-labeled cabins, Siwash “wickiups” and barbarically adorned graves, or some trim railway structure—to lighten the composition with a sympathetic human touch.
At North Bend we get breakfast in a charming hotel, and then go on again, past the important old town of Boston Bar (now abandoned to the Indians) and over the bridge above Skuzzy Falls, which come sliding down fern-strewn rocks in cataracts of lambent emerald. Gradually the cañon walls grow high again, and encroach more and more upon the channels. The railway passes from tunnel to bridge and bridge to tunnel in quick succession, always curving and costly. It is one long gallery of wonders. Ponderous masses of rock, fallen from the cliffs and long ago polished like black glass, obstruct the current, which roars through narrow flumes between them and hurls showers of spray far up their sides. This is the Black Cañon of old settlers; and an idea of its tortuous narrowness may be got from the fact that in freshets the choked-up water will rise a hundred feet above the ordinary level.
At the foot of this cañon is Yale, an old trading post and frontier town, ensconced in sombre mountains. As the head of navigation on the lower Fraser, it was once the leading town of the Province, and still has some 12,000 inhabitants. A few miles farther on is another similar village, Fort Hope, which is at the limit of steamboating, and is charmingly placed in front of a cluster of brilliant Cascade peaks. At times the figure of a colossal anchor is marked in snow-banks upon one of these summits; whence the name of the village—for is not the anchor the emblem of hope? In these mountains rich silver lodes await development.
Gradually the cañons and cliffs are left behind, and we gather speed on a level track through woods of prodigious growth. The river becomes a broad and placid stream, “backing up” here and there into lagoons, and making prairies utilized for herds of cattle. Beautiful mountains show themselves in every direction—last and finest of all, Mount Baker, fifty miles away.
At Agassiz many passengers leave the train to visit the Harrison Hot Springs, at the foot of Harrison Lake, five miles northward. This is one of the pleasantest watering-places on the coast, and a most interesting spot for sport and amusement. Harrison Lake and its outlet into the Fraser, with other lakes and portages, formed the foremost route to the northern interior twenty-five years ago. Its waters were then alive with steamboats, and the roads with wagons and pack-horses; but now the route is quite abandoned, and its wayside habitations have fallen into decay.
At noon we scent the saline odor of the ocean, and presently come with eager curiosity to the shore of Burrard Inlet. Half an hour later we are at Vancouver, and our transcontinental trip has reached its western terminus.
Two years ago a saw-mill represented civilization, and a dense forest covered the peninsula between Coal Harbor (a widening of Burrard Inlet) and English Bay (an offshoot of the Gulf of Georgia), where now a city of 5,000 people is established. The town is crescent-shaped, rising with gentle ascent to the ridge overlooking the open gulf, the heights of Vancouver Island and the Olympic and Cascade ranges in Washington Territory. Upon this high ground a group of residences has already arisen, whose windows command a wonderfully beautiful view of water and mountains.