Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

When he returned on Monday, September 8th, the Prince was looking undeniably fit. He marched up the railway from the lake in footer-shorts and golf jacket, with an air of one who had thoroughly enjoyed "roughing it."

II

While the Prince and his party were camping, the train remained in Nipigon, a tiny village set in complete isolation on the edge of the river and in the heart of the woods.

It is a little germ-culture of humanity cut off from the world. The only way out is, apparently, the railway, though, perhaps, one could get away by the boats that come up to load pulp wood, or by the petrol launches that scurry out on to Lake Superior and its waterside towns. But the roads out of it, there appear to be none. Follow any track, and it fades away gently into the primitive bush.

It is a nest of loneliness that has carried on after its old office as a big fur collecting post—you see the original offices of Revillon Frères and the Hudson Bay Company standing today—has gone. Now it lives on lumber and the fishing, and one wonders what else.

Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream, where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.

There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization. Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent, with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their ancient race.

Small though it is, or perhaps because it is so small and observable, Nipigon is an example of the amalgam from which the Canadian race is being fused. We went, for instance, to a dance given by the Finns in their varnished, brown-wood hall on the Saturday night. It was an attractive and interesting evening. The whole of the village, without distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor with the local dressmaker's assistant.

In any case, it didn't matter. In Canada they don't think about that sort of thing. They were all unconcerned and happy in the big, generous spirit of equality that makes Canada the home of one big family rather than the dwelling-place of different classes and social grades. This fact was not new to us; naturally, we had seen and mixed with Canadians in hotels and on the street elsewhere. In those gathering-places of humanity, the hotels, we had lived with the big, jolly, homely crowds without social strata, who might very well have changed places with the waiters and the waiters with them without anybody noticing any difference. That would not have meant a loss of dignity to anybody. Nobody has any use for social status in the Dominion, the only standard being whether a man is a "mixer" or not.

By way of a footnote, I might say that waiters, even as waiters, are on the way to take seats as guests, since, apparently, waiting is only an occupation a man takes up until he finds something worth while. Not unexpectedly Canadian waiting suffers through this.