In British Columbia great stress is laid on the proper “smoking” of fish and delicious indeed is the flavour attained by the Western process. A range of characteristic atmosphere follows in the long trail of “smoked” salmon and herring. Scotch lassies have come out from fishing-towns of Old Scotland to give the proper “Scotch Cure” to the Pacific bloater in the curing houses at Vancouver. It is a far cry from these girls, and the big plant, with its chill-rooms for freezing the halibut, the latter with its own private car to Boston, to the old Indian woman, who has her little “smokehouse” on the shingle at Alert Bay and trusses up her salmon on splints in the shadow of the wet piles of some old boat-landing.
These are sea-pictures and pictures of ’longshore life. British Columbia in its valleys is a land of farms. It raises its own famous apples around its lakes, as Nova Scotia brings Bellefleurs and other beauties to perfection, round the Bay of Fundy. Okanagan, Arrowhead, Kootenay, all have their ranches with their acres of meadow, bench-lands and climbing fields. And here, on these Ranches beside the Lake, backed by mountains from whose peaks the snow never melts, are perched the homes of the ranchers.
Each of these homes presents its own epic, each family tracing it to the chosen spot from somewhere in Eastern Canada—Nova Scotia, Quebec or Ontario—or coming here to this Alpine region of the Dominion from somewhere over-seas, the British Islands, France, and indeed, all other countries of Old Europe, even reaching a finger into Asia at India and Japan. Truly the human-interest element of British Columbia is as big as its outlook.
Each little homestead and ranch stands for a family uprooted from old associations, whether Eastern Canadian, British or Foreign, transplanted here to the West, on the edge of things; but now—within the past ten years—coming to a consciousness of itself as no longer on the edge of wilderness and remoteness, separated from its fellows of the East by the great barrier of the Mountains, but a part of the beautiful curve of the World-circumference of the British Empire. Each little log-cabin in its forest or surroundings of stump-land (and the big trees of British Columbia make an endless number of big stumps) is a stake in the land. Practically it represents the bombardment of the black and unfriendly wilderness with a home and a family—the best ammunition in the world for the pioneer.
There is a long list of miniature cities and little towns, with a hotel, a bank, a couple of grocery shops, a butcher, a drug-store with week-old newspapers from Winnipeg or Calgary, yesterday’s Vancouver Sheets and the Newspaper from the nearest Over-the-Border large city; all these business places with large single-pane show-windows, in utter contrast to the little old-fashioned shop-windows of the small towns and villages of rural Quebec. The arrival and departure of trains once or twice a day is a thing as personal as the letter which comes into the hand of the butcher, the banker, the druggist, from that same adventuring train that kicks the level dust of the Prairie miles behind it, with the ease of a thoroughbred, and climbs the gorges, the canyons and the steeps of the passes, and enters the black mysteries of the long tunnels as nonchalantly as a cowboy, hand on hip, sits astride his pony.
These little towns may be rather dull, with a society only partly stirred into life by an occasional Movie, but there is always more than appears on the surface, since, behind them somewhere out there in the miles, threaded up sometimes by mere trails, are the little homes of the ranchers converting the soil to agriculture, “making land”—a curious phrase—where every ranch is a stage of dramatic action, and every little simple act of everyday life takes on heroic proportions from the very closeness of success or disaster constantly stalking the adventure on which the rancher has staked his all.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE DOUKHOBORS: A COMMUNITY RACE IN CANADA.
IN A COMMUNITY DOOR YARD.