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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On Canada's Frontier
+       Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the
+       Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of
+       Western Canada
+
+Author: Julian Ralph
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2011 [EBook #35208]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON CANADA'S FRONTIER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marcia Brooks, Ross Cooling and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
+http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from
+images generously made available by The Internet
+Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  ON CANADA'S FRONTIER
+
+  Sketches
+
+  OF HISTORY, SPORT, AND ADVENTURE AND OF THE INDIANS, MISSIONARIES
+  FUR-TRADERS, AND NEWER SETTLERS OF WESTERN CANADA
+
+  BY
+
+  JULIAN RALPH
+
+  ILLUSTRATED
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
+
+  1892
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers.
+
+  _All rights reserved_.
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+
+  THE PEOPLE OF CANADA
+
+  THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR WHO, DURING MANY LONG
+  JOURNEYS IN THE CANADIAN WEST WAS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE TREATED WITH AN
+  EXTREME FRIENDLINESS TO WHICH HE HERE TESTIFIES BUT WHICH HE CANNOT
+  EASILY RETURN IN EQUAL MEASURE
+
+
+
+
+  PREFACE
+
+
+If all those into whose hands this book may fall were as well informed
+upon the Dominion of Canada as are the people of the United States,
+there would not be needed a word of explanation of the title of this
+volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer that what is here related
+applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is necessary to explain that
+the work deals solely with scenes and phases of life in the newer, and
+mainly the western, parts of that country. The great English colony
+which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of history has for its
+capitals such proud and notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto,
+Halifax, and many others, to distinguish the progressive civilization of
+the region east of Lake Huron--the older provinces. But the Canada of
+the geographies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United
+States; it is, in fact, the "British America" of old. A great
+trans-Canadian railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific
+slope to the provinces of old Canada with stitches of steel across the
+Plains. There the same mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own
+West is elbowing the fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and is
+laying out farms far north, in the smiling Peace River district, where
+it was only a little while ago supposed that there were but two seasons,
+winter and late spring. It is with that new part of Canada, between the
+ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy new cities of the
+Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some references to the North are
+added in those chapters that treat of hunting and fishing and
+fur-trading.
+
+The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of
+papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during the
+past three years. The first one to be published was that which describes
+a settler's colony in which a few titled foreigners took the lead; the
+others were written so recently that they should possess the same
+interest and value as if they here first met the public eye. What that
+interest and value amount to is for the reader to judge, the author's
+position being such that he may only call attention to the fact that he
+had access to private papers and documents when he prepared the sketches
+of the Hudson Bay Company, and that, in pursuing information about the
+great province of British Columbia, he was not able to learn that a
+serious and extended study of its resources had ever been made. The
+principal studies and sketches were prepared for and published in
+Harper's Magazine. The spirit in which they were written was solely that
+of one who loves the open air and his fellow-men of every condition and
+color, and who has had the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada
+something of the old and almost departed life of the plainsmen and
+woodsmen, and of the newer forces of nation-building on our continent.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+                            PAGE
+
+   I. Titled Pioneers          1
+
+  II. Chartering a Nation     11
+
+ III. A Famous Missionary     53
+
+  IV. Antoine's Moose-yard    66
+
+   V. Big Fishing            115
+
+  VI. "A Skin for a Skin"    134
+
+ VII. "Talking Musquash"     190
+
+VIII. Canada's El Dorado     214
+
+  IX. Dan Dunn's Outfit      290
+
+
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                            PAGE
+
+  _The Romantic Adventure of Old Sun's Wife_        Frontispiece
+
+  _Dr. Rudolph Meyer's Place on the Pipestone_                 2
+
+  _Settler's Sod Cabin_                                        3
+
+  _Whitewood, a Settlement on the Prairie_                     4
+
+  _Interior of Sod Cabin on the Frontier_                      5
+
+  _Prairie Sod Stable_                                         7
+
+  _Trained Ox Team_                                            9
+
+  _Indian Boys Running a Foot-race_                           31
+
+  _Indian Mother and Boy_                                     36
+
+  _Opening of the Soldier Clan Dance_                         39
+
+  _Sketch in the Soldier Clan Dance_                          43
+
+  _A Fantasy from the Pony War-dance_                         47
+
+  _Throwing the Snow Snake_                                   51
+
+  _Father Lacombe Heading the Indians_                        61
+
+  _The Hotel--Last Sign of Civilisation_                      69
+
+  _"Give me a light"_                                         73
+
+  _Antoine, from Life_                                        79
+
+  _The Portage Sleigh on a Lumber Road_                       83
+
+  _The Track in the Winter Forest_                            87
+
+  _Pierre from Life_                                          91
+
+  _Antoine's Cabin_                                           93
+
+  _The Camp at Night_                                         97
+
+  _A Moose Bull Fight_                                       101
+
+  _On the Moose Trail_                                       103
+
+  _In sight of the Game--"Now Shoot"_                        105
+
+  _Success_                                                  109
+
+  _Hunting the Caribou--"Shoot! Shoot!"_                     111
+
+  _Indians Hunting Nets on Lake Nipigon_                     119
+
+  _Trout-fishing Through the Ice_                            127
+
+  _Rival Traders Racing to the Indian Camp_                  137
+
+  _The Bear-trap_                                            143
+
+  _Huskie Dogs Fighting_                                     147
+
+  _Painting the Robe_                                        151
+
+  _Coureur du Bois_                                          159
+
+  _A Fur-trader in the Council Tepee_                        163
+
+  _Buffalo Meat for the Post_                                167
+
+  _The Indian Hunter of 1750_                                171
+
+  _Indian Hunter Hanging Deer Out of the Reach of Wolves_    173
+
+  _Making the Snow-shoe_                                     177
+
+  _A Hudson Bay Man (Quarter-breed)_                         181
+
+  _The Coureur du Bois and the Savage_                       185
+
+  _Talking Musquash_                                         193
+
+  _Indian Hunters Moving Camp_                               198
+
+  _Setting a Mink-trap_                                      201
+
+  _Wood Indians Come to Trade_                               205
+
+  _A Voyageur, or Canoe-man, of Great Slave Lake_            209
+
+  _In a Stiff Current_                                       211
+
+  _Voyageur with Tumpline_                                   217
+
+  _Voyageurs in Camp for the Night_                          221
+
+  _"Huskie" Dogs on the Frozen Highway_                      227
+
+  _The Factor's Fancy Toboggan_                              233
+
+  _Halt of a York Boat Brigade for the Night_                239
+
+  _An Impression of Shuswap Lake, British Columbia_          251
+
+  _The Tschummum, or Tool Used in Making Canoes_             257
+
+  _The First of the Salmon Run, Fraser River_                261
+
+  _Indian Salmon-fishing in the Thrasher_                    266
+
+  _Going to the Potlatch--Big Canoe, North-west Coast_       269
+
+  _The Salmon Cache_                                         275
+
+  _An Ideal of the Coast_                                    279
+
+  _The Potlatch_                                             283
+
+  _An Indian Canoe on the Columbia_                          293
+
+  _"You're setting your nerves to stand it"_                 297
+
+  _Jack Kirkup, the Mountain Sheriff_                        299
+
+  _Engineer on the Preliminary Survey_                       303
+
+  _Falling Monarchs_                                         308
+
+  _Dan Dunn on His Works_                                    311
+
+  _The Supply Train Over the Mountain_                       313
+
+  _A Sketch on the Work_                                     317
+
+  _The Mess Tent at Night_                                   319
+
+  _"They Gained Erectness by Slow Jolts"_                    322
+
+
+
+
+  ON CANADA'S FRONTIER
+
+
+  I
+
+  TITLED PIONEERS
+
+
+There is a very remarkable bit of this continent just north of our State
+of North Dakota, in what the Canadians call Assiniboia, one of the
+North-west Provinces. Here the plains reach away in an almost level,
+unbroken, brown ocean of grass. Here are some wonderful and some very
+peculiar phases of immigration and of human endeavor. Here is Major
+Bell's farm of nearly one hundred square miles, famous as the Bell Farm.
+Here Lady Cathcart, of England, has mercifully established a colony of
+crofters, rescued from poverty and oppression. Here Count Esterhazy has
+been experimenting with a large number of Hungarians, who form a colony
+which would do better if those foreigners were not all together, with
+only each other to imitate--and to commiserate. But, stranger than all
+these, here is a little band of distinguished Europeans, partly noble
+and partly scholarly, gathered together in as lonely a spot as can be
+found short of the Rockies or the far northern regions of this
+continent.
+
+[Illustration: DR. RUDOLPH MEYER'S PLACE ON THE PIPESTONE]
+
+These gentlemen are Dr. Rudolph Meyer, of Berlin, the Comte de Cazes and
+the Comte de Raffignac, of France, and M. Le Bidau de St. Mars, of that
+country also. They form, in all probability, the most distinguished and
+aristocratic little band of immigrants and farmers in the New World.
+
+Seventeen hundred miles west of Montreal, in a vast prairie where
+settlers every year go mad from loneliness, these polished Europeans
+till the soil, strive for prizes at the provincial fairs, fish, hunt,
+read the current literature of two continents, and are happy. The soil
+in that region is of remarkable depth and richness, and is so black that
+the roads and cattle-trails look like ink lines on brown paper. It is
+part of a vast territory of uniform appearance, in one portion of which
+are the richest wheat-lands of the continent. The Canadian Pacific
+Railway crosses Assiniboia, with stops about five miles apart--some mere
+stations and some small settlements. Here the best houses are little
+frame dwellings; but very many of the settlers live in shanties made of
+sods, with such thick walls and tight roofs, all of sod, that the awful
+winters, when the mercury falls to forty degrees below zero, are endured
+in them better than in the more costly frame dwellings.
+
+[Illustration: SETTLER'S SOD CABIN]
+
+I stopped off the cars at Whitewood, picking that four-year-old village
+out at hap-hazard as a likely point at which to see how the immigrants
+live in a brand-new country. I had no idea of the existence of any of
+the persons I found there. The most perfect hospitality is offered to
+strangers in such infant communities, and while enjoying the shelter of
+a merchant's house I obtained news of the distinguished settlers, all
+of whom live away from the railroad in solitude not to be conceived by
+those who think their homes the most isolated in the older parts of the
+country. I had only time to visit Dr. Rudolph Meyer, five miles from
+Whitewood, in the valley of the Pipestone.
+
+[Illustration: WHITEWOOD, A SETTLEMENT ON THE PRAIRIE]
+
+The way was across a level prairie, with here and there a bunch of young
+wolf-willows to break the monotonous scene, with tens of thousands of
+gophers sitting boldly on their haunches within reach of the wagon whip,
+with a sod house in sight in one direction at one time and a frame house
+in view at another. The talk of the driver was spiced with news of
+abundant wild-fowl, fewer deer, and marvellously numerous small
+quadrupeds, from wolves and foxes down. He talked of bachelors living
+here and there alone on that sea of grass, for all the world like men
+in small boats on the ocean; and I saw, contrariwise, a man and wife who
+blessed Heaven for an unheard-of number of children, especially prized
+because each new-comer lessened the loneliness. I heard of the long and
+dreadful winters when the snowfall is so light that horses and mules may
+always paw down to grass, though cattle stand and starve and freeze to
+death. I heard, too, of the way the snow comes in flurried squalls, in
+which men are lost within pistol-shot of their homes. In time the wagon
+came to a sort of coulee or hollow, in which some mechanics imported
+from Paris were putting up a fine cottage for the Comte de Raffignac.
+Ten paces farther, and I stood on the edge of the valley of the
+Pipestone, looking at a scene so poetic, pastoral, and beautiful that in
+the whole transcontinental journey there were few views to compare with
+it.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SOD CABIN ON THE FRONTIER]
+
+Reaching away far below the level of the prairie was a bowl-like valley,
+a mile long and half as wide, with a crystal stream lying like a ribbon
+of silver midway between its sloping walls. Another valley, longer yet,
+served as an extension to this. On the one side the high grassy walls
+were broken with frequent gullies, while on the other side was a
+park-like growth of forest trees. Meadows and fields lay between, and
+nestling against the eastern or grassy wall was the quaint,
+old-fashioned German house of the learned doctor. Its windows looked out
+on those beautiful little valleys, the property of the doctor--a little
+world far below the great prairie out of which sportive and patient Time
+had hollowed it. Externally the long, low, steep-roofed house was
+German, ancient, and picturesque in appearance. Its main floor was all
+enclosed in the sash and glass frame of a covered porch, and outside of
+the walls of glass were heavy curtains of straw, to keep out the sun in
+summer and the cold in winter. In-doors the house is as comfortable as
+any in the world. Its framework is filled with brick, and its trimmings
+are all of pine, oiled and varnished. In the heart of the house is a
+great Russian stove--a huge box of brick-work, which is filled full of
+wood to make a fire that is made fresh every day, and that heats the
+house for twenty-four hours. A well-filled wine-cellar, a well-equipped
+library, where Harper's Weekly, and _Uber Land und Mer_, _Punch_,
+_Puck_, and _Die Fliegende Blätter_ lie side by side, a kindly wife, and
+a stumbling baby, tell of a combination of domestic joys that no man is
+too rich to envy. The library is the doctor's workshop. He is now
+engaged in compiling a digest of the economic laws of nations. He is
+already well known as the author of a _History of Socialism_ (in
+Germany, the United States, Scandinavia, Russia, France, Belgium, and
+elsewhere), and also for his _History of Socialism in Germany_. He
+writes in French and German, and his works are published in Germany.
+
+[Illustration: PRAIRIE SOD STABLE]
+
+Dr. Meyer is fifty-three years old. He is a political exile, having been
+forced from Prussia for connection with an unsuccessful opposition to
+Bismarck. It is because he is a scholar seeking rest from the turmoil of
+politics that one is able to comprehend his living in this overlooked
+corner of the world. Yet when that is understood, and one knows what an
+Arcadia his little valley is, and how complete are his comforts
+within-doors, the placidity with which he smokes his pipe, drinks his
+beer, and is waited upon by servants imported from Paris, becomes less a
+matter for wonder than for congratulation. He has shared part of one
+valley with the Comte de Raffignac, who thinks there is nothing to
+compare with it on earth. The count has had his house built near the
+abruptly-broken edge of the prairie, so that he may look down upon the
+calm and beautiful valley and enjoy it, as he could not had he built in
+the valley itself. He is a youth of very old French family, who loves
+hunting and horses. He was contemplating the raising of horses for a
+business when I was there. But the count mars the romance of his
+membership in this little band by going to Paris now and then, as a
+young man would be likely to.
+
+Out-of-doors one saw what untold good it does to the present and future
+settlers to have such men among them. The hot-houses, glazed vegetable
+beds, the plots of cultivated ground, the nurseries of young trees--all
+show at what cost of money and patience the Herr Doctor is experimenting
+with every tree and flower and vegetable and cereal to discover what can
+be grown with profit in that region of rich soil and short summers, and
+what cannot. He is in communication with the seedsmen, to say nothing of
+the savants, of Europe and this country, and whatever he plants is of
+the best. Near his quaint dwelling he has a house for his gardener, a
+smithy, a tool-house, a barn, and a cheese-factory, for he makes gruyere
+cheese in great quantities. He also raises horses and cattle.
+
+The Comte de Cazes has a sheltered, favored claim a few miles to the
+northward, near the Qu' Appele River. He lives in great comfort, and is
+so successful a farmer that he carries off nearly all the prizes for the
+province, especially those given for prime vegetables. He has his wife
+and daughter and one of his sons with him, and an abundance of means,
+as, indeed, these distinguished settlers all appear to have.
+
+[Illustration: TRAINED OX TEAM]
+
+These men have that faculty, developed in all educated and thinking
+souls, which enables them to banish loneliness and entertain themselves.
+Still, though Dr. Meyer laughs at the idea of danger, it must have been
+a little disquieting to live as he does during the Riel rebellion,
+especially as an Indian reservation is close by, and wandering red men
+are seen every day upon the prairie. Indeed, the Government thought fit
+to send men of the North-west Mounted Police to visit the doctor twice a
+week as lately as a year after the close of the half-breed uprising.
+
+
+
+
+  II
+
+  CHARTERING A NATION
+
+
+How it came about that we chartered the Blackfoot nation for two days
+had better not be told in straightforward fashion. There is more that is
+interesting in going around about the subject, just as in reality we did
+go around and about the neighborhood of the Indians before we determined
+to visit them.
+
+In the first place, the most interesting Indian I ever saw--among many
+kinds and many thousands--was the late Chief Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot
+people. More like a king than a chief he looked, as he strode upon the
+plains, in a magnificent robe of white bead-work as rich as ermine, with
+a gorgeous pattern illuminating its edges, a glorious sun worked into
+the front of it, and many artistic and chromatic figures sewed in gaudy
+beads upon its back. He wore an old white chimney-pot hat, bound around
+with eagle feathers, a splendid pair of _chaperajos_, all worked with
+beads at the bottoms and fringed along the sides, and bead-worked
+moccasins, for which any lover of the Indian or collector of his
+paraphernalia would have exchanged a new Winchester rifle without a
+second's hesitation. But though Crowfoot was so royally clothed, it was
+in himself that the kingly quality was most apparent. His face was
+extraordinarily like what portraits we have of Julius Cæsar, with the
+difference that Crowfoot had the complexion of an Egyptian mummy. The
+high forehead, the great aquiline nose, the thin lips, usually closed,
+the small, round, protruding chin, the strong jawbones, and the keen
+gray eyes composed a face in which every feature was finely moulded, and
+in which the warrior, the commander, and the counsellor were strongly
+suggested. And in each of these roles he played the highest part among
+the Indians of Canada from the moment that the whites and the red men
+contested the dominion of the plains until he died, a short time ago.
+
+He was born and lived a wild Indian, and though the good fathers of the
+nearest Roman Catholic mission believe that he died a Christian, I am
+constrained to see in the reason for their thinking so only another
+proof of the consummate shrewdness of Crowfoot's life-long policy. The
+old king lay on his death-bed in his great wig-a-wam, with twenty-seven
+of his medicine-men around him, and never once did he pretend that he
+despised or doubted their magic. When it was evident that he was about
+to die, the conjurers ceased their long-continued, exhausting formula of
+howling, drumming, and all the rest, and, Indian-like, left Death to
+take his own. Then it was that one of the watchful, zealous priests,
+whose lives have indeed been like those of fathers to the wild Indians,
+slipped into the great tepee and administered the last sacrament to the
+old pagan.
+
+"Do you believe?" the priest inquired.
+
+"Yes, I believe," old Crowfoot grunted. Then he whispered, "But don't
+tell my people."
+
+Among the last words of great men, those of Saponaxitaw (his Indian
+name) may never be recorded, but to the student of the American
+aborigine they betray more that is characteristic of the habitual
+attitude of mind of the wild red man towards civilizing influences than
+any words I ever knew one to utter.
+
+As the old chief crushed the bunch-grass beneath his gaudy moccasins at
+the time I saw him, and as his lesser chiefs and headmen strode behind
+him, we who looked on knew what a great part he was bearing and had
+taken in Canada. He had been chief of the most powerful and savage tribe
+in the North, and of several allied tribes as well, from the time when
+the region west of the Mississippi was _terra incognita_ to all except a
+few fur traders and priests. His warriors ruled the Canadian wilderness,
+keeping the Ojibbeways and Crees in the forests to the east and north,
+routing the Crows, the Stonies, and the Big-Bellies whenever they
+pleased, and yielding to no tribe they met except the Sioux to the
+southward in our territory. The first white man Crowfoot ever knew
+intimately was Father Lacombe, the noble old missionary, whose fame is
+now world-wide among scholars. The peaceful priest and the warrior chief
+became fast friends, and from the day when the white men first broke
+down the border and swarmed upon the plains, until at the last they ran
+what Crowfoot called their "fire-wagons" (locomotives) through his land,
+he followed the priest's counselling in most important matters. He
+treated with the authorities, and thereafter hindered his braves from
+murder, massacre, and warfare. Better than that, during the Riel
+rebellion he more than any other man, or twenty men, kept the red man of
+the plains at peace when the French half-breeds, led by their mentally
+irresponsible disturber, rebelled against the Dominion authorities.
+
+When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he spoke, his nation listened
+in silence. He had killed as many men as any Indian warrior alive; he
+was a mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and mangled in skin,
+limb, and bone. He never would learn English or pretend to discard his
+religion. He was an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At eighty
+odd years of age there lived no red-skin who dared answer him back when
+he spoke his mind. But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist.
+Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and because a grand old
+priest was his truest friend, he gave orders that his body should be
+buried in a coffin, Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in
+the summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a high hill, and
+knew that his bones were guarded night and day by watchers from among
+his people. Two or three days before he died his best horse was
+slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. "That was wrong," he
+said; "there was no sense in doing that; and besides, the horse was
+worth good money." But he was always at least as far as that in advance
+of his people, and it was natural that not only his horse, but his gun
+and blankets, his rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the
+happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried with him.
+
+There are different ways of judging which is the best Indian, but from
+the stand-point of him who would examine that distinct product of
+nature, the Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian Blackfeet
+are among if not quite the best. They are almost as primitive and
+natural as any, nearly the most prosperous, physically very fine, the
+most free from white men's vices. They are the most reasonable in their
+attitude towards the whites of any who hold to the true Indian
+philosophy. The sum of that philosophy is that civilization gets men a
+great many comforts, but bundles them up with so many rules and
+responsibilities and so much hard work that, after all, the wild Indian
+has the greatest amount of pleasure and the least share of care that men
+can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of the red-skins who
+considers them as children, governed mainly by emotion, and acting upon
+undisciplined impulse; and I know of no more hearty, natural children
+than the careless, improvident, impulsive boys and girls of from five to
+eighty years of age whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three
+Bulls, his brother.
+
+The Blackfeet of Canada number about two thousand men, women, and
+children. They dwell upon a reserve of nearly five hundred square miles
+of plains land, watered by the beautiful Bow River, and almost within
+sight of the Rocky Mountains. It is in the province of Alberta, north of
+our Montana. There were three thousand and more of these Indians when
+the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across their hunting-ground,
+seven or eight years ago, but they are losing numbers at the rate of
+two hundred and fifty a year, roughly speaking. Their neighbors, the
+tribes called the Bloods and the Piegans, are of the same nation. The
+Sarcis, once a great tribe, became weakened by disease and war, and many
+years ago begged to be taken into the confederation. These tribes all
+have separate reserves near to one another, but all have heretofore
+acknowledged each Blackfoot chief as their supreme ruler. Their old men
+can remember when they used to roam as far south as Utah, and be gone
+twelve months on the war-path and on their foraging excursions for
+horses. They chased the Crees as far north as the Crees would run, and
+that was close to the arctic circle. They lived in their war-paint and
+by the chase. Now they are caged. They live unnaturally and die as
+unnaturally, precisely like other wild animals shut up in our parks.
+Within their park each gets a pound of meat with half a pound of flour
+every day. Not much comes to them besides, except now and then a little
+game, tobacco, and new blankets. They are so poorly lodged and so
+scantily fed that they are not fit to confront a Canadian winter, and
+lung troubles prey among them.
+
+It is a harsh way to put it (but it is true of our own government also)
+to say that one who has looked the subject over is apt to decide that
+the policy of the Canadian Government has been to make treaties with the
+dangerous tribes, and to let the peaceful ones starve. The latter do not
+need to starve in Canada, fortunately; they trust to the Hudson Bay
+Company for food and care, and not in vain. Having treated with the
+wilder Indians, the rest of the policy is to send the brightest of their
+boys to trade-schools, and to try to induce the men to till the soil.
+Those who do so are then treated more generously than the others. I have
+my own ideas with which to meet those who find nothing admirable in any
+except a dead Indian, and with which to discuss the treatment and policy
+the live Indian endures, but this is not the place for the discussion.
+Suffice it that it is not to be denied that between one hundred and
+fifty and two hundred Blackfeet are learning to maintain several plots
+of farming land planted with oats and potatoes. This they are doing with
+success, and with the further result of setting a good example to the
+rest. But most of the bucks are either sullenly or stupidly clinging to
+the shadow and the memory of the life that is gone.
+
+It was a recollection of that life which they portrayed for us. And they
+did so with a fervor, an abundance of detail and memento, and with a
+splendor few men have seen equalled in recent years--or ever may hope to
+witness again.
+
+We left the cars at Gleichen, a little border town which depends almost
+wholly upon the Blackfeet and their visitors for its maintenance. It has
+two stores--one where the Indians get credit and high prices (and at
+which the red men deal), and one at which they may buy at low rates for
+cash, wherefore they seldom go there. It has two hotels and a half-dozen
+railway men's dwellings, and, finally, it boasts a tiny little station
+or barracks of the North-west Mounted Police, wherein the lower of the
+two rooms is fitted with a desk, and hung with pistols, guns,
+handcuffs, and cartridge belts, while the upper room contains the cots
+for the men at night.
+
+We went to the store that the Indians favor--just such a store as you
+see at any cross-roads you drive past in a summer's outing in the
+country--and there were half a dozen Indians beautifying the door-way
+and the interior, like magnified majolica-ware in a crockery-shop. They
+were standing or sitting about with thoughtful expressions, as Indians
+always do when they go shopping; for your true Indian generates such a
+contemplative mood when he is about to spend a quarter that one would
+fancy he must be the most prudent and deliberate of men, instead of what
+he really is--the greatest prodigal alive except the negro. These bucks
+might easily have been mistaken for waxworks. Unnaturally erect, with
+arms folded beneath their blankets, they stood or sat without moving a
+limb or muscle. Only when a new-comer entered did they stir. Then they
+turned their heads deliberately and looked at the visitor fixedly, as
+eagles look at you from out their cages. They were strapping fine
+fellows, each bundled up in a colored blanket, flapping cloth leg-gear,
+and yellow moccasins. Each had the front locks of his hair tied in an
+upright bunch, like a natural plume, and several wore little brass
+rings, like baby finger-rings, around certain side locks down beside
+their ears.
+
+There they stood, motionless and speechless, waiting until the impulse
+should move them to buy what they wanted, with the same deliberation
+with which they had waited for the original impulse which sent them to
+the store. If Mr. Frenchman, who kept the store, had come from behind
+his counter, English fashion, and had said: "Come, come; what d'you
+want? Speak up now, and be quick about it. No lounging here. Buy or get
+out." If he had said that, or anything like it, those Indians would have
+stalked out of his place, not to enter it again for a very long time, if
+ever. Bartering is a serious and complex performance to an Indian, and
+you might as well try to hurry an elephant up a gang-plank as try to
+quicken an Indian's procedure in trading.
+
+We purchased of the Frenchman a chest of tea, a great bag of lump sugar,
+and a small case of plug tobacco for gifts to the chief. Then we hired a
+buck-board wagon, and made ready for the journey to the reserve.
+
+The road to the reserve lay several miles over the plains, and commanded
+a view of rolling grass land, like a brown sea whose waves were
+petrified, with here and there a group of sickly wind-blown trees to
+break the resemblance. The road was a mere wagon track and horse-trail
+through the grass, but it was criss-crossed with the once deep ruts that
+had been worn by countless herds of buffalo seeking water.
+
+Presently, as we journeyed, a little line of sand-hills came into view.
+They formed the Blackfoot cemetery. We saw the "tepees of the dead" here
+and there on the knolls, some new and perfect, some old and
+weather-stained, some showing mere tatters of cotton flapping on the
+poles, and still others only skeleton tents, the poles remaining and the
+cotton covering gone completely. We knew what we would see if we looked
+into those "dead tepees" (being careful to approach from the windward
+side). We would see, lying on the ground or raised upon a framework, a
+bundle that would be narrow at top and bottom, and broad in the
+middle--an Indian's body rolled up in a sheet of cotton, with his best
+bead-work and blanket and gun in the bundle, and near by a kettle and
+some dried meat and corn-meal against his feeling hungry on his long
+journey to the hereafter. As one or two of the tepees were new, we
+expected to see some family in mourning; and, sure enough, when we
+reached the great sheer-sided gutter which the Bow River has dug for its
+course through the plains, we halted our horse and looked down upon a
+lonely trio of tepees, with children playing around them and women
+squatted by the entrances. Three families had lost members, and were
+sequestered there in abject surrender to grief.
+
+Those tents of the mourners were at our feet as we rode southward, down
+in the river gully, where the grass was green and the trees were leafy
+and thriving; but when we turned our faces to the eastward, where the
+river bent around a great promontory, what a sight met our gaze! There
+stood a city of tepees, hundreds of them, showing white and yellow and
+brown and red against the clear blue sky. A silent and lifeless city it
+seemed, for we were too far off to see the people or to hear their
+noises. The great huddle of little pyramids rose abruptly from the level
+bare grass against the flawless sky, not like one of those melancholy
+new treeless towns that white men are building all over the prairie, but
+rather like a mosquito fleet becalmed at sea. There are two camps on
+the Blackfoot Reserve, the North Camp and the South Camp, and this town
+of tents was between the two, and was composed of more households than
+both together; for this was the assembling for the sun-dance, their
+greatest religious festival, and hither had come Bloods, Piegans, and
+Sarcis as well as Blackfeet. Only the mourners kept away; for here were
+to be echoed the greatest ceremonials of that dead past, wherein lives
+dedicated to war and to the chase inspired the deeds of valor which each
+would now celebrate anew in speech or song. This was to be the
+anniversary of the festival at which the young men fastened themselves
+by a strip of flesh in their chests to a sort of Maypole rope, and tore
+their flesh apart to demonstrate their fitness to be considered braves.
+At this feast husbands had the right to confess their women, and to cut
+their noses off if they had been untrue, and if they yet preferred life
+to the death they richly merited. At this gala-time sacrifices of
+fingers were made by brave men to the sun. Then every warrior boasted of
+his prowess, and the young beaus feasted their eyes on gayly-clad
+maidens the while they calculated for what number of horses they could
+be purchased of their parents. And at each recurrence of this wonderful
+holiday-time every night was spent in feasting, gorging, and gambling.
+In short, it was the great event of the Indian year, and so it remains.
+Even now you may see the young braves undergo the torture; and if you
+may not see the faithless wives disciplined, you may at least perceive a
+score who have been, as well as hear the mighty boasting, and witness
+the dancing, gaming, and carousing.
+
+We turned our backs towards the tented field, for we had not yet
+introduced ourselves to Mr. Magnus Begg, the Indian agent in charge of
+the reserve. We were soon within his official enclosure, where a pretty
+frame house, an office no bigger than a freight car, and a roomy barn
+and stable were all overtopped by a central flag-staff, and shaded by
+flourishing trees. Mr. Begg was at home, and, with his accomplished
+wife, welcomed us in such a hearty manner as one could hardly have
+expected, even where white folks were so "mighty unsartin" to appear as
+they are on the plains. The agent's house without is like any pretty
+village home in the East; and within, the only distinctive features are
+a number of ornamental mounted wild-beast's heads and a room whose walls
+are lined about with rare and beautiful Blackfoot curios in skin and
+stone and bead-work. But, to our joy, we found seated in that room the
+famous chief Old Sun. He is the husband of the most remarkable Indian
+squaw in America, and he would have been Crowfoot's successor were it
+not that he was eighty-seven years of age when the Blackfoot Cæsar died.
+As chief of the North Blackfeet, Old Sun boasts the largest personal
+following on the Canadian plains, having earned his popularity by his
+fighting record, his commanding manner, his eloquence, and by that
+generosity which leads him to give away his rations and his presents. No
+man north of Mexico can dress more gorgeously than he upon occasion, for
+he still owns a buckskin outfit beaded to the value of a Worth gown.
+Moreover, he owns a red coat, such as the Government used to give only
+to great chiefs. The old fellow had lost his vigor when we saw him, and
+as he sat wrapped in his blanket he looked like a half-emptied meal bag
+flung on a chair. He despises English, but in that marvellous Volapük of
+the plains called the sign language he told us that his teeth were gone,
+his hearing was bad, his eyes were weak, and his flesh was spare. He
+told his age also, and much else besides, and there is no one who reads
+this but could have readily understood his every statement and
+sentiment, conveyed solely by means of his hands and fingers. I noticed
+that he looked like an old woman, and it is a fact that old Indian men
+frequently look so. Yet no one ever saw a young brave whose face
+suggested a woman's, though their beardless countenances and long hair
+might easily create that appearance.
+
+Mr. Remington was anxious to paint Old Sun and his squaw, particularly
+the latter, and he easily obtained permission, although when the time
+for the mysterious ordeal arrived next day the old chief was greatly
+troubled in his superstitious old brain lest some mischief would befall
+him through the medium of the painting. To the Indian mind the sun,
+which they worship, has magical, even devilish, powers, and Old Sun
+developed a fear that the orb of day might "work on his picture" and
+cause him to die. Fortunately I found in Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter,
+a person who had undergone the process without dire consequences, was
+willing to undergo it again, and who added that his father and mother
+had submitted to the operation, and yet had lived to a yellow old age.
+When Old Sun brought his wife to sit for her portrait I put all
+etiquette to shame in staring at her, as you will all the more readily
+believe when you know something of her history.
+
+Old Sun's wife sits in the council of her nation--the only woman, white,
+red, or black, of whom I have ever heard who enjoys such a prerogative
+on this continent. She earned her peculiar privileges, if any one ever
+earned anything. Forty or more years ago she was a Piegan maiden known
+only in her tribe, and there for nothing more than her good origin, her
+comeliness, and her consequent value in horses. She met with outrageous
+fortune, but she turned it to such good account that she was speedily
+ennobled. She was at home in a little camp on the plains one day, and
+had wandered away from the tents, when she was kidnapped. It was in this
+wise: other camps were scattered near there. On the night before the day
+of her adventure a band of Crows stole a number of horses from a camp of
+the Gros Ventres, and very artfully trailed their plunder towards and
+close to the Piegan camp before they turned and made their way to their
+own lodges. When the Gros Ventres discovered their loss, and followed
+the trail that seemed to lead to the Piegan camp, the girl and her
+father, an aged chief, were at a distance from their tepees, unarmed and
+unsuspecting. Down swooped the Gros Ventres. They killed and scalped the
+old man, and then their chief swung the young girl upon his horse behind
+him, and binding her to him with thongs of buckskin, clashed off
+triumphantly for his own village. That has happened to many another
+Indian maiden, most of whom have behaved as would a plaster image,
+saving a few days of weeping. Not such was Old Sun's wife. When she and
+her captor were in sight of the Gros Ventre village, she reached forward
+and stole the chief's scalping-knife out of its sheath at his side. With
+it, still wet with her father's blood, she cut him in the back through
+to the heart. Then she freed his body from hers, and tossed him from the
+horse's back. Leaping to the ground beside his body, she not only
+scalped him, but cut off his right arm and picked up his gun, and rode
+madly back to her people, chased most of the way, but bringing safely
+with her the three greatest trophies a warrior can wrest from a
+vanquished enemy. Two of them would have distinguished any brave, but
+this mere village maiden came with all three. From that day she has
+boasted the right to wear three eagle feathers.
+
+Old Sun was a young man then, and when he heard of this feat he came and
+hitched the requisite number of horses to her mother's travois poles
+beside her tent. I do not recall how many steeds she was valued at, but
+I have heard of very high-priced Indian girls who had nothing except
+their feminine qualities to recommend them. In one case I knew that a
+young man, who had been casting what are called "sheep's eyes" at a
+maiden, went one day and tied four horses to her father's tent. Then he
+stood around and waited, but there was no sign from the tent. Next day
+he took four more, and so he went on until he had tied sixteen horses to
+the tepee. At the least they were worth $20, perhaps $30, apiece. At
+that the maiden and her people came out, and received the young man so
+graciously that he knew he was "the young woman's choice," as we say in
+civilized circles, sometimes under very similar circumstances.
+
+At all events, Old Sun was rich and powerful, and easily got the savage
+heroine for his wife. She was admitted to the Blackfoot council without
+a protest, and has since proven that her valor was not sporadic, for she
+has taken the war-path upon occasion, and other scalps have gone to her
+credit.
+
+After a while we drove over to where the field lay littered with tepees.
+There seemed to be no order in the arrangement of the tents as we looked
+at the scene from a distance. Gradually the symptoms of a great stir and
+activity were observable, and we saw men and horses running about at one
+side of the nomad settlement, as well as hundreds of human figures
+moving in the camp. Then a nearer view brought out the fact that the
+tepees, which were of many sizes, were apt to be white at the base,
+reddish half-way up, and dark brown at the top. The smoke of the fires
+within, and the rain and sun without, paint all the cotton or canvas
+tepees like that, and very pretty is the effect. When closer still, we
+saw that each tepee was capped with a rude crown formed of pole
+ends--the ends of the ribs of each structure; that some of the tents
+were gayly ornamented with great geometric patterns in red, black, and
+yellow around the bottoms; and that others bore upon their sides rude
+but highly colored figures of animals--the clan sign of the family
+within. Against very many of the frail dwellings leaned a travois, the
+triangle of poles which forms the wagon of the Indians. There were three
+or four very large tents, the headquarters of the chiefs of the soldier
+bands and of the head chief of the nation; and there was one spotless
+new tent, with a pretty border painted around its base, and the figure
+of an animal on either side. It was the new establishment of a bride and
+groom. A hubbub filled the air as we drew still nearer; not any noise
+occasioned by our approach, but the ordinary uproar of the camp--the
+barking of dogs, the shouts of frolicking children, the yells of young
+men racing on horseback and of others driving in their ponies. When we
+drove between the first two tents we saw that the camp had been
+systematically arranged in the form of a rude circle, with the tents in
+bunches around a great central space, as large as Madison Square if its
+corners were rounded off.
+
+We were ushered into the presence of Three Bulls, in the biggest of all
+the tents. By common consent he was presiding as chief and successor to
+Crowfoot, pending the formal election, which was to take place at the
+feast of the sun-dance. European royalty could scarcely have managed to
+invest itself with more dignity or access to its presence with more
+formality than hedged about this blanketed king. He had assembled his
+chiefs and headmen to greet us, for we possessed the eminence of persons
+bearing gifts. He was in mourning for Crowfoot, who was his brother, and
+for a daughter besides, and the form of expression he gave to his grief
+caused him to wear nothing but a flannel shirt and a breech-cloth, in
+which he sat with his big brown legs bare and crossed beneath him. He is
+a powerful man, with an uncommonly large head, and his facial features,
+all generously moulded, indicate amiability, liberality, and
+considerable intelligence. Of middle age, smooth-skinned, and plump,
+there was little of the savage in his looks beyond what came of his long
+black hair. It was purposely wore unkempt and hanging in his eyes, and
+two locks of it were bound with many brass rings. When we came upon him
+our gifts had already been received and distributed, mainly to three or
+four relatives. But though the others sat about portionless, all were
+alike stolid and statuesque, and whatever feelings agitated their
+breasts, whether of satisfaction or disappointment, were equally hidden
+by all.
+
+When we entered the big tepee we saw twenty-one men seated in a circle
+against the wall and facing the open centre, where the ground was
+blackened by the ashes of former fires. Three Bulls sat exactly opposite
+the queer door, a horseshoe-shaped hole reaching two feet above the
+ground, and extended by the partly loosened lacing that held the edges
+of the tent-covering together. Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter, made a
+long speech in introducing each of us. We stood in the middle of the
+ring, and the chief punctuated the interpreter's remarks with that queer
+Indian grunt which it has ever been the custom to spell "ugh," but which
+you may imitate exactly if you will try to say "Ha" through your nose
+while your mouth is closed. As Mr. L'Hereux is a great talker, and is of
+a poetic nature, there is no telling what wild fancy of his active brain
+he invented concerning us, but he made a friendly talk, and that was
+what we wanted. As each speech closed, Three Bulls lurched forward just
+enough to make the putting out of his hand a gracious act, yet not
+enough to disturb his dignity. After each salutation he pointed out a
+seat for the one with whom he had shaken hands. He announced to the
+council in their language that we were good men, whereat the council
+uttered a single "Ha" through its twenty-one noses. If you had seen the
+rigid stateliness of Three Bulls, and had felt the frigid
+self-possession of the twenty-one ramrod-mannered under-chiefs, as well
+as the deference which was in the tones of the other white men in our
+company, you would comprehend that we were made to feel at once honored
+and subordinate. Altogether we made an odd picture: a circle of men
+seated tailor fashion, and my own and Mr. Remington's black shoes
+marring the gaudy ring of yellow moccasins in front of the savages, as
+they sat in their colored blankets and fringed and befeathered gear,
+each with the calf of one leg crossed before the shin of the other.
+
+But L'Hereux's next act after introducing us was one that seemed to
+indicate perfect indifference to the feelings of this august body. No
+one but he, who had spent a quarter of a century with them in closest
+intimacy, could have acted as he proceeded to do. He cast his eyes on
+the ground, and saw the mounds of sugar, tobacco, and tea heaped before
+only a certain few Indians. "Now who has done dose t'ing?" he inquired.
+"Oh, dat vill nevaire do 'tall. You haf done dose t'ing, Mistaire Begg?
+No? Who den? Chief? Nevaire mind. I make him all rount again, vaire
+deeferent. You shall see somet'ing." With that, and yet without ceasing
+to talk for an instant, now in Indian and now in his English, he began
+to dump the tea back again into the chest, the sugar into the bag, and
+the plug tobacco in a heap by itself. Not an Indian moved a
+muscle--unless I was right in my suspicion that the corners of Three
+Bulls' mouth curved upward slightly, as if he were about to smile. "Vot
+kind of wa-a-y to do-o somet'ing is dat?" the interpreter continued, in
+his sing-song tone. "You moos' haf one maje-dome [major-domo] if you
+shall try satisfy dose Engine." He always called the Indians "dose
+Engine." "Dat chief gif all dose present to his broders und cousins,
+which are in his famille. Now you shall see me, vot I shall do." Taking
+his hat, he began filling it, now with sugar and now with tea, and
+emptying it before some six or seven chiefs. Finally, when a double
+share was left, he gave both bag and chest to Three Bulls, to whom he
+also gave all the tobacco. "Such tam-fool peezness," he went on, "I do
+not see in all my life. I make visitation to de t'ree soljier chief
+vhich shall make one grand darnce for dose gentlemen, und here is for
+dose soljier chief not anyt'ing 'tall, vhile everyt'ing was going to one
+lot of beggaire relation of T'ree Bull. Dat is what I call one tam-fool
+way to do some'ting."
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN BOYS RUNNING A FOOT-RACE]
+
+The redistribution accomplished, Three Bulls wore a grin of
+satisfaction, and one chief who had lost a great pile of presents, and
+who got nothing at all by the second division, stalked solemnly out of
+the tent, through not until Three Bulls had tossed the plugs of tobacco
+to all the men around the circle, precisely as he might have thrown
+bones to dogs, but always observing a certain order in making each round
+with the plugs. All were thus served according to their rank. Then Three
+Bulls rummaged with one hand behind him in the grass, and fetched
+forward a great pipe with a stone bowl and wooden handle--a sort of
+chopping-block of wood--and a large long-bladed knife. Taking a plug of
+tobacco in one hand and the knife in the other, he pared off enough
+tobacco to fill the pipe. Then he filled it, and passed it, stem
+foremost, to a young man on the left-hand side of the tepee. The
+superior chiefs all sat on the right-hand side. The young man knew that
+he had been chosen to perform the menial act of lighting the pipe, and
+he lighted it, pulling two or three whiffs of smoke to insure a good
+coal of fire in it before passing it back--though why it was not
+considered a more menial task to cut the tobacco and fill the pipe than
+to light it I don't know.
+
+Three Bulls puffed the pipe for a moment, and then turning the stem from
+him, pointed it at the chief next in importance, and to that personage
+the symbol of peace was passed from hand to hand. When that chief had
+drawn a few whiffs, he sent the pipe back to Three Bulls, who then
+indicated to whom it should go next. Thus it went dodging about the
+circle like a marble on a bagatelle board. When it came to me, I
+hesitated a moment whether or not to smoke it, but the desire to be
+polite outweighed any other prompting, and I sucked the pipe until some
+of the Indians cried out that I was "a good fellow."
+
+While all smoked and many talked, I noticed that Three Bulls sat upon a
+soft seat formed of his blanket, at one end of which was one of those
+wickerwork contrivances, like a chair back, upon which Indians lean when
+seated upon the ground. I noticed also that one harsh criticism passed
+upon Three Bulls was just; that was that when he spoke, others might
+interrupt him. It was said that even women "talked back" to him at times
+when he was haranguing his people. Since no one spoke when Crowfoot
+talked, the comparison between him and his predecessor was injurious to
+him; but it was Crowfoot who named Three Bulls for the chieftainship.
+Besides, Three Bulls had the largest following (under that of the too
+aged Old Sun), and was the most generous chief and ablest politician of
+all. Then, again, the Government supported him with whatever its
+influence amounted to. This was because Three Bulls favored agricultural
+employment for the tribe, and was himself cultivating a patch of
+potatoes. He was in many other ways the man to lead in the new era, as
+Crowfoot had been for the era that was past.
+
+When we retired from the presence of the chief, I asked Mr. L'Hereux how
+he had dared to take back the presents made to the Indians and then
+distribute them differently. The queer Frenchman said, in his
+indescribably confident, jaunty way:
+
+"Why, dat is how you mus' do wid dose Engine. Nevaire ask one of dose
+Engine anyt'ing, but do dose t'ing which are right, and at de same time
+make explanashion what you are doing. Den dose Engine can say no t'ing
+'tall. But if you first make explanashion and den try to do somet'ng,
+you will find one grand trouble. Can you explain dis and dat to one hive
+of de bees? Well, de hive of de bee is like dose Engine if you shall
+talk widout de promp' action."
+
+He said, later on, "Dose Engine are children, and mus' not haf
+consideration like mans and women."
+
+The news of our generosity ran from tent to tent, and the Black Soldier
+band sent out a herald to cry the news that a war-dance was to be held
+immediately. As immediately means to the Indian mind an indefinite and
+very enduring period, I amused myself by poking about the village, in
+tents and among groups of men or women, wherever chance led me. The
+herald rode from side to side of the enclosure, yelling like a New York
+fruit peddler. He was mounted on a bay pony, and was fantastically
+costumed with feathers and war-paint. Of course every man, woman, and
+child who had been in-doors, so to speak, now came out of the tepees,
+and a mighty bustle enlivened the scene. The worst thing about the camp
+was the abundance of snarling cur-dogs. It was not safe to walk about
+the camp without a cane or whip, on account of these dogs.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN MOTHER AND BOY]
+
+The Blackfeet are poor enough, in all conscience, from nearly every
+stand-point from which we judge civilized Communities, but their tribal
+possessions include several horses to each head of a family; and though
+the majority of their ponies would fetch no more than $20 apiece out
+there, even this gives them more wealth per capita than many civilized
+peoples can boast. They have managed, also, to keep much of the savage
+paraphernalia of other days in the form of buckskin clothes, elaborate
+bead-work, eagle headdresses, good guns, and the outlandish adornments
+of their chiefs and medicine-men. Hundreds of miles from any except such
+small and distant towns as Calgary and Medicine Hat, and kept on the
+reserve as much as possible, there has come to them less damage by
+whiskey and white men's vices than perhaps most other tribes have
+suffered. Therefore it was still possible for me to see in some tents
+the squaws at work painting the clan signs on stretched skins, and
+making bead-work for moccasins, pouches, "chaps," and the rest. And in
+one tepee I found a young and rather pretty girl wearing a suit of
+buckskin, such as Cooper and all the past historians of the Indian knew
+as the conventional every-day attire of the red-skin. I say I saw the
+girl in a tent, but, as a matter of fact, she passed me out-of-doors,
+and with true feminine art managed to allow her blanket to fall open for
+just the instant it took to disclose the precious dress beneath it. I
+asked to be taken into the tent to which she went, and there, at the
+interpreter's request, she threw off her blanket, and stood, with a
+little display of honest coyness, dressed like the traditional and the
+theatrical belle of the wilderness. The soft yellowish leather, the
+heavy fringe upon the arms, seams, and edges of the garment, her
+beautiful beaded leggings and moccasins, formed so many parts of a very
+charming picture. For herself, her face was comely, but her figure
+was--an Indian's. The figure of the typical Indian woman shows few
+graceful curves.
+
+The reader will inquire whether there was any real beauty, as we judge
+it, among these Indians. Yes, there was; at least there were good looks
+if there was not beauty. I saw perhaps a dozen fine-looking men, half a
+dozen attractive girls, and something like a hundred children of varying
+degrees of comeliness--pleasing, pretty, or beautiful. I had some jolly
+romps with the children, and so came to know that their faces and arms
+met my touch with the smoothness and softness of the flesh of our own
+little ones at home. I was surprised at this; indeed, the skin of the
+boys was of the texture of velvet. The madcap urchins, what riotous fun
+they were having! They flung arrows and darts, ran races and wrestled,
+and in some of their play they fairly swarmed all over one another,
+until at times one lad would be buried in the thick of a writhing mass
+of legs and arms several feet in depth. Some of the boys wore only
+"G-strings" (as, for some reason, the breech-clout is commonly called on
+the prairie), but others were wrapped in old blankets, and the larger
+ones were already wearing the Blackfoot plume-lock, or tuft of hair tied
+and trained to stand erect above the forehead. The babies within the
+tepees were clad only in their complexions.
+
+The result of an hour of waiting on our part and of yelling on the part
+of the herald resulted in a war-dance not very different in itself from
+the dances we have most of us seen at Wild West shows. An immense tomtom
+as big as the largest-sized bass-drum was set up between four poles,
+around which colored cloths were wrapped, and from the tops of which the
+same gay stuff floated on the wind in bunches of party-colored ribbons.
+Around this squatted four young braves, who pounded the drum-head and
+chanted a tune, which rose and fell between the shrillest and the
+deepest notes, but which consisted of simple monosyllabic sounds
+repeated thousands of times. The interpreter said that originally the
+Indians had words to their songs, but these were forgotten no man knows
+when, and only the so-called tunes (and the tradition that there once
+were words for them) are perpetuated. At all events, the four braves
+beat the drum and chanted, until presently a young warrior, hideous with
+war-paint, and carrying a shield and a tomahawk, came out of a tepee and
+began the dancing. It was the stiff-legged hopping, first on one foot
+and then on the other, which all savages appear to deem the highest form
+the terpsichorean art can take. In the course of a few circles around
+the tomtom he began shouting of valorous deeds he never had performed,
+for he was too young to have ridden after buffalo or into battle.
+Presently he pretended to see upon the ground something at once
+fascinating and awesome. It was the trail of the enemy. Then he danced
+furiously and more limberly, tossing his head back, shaking his hatchet
+and many-tailed shield high aloft, and yelling that he was following the
+foe, and would not rest while a skull and a scalp-lock remained in
+conjunction among them. He was joined by three others, and all danced
+and yelled like madmen. At the last the leader came to a sort of
+standard made of a stick and some cloth, tore it out from where it had
+been thrust in the ground, and holding it far above his head, pranced
+once around the circle, and thus ended the dance.
+
+[Illustration: OPENING OF THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE]
+
+The novelty and interest in the celebration rested in the
+surroundings--the great circle of tepees; the braves in their blankets
+stalking hither and thither; the dogs, the horses, the intrepid riders,
+dashing across the view. More strange still was the solemn line of the
+medicine-men, who, for some reason not explained to me, sat in a row
+with their backs to the dancers a city block away, and crooned a low
+guttural accompaniment to the tomtom. But still more interesting were
+the boys, of all grades of childhood, who looked on, while not a woman
+remained in sight. The larger boys stood about in groups, watching the
+spectacle with eyes afire with admiration, but the little fellows had
+flung themselves on their stomachs in a row, and were supporting their
+chubby faces upon their little brown hands, while their elbows rested on
+the grass, forming a sort of orchestra row of Lilliputian spectators.
+
+We arranged for a great spectacle to be gotten up on the next afternoon,
+and were promised that it should be as notable for the numbers
+participating in it and for the trappings to be displayed as any the
+Blackfeet had ever given upon their reserve. The Indians spent the
+entire night in carousing over the gift of tea, and we knew that if they
+were true to most precedents they would brew and drink every drop of it.
+Possibly some took it with an admixture of tobacco and wild currant to
+make them drunk, or, in reality, very sick--which is much the same thing
+to a reservation Indian. The compounds which the average Indian will
+swallow in the hope of imitating the effects of whiskey are such as to
+tax the credulity of those who hear of them. A certain patent
+"painkiller" ranks almost as high as whiskey in their estimation; but
+Worcestershire sauce and gunpowder, or tea, tobacco, and wild currant,
+are not at all to be despised when alcohol, or the money to get it with,
+is wanting. I heard a characteristic story about these red men while I
+was visiting them. All who are familiar with them know that if medicine
+is given them to take in small portions at certain intervals they are
+morally sure to swallow it all at once, and that the sicker it makes
+them, the more they will value it. On the Blackfoot Reserve, only a
+short time ago, our gentle and insinuating Sedlitz-powders were classed
+as children's stuff, but now they have leaped to the front rank as
+powerful medicines. This is because some white man showed the Indian how
+to take the soda and magnesia first, and then swallow the tartaric acid.
+They do this, and when the explosion follows, and the gases burst from
+their mouths and noses, they pull themselves together and remark, "Ugh!
+him heap good."
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH IN THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE]
+
+On the morning of the day of the great spectacle I rode with Mr. Begg
+over to the ration-house to see the meat distributed. The dust rose in
+clouds above all the trails as the cavalcade of men, women, children,
+travoises and dogs, approached the station. Men were few in the
+disjointed lines; most of them sent their women or children. All rode
+astraddle, some on saddles and some bareback. As all urged their horses
+in the Indian fashion, which is to whip them unceasingly, and prod them
+constantly with spurless heels, the bobbing movement of the riders'
+heads and the gymnastics of their legs produced a queer scene. Here and
+there a travois was trailed along by a horse or a dog, but the majority
+of the pensioners were content to carry their meat in bags or otherwise
+upon their horses. While the slaughtering went on, and after that, when
+the beef was being chopped up into junks, I sat in the meat-contractor's
+office, and saw the bucks, squaws, and children come, one after another,
+to beg. I could not help noticing that all were treated with marked and
+uniform kindness, and I learned that no one ever struck one of the
+Indians, or suffered himself to lose his temper with them. A few of the
+men asked for blankets, but the squaws and the children wanted soap. It
+was said that when they first made their acquaintance with this symbol
+of civilization they mistook it for an article of diet, but that now
+they use it properly and prize it. When it was announced that the meat
+was ready, the butchers threw open an aperture in the wall of the
+ration-house, and the Indians huddled before it as if they had flung
+themselves against the house in a mass. I have seen boys do the same
+thing at the opening of a ticket window for the sale of gallery seats in
+a theatre. There was no fighting or quarrelling, but every Indian pushed
+steadily and silently with all his or her might. When one got his share
+he tore himself away from the crowd as briers are pulled out of hairy
+cloth. They are a hungry and an economical people. They bring pails for
+the beef blood, and they carry home the hoofs for jelly. After a steer
+has been butchered and distributed, only his horns and his paunch
+remain.
+
+The sun blazed down on the great camp that afternoon and glorified the
+place so that it looked like a miniature Switzerland of snowy peaks. But
+it was hot, and blankets were stretched from the tent tops, and the
+women sat under them to catch the air and escape the heat. The salaried
+native policeman of the reserve, wearing a white stove-pipe hat with
+feathers, and a ridiculous blue coat, and Heaven alone knows what other
+absurdities, rode around, boasting of deeds he never performed, while a
+white cur made him all the more ridiculous by chasing him and yelping at
+his horse's tail.
+
+And then came the grand spectacle. The vast plain was forgotten, and the
+great campus within the circle of tents was transformed into a theatre.
+The scene was a setting of white and red tents that threw their
+clear-cut outlines against a matchless blue sky. The audience was
+composed of four white men and the Indian boys, who were flung about by
+the startled horses they were holding for us. The players were the
+gorgeous cavalrymen of nature, circling before their women and old men
+and children, themselves plumed like unheard-of tropical birds, the
+others displaying the minor splendor of the kaleidoscope. The play was
+"The Pony War-dance, or the Departure for Battle." The acting was
+fierce; not like the conduct of a mimic battle on our stage, but
+performed with the desperate zest of men who hope for distinction in
+war, and may not trifle about it. It had the earnestness of a challenged
+man who tries the foils with a tutor. It was impressive, inspiring, at
+times wildly exciting.
+
+[Illustration: A FANTASY FROM THE PONY WAR-DANCE]
+
+There were threescore young men in the brilliant cavalcade. They rode
+horses that were as wild as themselves. Their evolutions were rude, but
+magnificent. Now they dashed past us in single file, and next they came
+helter-skelter, like cattle stampeding. For a while they rode around and
+around, as on a race-course, but at times they deserted the enclosure,
+parted into small bands, and were hidden behind the curtains of their
+own dust, presently to reappear with a mad rush, yelling like maniacs,
+firing their pieces, and brandishing their arms and their finery wildly
+on high. The orchestra was composed of seven tomtoms that had been dried
+taut before a camp fire. The old men and the chiefs sat in a semicircle
+behind the drummers on the ground.
+
+All the tribal heirlooms were in the display, the cherished gewgaws,
+trinkets, arms, apparel, and finery they had saved from the fate of
+which they will not admit they are themselves the victims. I never saw
+an old-time picture of a type of savage red man or of an extravagance of
+their costuming that was not revived in this spectacle. It was as if the
+plates in my old school-books and novels and tales of adventure were all
+animated and passing before me. The traditional Indian with the eagle
+plumes from crown to heels was there; so was he with the buffalo horns
+growing out of his skull; so were the idyllic braves in yellow
+buckskin fringed at every point. The shining bodies of men, bare naked,
+and frescoed like a Bowery bar-room, were not lacking; neither were
+those who wore masses of splendid embroidery with colored beads. But
+there were as many peculiar costumes which I never had seen pictured.
+And not any two men or any two horses were alike. As barber poles are
+covered with paint, so were many of these choice steeds of the nation.
+Some were spotted all over with daubs of white, and some with every
+color obtainable. Some were branded fifty times with the white hand, the
+symbol of peace, but others bore the red hand and the white hand in
+alternate prints. There were horses painted with the figures of horses
+and of serpents and of foxes. To some saddles were affixed colored
+blankets or cloths that fell upon the ground or lashed the air,
+according as the horse cantered or raced. One horse was hung all round
+with great soft woolly tails of some white material. Sleigh-bells were
+upon several.
+
+Only half a dozen men wore hats--mainly cowboy hats decked with
+feathers. Many carried rifles, which they used with one hand. Others
+brought out bows and arrows, lances decked with feathers or ribbons,
+poles hung with colored cloths, great shields brilliantly painted and
+fringed. Every visible inch of each warrior was painted, the naked ones
+being ringed, streaked, and striped from head to foot. I would have to
+catalogue the possessions of the whole nation to tell all that they wore
+between the brass rings in their hair and the cartridge-belts at their
+waists, and thus down to their beautiful moccasins.
+
+Two strange features further distinguished their pageant. One was the
+appearance of two negro minstrels upon one horse. Both had blackened
+their faces and hands; both wore old stove-pipe hats and queer
+long-tailed white men's coats. One wore a huge false white mustache, and
+the other carried a coal-scuttle. The women and children roared with
+laughter at the sight. The two comedians got down from their horse, and
+began to make grimaces, and to pose this way and that, very comically.
+Such a performance had never been seen on the reserve before. No one
+there could explain where the men had seen negro minstrels. The other
+unexpected feature required time for development. At first we noticed
+that two little Indian boys kept getting in the way of the riders. As we
+were not able to find any fixed place of safety from the excited
+horsemen, we marvelled that these children were permitted to risk their
+necks.
+
+Suddenly a hideously-painted naked man on horseback chased the little
+boys, leaving the cavalcade, and circling around the children. He rode
+back into the ranks, and still they loitered in the way. Then around
+swept the horsemen once more, and this time the naked rider flung
+himself from his horse, and seizing one boy and then the other, bore
+each to the ground, and made as if he would brain them with his hatchet
+and lift their scalps with his knife. The sight was one to paralyze an
+on-looker. But it was only a theatrical performance arranged for the
+occasion. The man was acting over again the proudest of his
+achievements. The boys played the parts of two white men whose scalps
+now grace his tepee and gladden his memory.
+
+[Illustration: THROWING THE SNOW SNAKE]
+
+For ninety minutes we watched the glorious riding, the splendid horses,
+the brilliant trappings, and the paroxysmal fervor of the excited
+Indians. The earth trembled beneath the dashing of the riders; the air
+palpitated with the noise of their war-cries and bells. We could have
+stood the day out, but we knew the players were tired, and yet would
+not cease till we withdrew. Therefore we came away.
+
+We had enjoyed a never-to-be-forgotten privilege. It was if we had seen
+the ghosts of a dead people ride back to parody scenes in an era that
+had vanished. It was like the rising of the curtain, in response to an
+"encore," upon a drama that has been played. It was as if the sudden
+up-flashing of a smouldering fire lighted, once again and for an
+instant, the scene it had ceased to illumine.
+
+
+
+
+  III
+
+  A FAMOUS MISSIONARY
+
+
+The former chief of the Blackfeet--Crowfoot--and Father Lacombe, the
+Roman Catholic missionary to the tribe, were the most interesting and
+among the most influential public characters in the newer part of
+Canada. They had much to do with controlling the peace of a territory
+the size of a great empire.
+
+The chief was more than eighty years old; the priest is a dozen years
+younger; and yet they represented in their experiences the two great
+epochs of life on this continent--the barbaric and the progressive. In
+the chief's boyhood the red man held undisputed sway from the Lakes to
+the Rockies. In the priest's youth he led, like a scout, beyond the
+advancing hosts from Europe. But Father Lacombe came bearing the olive
+branch of religion, and he and the barbarian became fast friends,
+intimates in a companionship as picturesque and out of the common as any
+the world could produce.
+
+There is something very strange about the relations of the French and
+the French half-breeds with the wild men of the plains. It is not
+altogether necessary that the Frenchman should be a priest, for I have
+heard of French half-breeds in our Territories who showed again and
+again that they could make their way through bands of hostiles in
+perfect safety, though knowing nothing of the language of the tribes
+there in war-paint. It is most likely that their swarthy skins and black
+hair, and their knowledge of savage ways aided them. But when not even a
+French half-breed has dared to risk his life among angry Indians, the
+French missionaries went about their duty fearlessly and unscathed.
+There was one, just after the dreadful massacre of the Little Big Horn,
+who built a cross of rough wood, painted it white, fastened it to his
+buck-board, and drove through a country in which a white man with a pale
+face and blond hair would not have lived two hours.
+
+It must be remembered that in a vast region of country the French priest
+and _voyageur_ and _coureur des bois_ were the first white men the
+Indians saw, and while the explorers and traders seldom quarrelled with
+the red men or offered violence to them, the priests never did. They
+went about like women or children, or, rather, like nothing else than
+priests. They quickly learned the tongues of the savages, treated them
+fairly, showed the sublimest courage, and acted as counsellors,
+physicians, and friends. There is at least one brave Indian fighter in
+our army who will state it as his belief that if all the white men had
+done thus we would have had but little trouble with our Indians.
+
+Father Lacombe was one of the priests who threaded the trails of the
+North-western timber land and the Far Western prairie when white men
+were very few indeed in that country, and the only settlements were
+those that had grown around the frontier forts and the still earlier
+mission chapels. For instance, in 1849, at twenty-two years of age, he
+slept a night or two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was then a
+village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the great building of the St.
+Paul _Pioneer Press_ now stands, then stood the village chapel. For two
+years he worked at his calling on either side of the American frontier,
+and then was sent to what is now Edmonton, in that magical region of
+long summers and great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River
+District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and Idaho. There the Rockies
+are broken and lowered, and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the
+region warmer than the land far to the south of it. But Father Lacombe
+went farther--400 miles north to Lake Labiche. There he found what he
+calls a fine colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the Hudson
+Bay Company--white men from England, France, and the Orkney Islands, and
+Indians and half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests were
+so infrequent that in the intervals between them the white men and
+Indian women married one another, not without formality and the sanction
+of the colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the Church.
+Father Lacombe was called upon to bless and solemnize many such matches,
+to baptize many children, and to teach and preach what scores knew but
+vaguely or not at all.
+
+In time he was sent to Calgary in the province of Alberta. It is one of
+the most bustling towns in the Dominion, and the biggest place west of
+Winnipeg. Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but
+from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, sixty
+miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with
+the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere
+post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The
+buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the
+bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed
+the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." But
+the other Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the territory
+as final, and the country thereabouts was an almost constant
+battle-ground between the Blackfoot nation of allied tribes and the
+Sioux, Crows, Flatheads, Crees, and others.
+
+The good priest--for if ever there was a good man Father Lacombe is
+one--saw fighting enough, as he roamed with one tribe and the other, or
+journeyed from tribe to tribe. His mission led him to ignore tribal
+differences, and to preach to all the Indians of the plains. He knew the
+chiefs and headmen among them all, and so justly did he deal with them
+that he was not only able to minister to all without attracting the
+enmity of any, but he came to wield, as he does to-day, a formidable
+power over all of them.
+
+He knew old Crowfoot in his prime, and as I saw them together they were
+like bosom friends. Together they had shared dreadful privation and
+survived frightful winters and storms. They had gone side by side
+through savage battles, and each respected and loved the other. I think
+I make no mistake in saying that all through his reign Crowfoot was the
+greatest Indian monarch in Canada; possibly no tribe in this country was
+stronger in numbers during the last decade or two. I have never seen a
+nobler-looking Indian or a more king-like man. He was tall and straight,
+as slim as a girl, and he had the face of an eagle or of an ancient
+Roman. He never troubled himself to learn the English language; he had
+little use for his own. His grunt or his "No" ran all through his tribe.
+He never shared his honors with a squaw. He died an old bachelor,
+saying, wittily, that no woman would take him.
+
+It must be remembered that the degradation of the Canadian Indian began
+a dozen or fifteen years later than that of our own red men. In both
+countries the railroads were indirectly the destructive agents, and
+Canada's great transcontinental line is a new institution. Until it
+belted the prairie the other day the Blackfoot Indians led very much the
+life of their fathers, hunting and trading for the whites, to be sure,
+but living like Indians, fighting like Indians, and dying like them. Now
+they don't fight, and they live and die like dogs. Amid the old
+conditions lived Crowfoot--a haughty, picturesque, grand old savage. He
+never rode or walked without his headmen in his retinue, and when he
+wished to exert his authority, his apparel was royal indeed. His coat of
+gaudy bead-work was a splendid garment, and weighed a dozen pounds. His
+leg-gear was just as fine; his moccasins would fetch fifty dollars in
+any city to-day. Doubtless he thought his hat was quite as impressive
+and king-like, but to a mere scion of effeminate civilization it looked
+remarkably like an extra tall plug hat, with no crown in the top and a
+lot of crows' plumes in the band. You may be sure his successor wears
+that same hat to-day, for the Indians revere the "state hat" of a brave
+chief, and look at it through superstitious eyes, so that those queer
+hats (older tiles than ever see the light of St. Patrick's Day) descend
+from chief to chief, and are hallowed.
+
+But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of the conquest of the
+wilderness contains no more pathetic story than that of how the kind old
+priest, Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieutenants against the
+coming of the pale-faces. He went to the reservation and assembled the
+leaders before him in council. He told them that the white men were
+building a great railroad, and in a month their workmen would be in that
+virgin country. He told the wondering red men that among these laborers
+would be found many bad men seeking to sell whiskey, offering money for
+the ruin of the squaws. Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for
+him, because he loved the Indians and doubted their strength, he assured
+them that contact with these white men would result in death, in the
+destruction of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of
+disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. The Indians smoked and
+reflected. Then they spoke through old Crowfoot:
+
+"We have listened. We will keep upon our reservation. We will not go to
+see the railroad."
+
+But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more profoundly was he
+convinced of the ruin of the tribe should the "children," as he sagely
+calls all Indians, disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve,
+and gathered the chief and the headmen, and warned them of the soulless,
+diabolical, selfish instincts of the white men. Again the grave warriors
+promised to obey him.
+
+The railroad laborers came with camps and money and liquors and numbers,
+and the prairie thundered the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And
+one morning the old priest looked out of the window of his bare bedroom
+and saw curling wisps of gray smoke ascending from a score of tepees on
+the hill beside Calgary.[1] Angry, amazed, he went to his doorway and
+opened it, and there upon the ground sat some of the headmen and the old
+men, with bowed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his
+questions! Note how wisely he chose the name of children for them, when
+I tell you that their spokesman at last answered with the excuse that
+the buffaloes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the white men
+brought money which the squaws could get. And what is the end? There are
+always tepees on the hills now beside every settlement near the
+Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary lifted his trembling
+forefinger towards the sky, when I was there, and said: "Mark me. In
+fifteen years there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the
+Canadian prairie--not one."
+
+Through all that revolutionary railroad building and the rush of new
+settlers, Father Lacombe and Crowfoot kept the Indians from war, and
+even from depredations and from murder. When the half-breeds arose under
+Riel, and every Indian looked to his rifle and his knife, and when the
+mutterings that preface the war-cry sounded in every lodge, Father
+Lacombe made Crowfoot pledge his word that the Indians should not rise.
+The priest represented the Government on these occasions. The Canadian
+statesmen recognize the value of his services. He is the great authority
+on Indian matters beyond our border; the ambassador to and spokesman for
+the Indians.
+
+But Father Lacombe is more than that. He is the deepest student of the
+Indian languages that Canada possesses. The revised edition of Bishop
+Barager's _Grammar of the Ochipwe Language_ bears these words upon its
+title-page: "Revised by the Rev. Father Lacombe, Oblate Mary Immaculate,
+1878." He is the author of the authoritative _Dictionnaire et Grammaire
+de la Langue Crise_, the dictionary of the Cree dialect published in
+1874. He has compiled just such another monument to the Blackfoot
+language, and will soon publish it, if he has not done so already. He is
+in constant correspondence with our Smithsonian Institution; he is
+famous to all who study the Indian; he is beloved or admired throughout
+Canada.
+
+[Illustration: FATHER LACOMBE HEADING THE INDIANS]
+
+His work in these lines is labor of love. He is a student by nature. He
+began the study of the Algonquin language as a youth in older Canada,
+and the tongues of many of these tribes from Labrador to Athabasca are
+but dialects of the language of the great Algonquin nation--the Algic
+family. He told me that the white man's handling of Indian words in the
+nomenclature of our cities, provinces, and States is as brutal as
+anything charged against the savages. Saskatchewan, for instance, means
+nothing. "Kissiskatchewan" is the word that was intended. It means
+"rapid current." Manitoba is senseless, but "Manitowapa" (the mysterious
+strait) would have been full of local import. However, there is no need
+to sadden ourselves with this expert knowledge. Rather let us be
+grateful for every Indian name with which we have stamped individuality
+upon the map of the world be it rightly or wrong set forth.
+
+It is strange to think of a scholar and a priest amid the scenes that
+Father Lacombe has witnessed. It was one of the most fortunate
+happenings of my life that I chanced to be in Calgary and in the little
+mission beside the chapel when Chief Crowfoot came to pay his respects
+to his old black-habited friend. Anxious to pay the chief such a
+compliment as should present the old warrior to me in the light in which
+he would be most proud to be viewed, Father Lacombe remarked that he had
+known Crowfoot when he was a young man and a mighty warrior. The old
+copper-plated Roman smiled and swelled his chest when this was
+translated. He was so pleased that the priest was led to ask him if he
+remembered one night when a certain trouble about some horses, or a
+chance duel between the Blackfoot tribe and a band of its enemies, led
+to a midnight attack. If my memory serves me, it was the Bloods (an
+allied part of the Blackfoot nation) who picked this quarrel. The chief
+grinned and grunted wonderfully as the priest spoke. The priest asked if
+he remembered how the Bloods were routed. The chief grunted even more
+emphatically. Then the priest asked if the chief recalled what a pickle
+he, the priest, was in when he found himself in the thick of the fight.
+At that old Crowfoot actually laughed.
+
+After that Father Lacombe, in a few bold sentences, drew a picture of
+the quiet, sleep-enfolded camp of the Blackfoot band, of the silence and
+the darkness. Then he told of a sudden musket-shot; then of the
+screaming of the squaws, and the barking of the dogs, and the yelling of
+the children, of the general hubbub and confusion of the startled camp.
+The cry was everywhere "The Bloods! the Bloods!" The enemy shot a
+fusillade at close quarters into the Blackfoot camp, and the priest ran
+out towards the blazing muskets, crying that they must stop, for he,
+their priest, was in the camp. He shouted his own name, for he stood
+towards the Bloods precisely as he did towards the Blackfoot nation. But
+whether the Bloods heard him or not, they did not heed him. The blaze of
+their guns grew stronger and crept nearer. The bullets whistled by. It
+grew exceedingly unpleasant to be there. It was dangerous as well.
+Father Lacombe said that he did all he could to stop the fight, but when
+it was evident that his behavior would simply result in the massacre of
+his hosts and of himself in the bargain, he altered his cries into
+military commands. "Give it to 'em!" he screamed. He urged Crowfoot's
+braves to return two shots for every one from the enemy. He took
+command, and inspired the bucks with double valor. They drove the Bloods
+out of reach and hearing.
+
+All this was translated to Crowfoot--or Saponaxitaw, for that was his
+Indian name--and he chuckled and grinned, and poked the priest in the
+side with his knuckles. And good Father Lacombe felt the magnetism of
+his own words and memory, and clapped the chief on the shoulder, while
+both laughed heartily at the climax, with the accompanying mental
+picture of the discomfited Bloods running away, and the clergyman
+ordering their instant destruction.
+
+There may not be such another meeting and rehearsal on this continent
+again. Those two men represented the passing and the dominant races of
+America; and yet, in my view, the learned and brave and kindly
+missionary is as much a part of the dead past as is the royalty that
+Crowfoot was the last to represent.
+
+[Footnote 1: Since this was written Father Lacombe's work has been
+continued at Fort McLeod in the same province as Calgary. In this
+smaller place he finds more time for his literary pursuits.]
+
+
+
+
+  IV
+
+  ANTOINE'S MOOSE-YARD
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was the night of a great dinner at the club. Whenever the door of the
+banqueting hall was opened, a burst of laughter or of applause disturbed
+the quiet talk of a few men who had gathered in the reading-room--men of
+the sort that extract the best enjoyment from a club by escaping its
+functions, or attending them only to draw to one side its choicest
+spirits for never-to-be-forgotten talks before an open fire, and over
+wine and cigars used sparingly.
+
+"I'm tired," an artist was saying--"so tired that I have a horror of my
+studio. My wife understands my condition and bids me go away and rest."
+
+"That is astonishing," said I; "for, as a rule, neither women nor men
+can comprehend the fatigue that seizes an artist or writer. At most of
+our homes there comes to be a reluctant recognition of the fact that we
+say we are tired, and that we persist in the assumption by knocking off
+work. But human fatigue is measured by the mile of walking, or the cords
+of firewood that have been cut, and the world will always hold that if
+we have not hewn wood or tramped all day, it is absurd for us to talk
+of feeling tired. We cannot alter this; we are too few."
+
+"Yes," said another of the little party. "The world shares the feeling
+of the Irishman who saw a very large, stout man at work at reporting in
+a courtroom. 'Faith!' said he, 'will ye look at the size of that man--to
+be airning his living wid a little pincil?' The world would acknowledge
+our right to feel tired if we used crow-bars to write or draw with; but
+pencils! pshaw! a hundred weigh less than a pound."
+
+"Well," said I, "all the same, I am so tired that my head feels like
+cork; so tired that for two days I have not been able to summon an idea
+or turn a sentence neatly. I have been sitting at my desk writing
+wretched stuff and tearing it up, or staring blankly out of the window."
+
+"Glorious!" said the artist, startling us all with his vehemence and
+inapt exclamation. "Why, it is providential that I came here to-night.
+If that's the way you feel, we are a pair, and you will go with me and
+rest. Do you hunt? Are you fond of it?"
+
+"I know all about it," said I, "but I have not definitely determined
+whether I am fond of it or not. I have been hunting only once. It was
+years ago, when I was a mere boy. I went after deer with a poet, an
+editor, and a railroad conductor. We journeyed to a lovely valley in
+Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, and put ourselves in the hands of a man
+seven feet high, who had a flintlock musket a foot taller than himself,
+and a wife who gave us saleratus bread and a bowl of pork fat for supper
+and breakfast. We were not there at dinner. The man stationed us a mile
+apart on what he said were the paths, or "runways," the deer would take.
+Then he went to stir the game up with his dogs. There he left us from
+sunrise till supper, or would have left us had we not with great
+difficulty found one another, and enjoyed the exquisite woodland quiet
+and light and shade together, mainly flat on our backs, with the white
+sails of the sky floating in an azure sea above the reaching fingers of
+the tree-tops. The editor marred the occasion with an unworthy suspicion
+that our hunter was at the village tavern picturing to his cronies what
+simple donkeys we were, standing a mile apart in the forsaken woods. But
+the poet said something so pregnant with philosophy that it always comes
+back to me with the mention of hunting. 'Where is your gun?' he was
+asked, when we came upon him, pacing the forest path, hands in pockets,
+and no weapon in sight. 'Oh, my gun?' he repeated. 'I don't know.
+Somewhere in among those trees. I covered it with leaves so as not to
+see it. After this, if I go hunting again, I shall not take a gun. It is
+very cold and heavy, and more or less dangerous in the bargain. You
+never use it, you know. I go hunting every few years, but I never yet
+have had to fire my gun, and I begin to see that it is only brought
+along in deference to a tradition descending from an era when men got
+something more than fresh air and scenery on a hunting trip.'"
+
+The others laughed at my story, but the artist regarded me with an
+expression of pity. He is a famous hunter--a genuine, devoted
+hunter--and one might almost as safely speak a light word of his
+relations as of his favorite mode of recreation.
+
+[Illustration: THE HOTEL--LAST SIGN OF CIVILIZATION]
+
+"Fresh air!" said he; "scenery! Humph! Your poet would not know which
+end of a gun to aim with. I see that you know nothing at all about
+hunting, but I will pay you the high compliment of saying that I can
+make a hunter of you. I have always insisted heretofore that a hunter
+must begin in boyhood; but never mind, I'll make a hunter of you at
+thirty-six. We will start to-morrow morning for Montreal, and in
+twenty-four hours you shall be in the greatest sporting region in
+America, incomparably the greatest hunting district. It is great because
+Americans do not know of it, and because it has all of British America
+to keep it supplied with game. Think of it! In twenty-four hours we
+shall be tracking moose near Hudson Bay, for Hudson Bay is not much
+farther from New York than Chicago--another fact that few persons are
+aware of."
+
+Environment is a positive force. We could feel that we were disturbing
+what the artist would call "the local tone," by rushing through the
+city's streets next morning with our guns slung upon our backs. It was
+just at the hour when the factory hands and the shop-girls were out in
+force, and the juxtaposition of those elements of society with two
+portly men bearing guns created a positive sensation. In the cars the
+artist held forth upon the terrors of the life upon which I was about to
+venture. He left upon my mind a blurred impression of sleeping
+out-of-doors like human cocoons, done up in blankets, while the savage
+mercury lurked in unknown depths below the zero mark. He said the
+camp-fire would have to be fed every two hours of each night, and he
+added, without contradiction from me, that he supposed he would have to
+perform this duty, as he was accustomed to it. Lest his forecast should
+raise my anticipation of pleasure extravagantly, he added that those
+hunters were fortunate who had fires to feed; for his part he had once
+walked around a tree stump a whole night to keep from freezing. He
+supposed that we would perform our main journeying on snow-shoes, but
+how we should enjoy that he could not say, as his knowledge of
+snow-shoeing was limited.
+
+At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who is always at a
+traveller's elbow with a fund of alarming information, cleared his
+throat as he sat opposite us, and inquired whether he had overheard that
+we did not know much about snow-shoes. An interesting fact concerning
+them, he said, was that they seemed easy to walk with at first, but if
+the learner fell down with them on it usually needed a considerable
+portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on his feet. Beginners
+only fell down, however, in attempting to cross a log or stump, but the
+forest where we were going was literally floored with such obstructions.
+The first day's effort to navigate with snow-shoes, he remarked, is
+usually accompanied by a terrible malady called _mal de raquette_, in
+which the cords of one's legs become knotted in great and excruciatingly
+painful bunches. The cure for this is to "walk it off the next day, when
+the agony is yet more intense than at first." As the stranger had
+reached his destination, he had little more than time to remark that the
+moose is an exceedingly vicious animal, invariably attacking all hunters
+who fail to kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped upon
+the car platform he let fall a simple but touching eulogy upon a dear
+friend who had recently lost his life by being literally cut in two,
+lengthwise, by a moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly
+stiffened fore-legs. The artist protested that the stranger was a
+sensationalist, unsupported by either the camp-fire gossip or the
+literature of hunters. Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled
+with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying.
+
+In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had in the United States:
+woollens thick as boards, hosiery that wards off the cold as armor
+resists missiles, gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps
+and coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and rich alike,
+blanket suits that are more picturesque than any other masculine garment
+worn north of the city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed,
+so many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little of (though many
+of us need them) that at a glance we say the Montrealers are foreigners.
+Montreal is the gayest city on this continent, and I have often thought
+that the clothing there is largely responsible for that condition.
+
+[Illustration: "GIVE ME A LIGHT"]
+
+A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid-winter finds the place
+inhospitably cold, and wonders how, as well as why, any one lives there.
+I well remember standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, with my
+teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly congealing, when my attention
+was called to the fact that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, laughing
+girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. I asked a Canadian
+lady how that could be possible, and she answered with a list of the
+principal garments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs of
+stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings over their shoes,
+with moccasins over them. They had so many woollen skirts that an
+American girl would not believe me if I gave the number. They wore heavy
+dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket suits over all this. They had
+mittens over their gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no
+longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed the cold; indeed, it
+occurred to me that their bravery amid the terrors of tobogganing was no
+bravery at all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a mass of
+woollens could scarcely expect damage if she fell from a steeple. When
+next I appeared out-of-doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel
+in a box of plash, and from that time out Montreal seemed, what it
+really is, the merriest of American capitals. And there I had come
+again, and was filling my trunk with this wonderful armor of
+civilization, while the artist sought advice as to which point to enter
+the wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most quickly.
+
+Mr. W. C. Van Horne, the President of the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
+proved a friend in need. He dictated a few telegrams that agitated the
+people of a vast section of country between Ottawa and the Great Lakes.
+And in the afternoon the answers came flying back. These were from
+various points where Hudson Bay posts are situated. At one or two the
+Indian trappers and hunters were all away on their winter expeditions;
+from another a famous white hunter had just departed with a party of
+gentlemen. At Mattawa, in Ontario, moose were close at hand and
+plentiful, and two skilled Indian hunters were just in from a trapping
+expedition; but the post factor, Mr. Rankin, was sick in bed, and the
+Indians were on a spree. To Mattawa we decided to go. It is a
+twelve-hour journey from New York to Montreal, and an eleven-hour
+journey from Montreal to the heart of this hunters' paradise; so that,
+had we known at just what point to enter the forest, we could have taken
+the trail in twenty-four hours from the metropolis, as the artist had
+predicted.
+
+Our first taste of the frontier, at Peter O'Farrall's Ottawa Hotel, in
+Mattawa, was delicious in the extreme. O'Farrall used to be game-keeper
+to the Marquis of Waterford, and thus got "a taste of the quality" that
+prompted him to assume the position he has chosen as the most lordly
+hotel-keeper in Canada. We do not know what sort of men own our great
+New York and Chicago and San Francisco hotels, but certainly they cannot
+lead more leisurely, complacent lives than Mr. O'Farrall. He has a
+bartender to look after the male visitors and the bar, and a matronly
+relative to see to the women and the kitchen, so that the landlord
+arises when he likes to enjoy each succeeding day of ease and
+prosperity. He has been known to exert himself, as when he chased a man
+who spoke slightingly of his liquor. And he was momentarily ruffled at
+the trying conduct of the artist on this hunting trip. The artist could
+not find his overcoat, and had the temerity to refer the matter to Mr.
+O'Farrall.
+
+"Sir," said the artist, "what do you suppose has become of my overcoat?
+I cannot find it anywhere."
+
+"I don't know anything about your botheration overcoat," said Mr.
+O'Farrall. "Sure, I've throuble enough kaping thrack of me own."
+
+The reader may be sure that O'Farrall's was rightly recommended to us,
+and that it is a well-managed and popular place, with good beds and
+excellent fare, and with no extra charge for the delightful addition of
+the host himself, who is very tall and dignified and humourous, and who
+is the oddest and yet most picturesque-looking public character in the
+Dominion. Such an oddity is certain to attract queer characters to his
+side, and Mr. O'Farrall is no exception to the rule. One of the
+waiter-girls in the dining-room was found never by any chance to know
+anything that she was asked about. For instance, she had never heard of
+Mr. Rankin, the chief man of the place. To every question she made
+answer, "Sure, there does be a great dale goin' on here and I know
+nothin' of it." Of her the artist ventured the theory that "she could
+not know everything on a waiter-girl's salary." John, the bartender, was
+a delightful study. No matter what a visitor laid down in the
+smoking-room, John picked it up and carried it behind the bar. Every one
+was continually losing something and searching for it, always to observe
+that John was able to produce it with a smile and the wise remark that
+he had taken the lost article and put it away "for fear some one would
+pick it up." Finally, there was Mr. O'Farrall's dog--a ragged,
+time-worn, petulant terrier, no bigger than a pint-pot. Mr. O'Farrall
+nevertheless called him "Fairy," and said he kept him "to protect the
+village children against wild bears."
+
+I shall never be able to think of Mattawa as it is--a plain little
+lumbering town on the Ottawa River, with the wreck and ruin of once
+grand scenery hemming it in on all sides in the form of ragged mountains
+literally ravaged by fire and the axe. Hints of it come back to me in
+dismembered bits that prove it to have been interesting: vignettes of
+little school-boys in blanket suits and moccasins, of great-spirited
+horses forever racing ahead of fur-laden sleighs, and of troops of
+olive-skinned French-Canadian girls, bundled up from their feet to those
+mischievous features which shot roguish glances at the artist--the
+biggest man, the people said, who had ever been seen in Mattawa. But the
+place will ever yield back to my mind the impression I got of the
+wonderful preparations that were made for our adventure--preparations
+that seemed to busy or to interest nearly every one in the village. Our
+Indians had come in from the Indian village three miles away, and had
+said they had had enough drink. Mr. John De Sousa, accountant at the
+post, took charge of them and of us, and the work of loading a great
+portage sleigh went on apace. The men of sporting tastes came out and
+lounged in front of the post, and gave helpful advice; the Indians and
+clerks went to and from the sleigh laden with bags of necessaries; the
+harness-maker made for us belts such as the lumbermen use to preclude
+the possibility of incurable strains in the rough life in the
+wilderness. The help at O'Farrall's assisted in repacking what we needed
+so that our trunks and town clothing could be stored. Mr. De Sousa sent
+messengers hither and thither for essentials not in stock at the post.
+Some women, even, were set at work to make "neaps" for us, a neap being
+a sort of slipper or unlaced shoe made of heavy blanketing and worn
+outside one's stockings to give added warmth to the feet.
+
+"You see, this is no casual rabbit-hunt," said the artist. The remark
+will live in Mattawa many a year.
+
+The Hudson Bay Company's posts differ. In the wilderness they are forts
+surrounded by stockades, but within the boundaries of civilization they
+are stores. That at Winnipeg is a splendid emporium, while that at
+Mattawa is like a village store in the United States, except that the
+top story is laden with guns, traps, snow-shoes, and the skins of wild
+beasts; while an outbuilding in the rear is the repository of scores of
+birch-bark canoes--the carriages of British America. Mr. Rankin, the
+factor there, lay in a bed of suffering and could not see us. Yet it
+seemed difficult to believe that we could be made the recipients of
+greater or more kindly attentions than were lavished upon us by his
+accountant, Mr. De Sousa. He ordered our tobacco ground for us ready for
+our pipes; selected the finest from among those extraordinary blankets
+that have been made exclusively for this company for hundreds of years;
+picked out the largest snow-shoes in his stock; bade us lay aside the
+gloves we had brought, and take mittens such as he produced, and for
+which we thanked him in our hearts many times afterwards; planned our
+outfit of food with the wisdom of an old campaigner; bethought himself
+to send for baker's bread; ordered high legs sewed on our moccasins--in
+a word, he made it possible for us to say afterwards that absolutely
+nothing had been overlooked or slighted in fitting out our expedition.
+
+[Illustration: ANTOINE, FROM LIFE]
+
+As I sat in the sleigh, tucked in under heavy skins and leaning at royal
+ease against other furs that covered a bale of hay, it seemed to me that
+I had become part of one of such pictures as we all have seen,
+portraying historic expeditions in Russia or Siberia. We carried
+fifteen hundred pounds of traps and provisions for camping, stabling,
+and food for men and beasts. We were five in all--two hunters, two
+Indians, and a teamster. We set out with the two huge mettlesome horses
+ahead, the driver on a high seat formed of a second bale of hay,
+ourselves lolling back under our furs, and the two Indians striding
+along over the resonant cold snow behind us. It was beginning to be
+evident that a great deal of effort and machinery was needed to "make a
+hunter" of a city man, and that it was going to be done thoroughly--two
+thoughts of a highly flattering nature.
+
+We were now clad for arctic weather, and perhaps nothing except a mummy
+was ever "so dressed up" as we were. We each wore two pairs of the
+heaviest woollen stockings I ever saw, and over them ribbed bicycle
+stockings that came to our knees. Over these in turn were our "neaps,"
+and then our moccasins, laced tightly around our ankles. We had on two
+suits of flannels of extra thickness, flannel shirts, reefing jackets,
+and "capeaux," as they call their long-hooded blanket coats, longer than
+snow-shoe coats. On our heads we had knitted tuques, and on our hands
+mittens and gloves. We were bound for Antoine's moose-yard, near Crooked
+Lake.
+
+The explanation of the term "moose-yard" made moose-hunting appear a
+simple operation (once we were started), for a moose-yard is the
+feeding-ground of a herd of moose, and our head Indian, Alexandre
+Antoine, knew where there was one. Each herd or family of these great
+wild cattle has two such feeding-grounds, and they are said to go
+alternately from one to the other, never herding in one place two years
+in succession. In this region of Canada they weigh between 600 and 1200
+pounds, and the reader will help his comprehension of those figures by
+recalling the fact that a 1200-pound horse is a very large one. Whether
+they desert a yard for twelve months because of the damage they do to
+the supply of food it offers to them, or whether it is instinctive
+caution that directs their movements, no one can more than conjecture.
+
+Their yards are always where soft wood is plentiful and water is near,
+and during a winter they will feed over a region from half a mile to a
+mile square. The prospect of going directly to the fixed home of a herd
+of moose almost robbed the trip of that speculative element that gives
+the greatest zest to hunting. But we knew not what the future held for
+us. Not even the artist, with all his experience, conjectured what was
+in store for us. And what was to come began coming almost immediately.
+
+The journey began upon a good highway, over which we slid along as
+comfortably as any ladies in their carriages, and with the sleigh-bells
+flinging their cheery music out over a desolate valley, with a leaden
+river at the bottom, and with small mountains rolling all about. The
+timber was cut off them, except here and there a few red or white pines
+that reared their green, brush-like tops against the general blanket of
+snow. The dull sky hung sullenly above, and now and then a raven flew
+by, croaking hoarse disapproval of our intrusion. To warn us of what we
+were to expect, Antoine had made a shy Indian joke, one of the few I
+ever heard: "In small little while," said he, "we come to all sorts of a
+road. Me call it that 'cause you get every sort riding, then you sure be
+suited."
+
+At five miles out we came to this remarkable highway. It can no more be
+adequately described here than could the experiences of a man who goes
+over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The reader must try to imagine the most
+primitive sort of a highway conceivable--one that has been made by
+merely felling trees through a forest in a path wide enough for a team
+and wagon. All the tree stumps were left in their places, and every here
+and there were rocks; some no larger than a bale of cotton, and some as
+small as a bushel basket. To add to the other alluring qualities of the
+road, there were tree trunks now and then directly across it, and, as a
+further inducement to traffic, the highway was frequently interrupted by
+"pitch holes." Some of these would be called pitch holes anywhere. They
+were at points where a rill crossed the road, or the road crossed the
+corner of a marsh. But there were other pitch holes that any intelligent
+New Yorker would call ravines or gullies. These were at points where one
+hill ran down to the water-level and another immediately rose
+precipitately, there being a watercourse between the two. In all such
+places there was deep black mud and broken ice. However, these were mere
+features of the character of this road--a character too profound for me
+to hope to portray it. When the road was not inclined either straight
+down or straight up, it coursed along the slanting side of a steep hill,
+so that a vehicle could keep to it only by falling against the forest
+at the under side and carroming along from tree to tree.
+
+[Illustration: THE PORTAGE SLEIGH ON A LUMBER ROAD]
+
+Such was the road. The manner of travelling it was quite as astounding.
+For nothing short of what Alphonse, the teamster, did would I destroy a
+man's character; but Alphonse was the next thing to an idiot. He made
+that dreadful journey at a gallop! The first time he upset the sleigh
+and threw me with one leg thigh-deep between a stone and a tree trunk,
+besides sending the artist flying over my head like a shot from a sling,
+he reseated himself and remarked: "That makes tree time I upset in dat
+place. Hi, there! Get up!" It never occurred to him to stop because a
+giant tree had fallen across the trail. "Look out! Hold tight!" he would
+call out, and then he would take the obstruction at a jump. The horses
+were mammoth beasts, in the best fettle, and the sleigh was of the
+solidest, strongest pattern. There were places where even Alphonse was
+anxious to drive with caution. Such were the ravines and unbridged
+waterways. But one of the horses had cut himself badly in such a place a
+year before, and both now made it a rule to take all such places flying.
+Fancy the result! The leap in air, and then the crash of the sled as it
+landed, the snap of the harness chains, the snorts of the winded beasts,
+the yells of the driver, the anxiety and nervousness of the passengers!
+
+At one point we had an exciting adventure of a far different sort. There
+was a moderately good stretch of road ahead, and we invited the Indians
+to jump in and ride a while. We noticed that they took occasional
+draughts from a bottle. They finished a full pint, and presently
+Alexandre produced another and larger phial. Every one knows what a
+drunken Indian is, and so did we. We ordered the sleigh stopped and all
+hands out for "a talk." Firmly, but with both power and reason on our
+side; we demanded a promise that not another drink should be taken, or
+that the horses be turned towards Mattawa at once. The promise was
+freely given.
+
+"But what is that stuff? Let me see it," one of the hunters asked.
+
+"It is de 'igh wine," said Alexandre.
+
+"High wine? Alcohol?" exclaimed the hunter, and, impulse being quicker
+than reason sometimes, flung the bottle high in air into the bush. It
+was an injudicious action, but both of us at once prepared to defend
+and re-enforce it, of course. As it happened, the Indians saw that no
+unkindness or unfairness was intended, and neither sulked nor made
+trouble afterwards.
+
+We were now deep in the bush. Occasionally we passed "a brulè," or tract
+denuded of trees, and littered with trunks and tops of trunks rejected
+by the lumbermen. But every mile took us nearer to the undisturbed
+primeval forest, where the trees shoot up forty feet before the branches
+begin. There were no houses, teams, or men. In a week in the bush we saw
+no other sign of civilization than what we brought or made. All around
+us rose the motionless regiments of the forest, with the snow beneath
+them, and their branches and twigs printing lacework on the sky. The
+signs of game were numerous, and varied to an extent that I never heard
+of before. There were few spaces of the length of twenty-five feet in
+which the track of some wild beast or bird did not cross the road. The
+Indians read this writing in the snow, so that the forest was to them as
+a book would be to us. "What is that?" "And that?" "And that?" I kept
+inquiring. The answers told more eloquently than any man can describe it
+the story of the abundance of game in that easily accessible wilderness.
+"Dat red deer," Antoine replied. "Him fox." "Dat bear track; dat
+squirrel; dat rabbit." "Dat moose track; pass las' week." "Dat
+pa'tridge; dat wolf." Or perhaps it was the trail of a marten, or a
+beaver, or a weasel, or a fisher, mink, lynx, or otter that he pointed
+out, for all these "signs" were there, and nearly all were repeated
+again and again. Of the birds that are plentiful there the principal
+kinds are partridge, woodcock, crane, geese, duck, gull, loon, and owl.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRACK IN THE WINTER FOREST]
+
+When the sun set we prepared to camp, selecting a spot near a tiny rill.
+The horses were tethered to a tree, with their harness still on, and
+blankets thrown over them. We cleared a little space by the road-side,
+using our snow-shoes for shovels. The Indians, with their axes, turned
+up the moss and leaves, and levelled the small shoots and brushwood.
+Then one went off to cut balsam boughs for bedding, while the other set
+up two crotched sticks, with a pole upon them resting in the crotches,
+and throwing the canvas of an "A" tent over the frame, he looped the
+bottom of the tent to small pegs, and banked snow lightly all around it.
+The little aromatic branches of balsam were laid evenly upon the ground,
+a fur robe was thrown upon the leaves, our enormous blankets were spread
+half open side by side, and two coats were rolled up and thrown down for
+pillows. Pierre, the second Indian, made tiny slivers of some soft wood,
+and tried to start a fire. He failed. Then Alexandre Antoine brought two
+handfuls of bark, and lighting a small piece with a match, proceeded to
+build a fire in the most painstaking manner, and with an ingenuity that
+was most interesting. First he made a fire that could have been started
+in a teacup; then he built above and around it a skeleton tent of bits
+of soft wood, six to nine inches in length. This gave him a fire of the
+dimensions of a high hat. Next, he threw down two great bits of timber,
+one on either side of the fire, and a still larger back log, and upon
+these he heaped split soft wood. While this was being done, Pierre
+assailed one great tree after another, and brought them crashing down
+with noises that startled the forest quiet. Alphonse had opened the
+provision bags, and presently two tin pails filled with water swung from
+saplings over the fire, and a pan of fat salt pork was frizzling upon
+the blazing wood. The darkness grew dead black, and the dancing flames
+peopled the near forest with dodging shadows. Almost in the time it has
+taken me to write it, we were squatting on our heels around the fire,
+each with a massive cutting of bread, a slice of fried pork in a tin
+plate, and half a pint of tea, precisely as hot as molten lead, in a tin
+cup. Supper was a necessity, not a luxury, and was hurried out of the
+way accordingly. Then the men built their camp beside ours in front of
+the fire, and followed that by felling three or more monarchs of the
+bush. Nothing surprised me so much as the amount of wood consumed in
+these open-air fires. In five days at our permanent camp we made a great
+hole in the forest.
+
+But that first night in the open air, abed with nature, with British
+America for a bedroom! Only I can tell of it, for the others slept. The
+stillness was intense. There was no wind and not an animal or bird
+uttered a cry. The logs cracked and sputtered and popped, the horses
+shook their chains, the men all snored--white and red alike. The horses
+pounded the hollow earth; the logs broke and fell upon the cinders; one
+of the men talked in his sleep. But over and through it all the
+stillness grew. Then the fire sank low, the cold became intense, the
+light was lost, and the darkness swallowed everything. Some one got up
+awkwardly, with muttering, and flung wood upon the red ashes, and
+presently all that had passed was re-experienced.
+
+The ride next day was more exciting than the first stage. It was like
+the journey of a gun-carriage across country in a hot retreat. The sled
+was actually upset only once, but to prevent that happening fifty times
+the Indians kept springing at the uppermost side of the flying vehicle,
+and hanging to the side poles to pull the toppling construction down
+upon both runners. Often we were advised to leap out for safety's sake;
+at other times we wished we had leaped out. For seven hours we were
+flung about like cotton spools that are being polished in a revolving
+cylinder. And yet we were obliged to run long distances after the
+hurtling sleigh--long enough to tire us. The artist, who had spent years
+in rude scenes among rough men, said nothing at the time. What was the
+use? But afterwards, in New York, he remarked that this was the roughest
+travelling he had ever experienced.
+
+The signs of game increased. Deer and bear and wolf and fox and moose
+were evidently numerous around us. Once we stopped, and the Indians
+became excited. What they had taken for old moose tracks were the
+week-old footprints of a man. It seems strange, but they felt obliged to
+know what a man had gone into the bush for a week ago. They followed the
+signs, and came back smiling. He had gone in to cut hemlock boughs; we
+would find traces of a camp near by. We did. In a country where men are
+so few, they busy themselves about one another. Four or five days later,
+while we were hunting, these Indians came to the road and stopped
+suddenly, as horses do when lassoed. With a glance they read that two
+teams had passed during the night, going towards our camp. When we
+returned to camp the teams had been there, and our teamster had talked
+with the drivers. Therefore that load was lifted from the minds of our
+Indians. But their knowledge of the bush was marvellous. One point in
+the woods was precisely like another to us, yet the Indians would leap
+off the sleigh now and then and dive into the forest to return with a
+trap hidden there months before, or to find a great iron kettle.
+
+[Illustration: PIERRE, FROM LIFE]
+
+"Do you never get lost?" I asked Alexandre.
+
+"Me get los'? No, no get los'."
+
+"But how do you find your way?"
+
+"Me fin' way easy. Me know way me come, or me follow my tracks, or me
+know by de sun. If no sun, me look at trees. Trees grow more branches
+on side toward sun, and got rough bark on north side. At night me know
+by see de stars."
+
+We camped in a log-hut Alexandre had built for a hunting camp. It was
+very picturesque and substantial, built of huge logs, and caulked with
+moss. It had a great earthen bank in the middle for a fireplace, with an
+equally large opening in the roof, boarded several feet high at the
+sides to form a chimney. At one corner of the fire bank was an ingenious
+crane, capable of being raised and lowered, and projecting from a
+pivoted post, so that the long arm could be swung over or away from the
+fire. At one end of the single apartment were two roomy bunks built
+against the wall. With extraordinary skill and quickness the Indians
+whittled a spade out of a board, performing the task with an axe, an
+implement they can use as white men use a penknife, an implement they
+value more highly than a gun. They made a broom of balsam boughs, and
+dug and swept the dirt off the floor and walls, speedily making the
+cabin neat and clean. Two new bunks were put up for us, and bedded with
+balsam boughs and skins. Shelves were already up, and spread with pails
+and bottles, tin cups and plates, knives and forks, canned goods, etc.
+On them and on the floor were our stores.
+
+[Illustration: ANTOINE'S CABIN]
+
+We had a week's outfit, and we needed it, because for five days we could
+not hunt on account of the crust on the snow, which made such a noise
+when a human foot broke through it that we could not have approached any
+wild animal within half a mile. On the third day it rained, but without
+melting the crust. On the fourth day it snowed furiously, burying the
+crust under two inches of snow. On the fifth day we got our moose.
+
+In the mean time the log-cabin was our home. Alexandre and Pierre cut
+down trees every day for the fire, and Pierre disappeared for hours
+every now and then to look after traps set for otter, beaver, and
+marten. Alphonse attended his horses and served as cook. He could
+produce hotter tea than any other man in the world. I took mine for a
+walk in the arctic cold three times a day, the artist learned to pour
+his from one cup to another with amazing dexterity, and the Indians (who
+drank a quart each of green tea at each meal because it was stronger
+than our black tea) lifted their pans and threw the liquid fire down
+throats that had been inured to high wines. Whenever the fire was low,
+the cold was intense. Whenever it was heaped with logs, all the heat
+flew directly through the roof, and spiral blasts of cold air were
+sucked through every crack between logs in the cabin walls. Whenever the
+door opened, the cabin filled with smoke. Smoke clung to all we ate or
+wore. At night the fire kept burning out, and we arose with chattering
+teeth to build it anew. The Indians were then to be seen with their
+blankets pushed down to their knees, asleep in their shirts and
+trousers. At meal-times we had bacon or pork, speckled or lake trout,
+bread-and-butter, stewed tomatoes, and tea. There were two stools for
+the five men, but they only complicated the discomfort of those who got
+them; for it was found that if we put our tin plates on our knees, they
+fell off; if we held them in one hand, we could not cut the pork and
+hold the bread with the other hand; while if we put the plates on the
+floor beside the tea, we could not reach them. In a month we might have
+solved the problem. Life in that log shanty was precisely the life of
+the early settlers of this country. It was bound to produce great
+characters or early death. There could be no middle course with such an
+existence.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAMP AT NIGHT]
+
+Partridge fed in the brush impudently before us. Rabbits bobbed about in
+the clearing before the door. Squirrels sat upon the logs near by and
+gormandized and chattered. Great saucy birds, like mouse-colored robins,
+and known to the Indians as "meat-birds," stole our provender if we left
+it out-of-doors half an hour, and one day we saw a red deer jump in the
+bush a hundred yards away. Yet we got no game, because we knew there was
+a moose-yard within two miles on one side and within three miles on the
+other, and we dared not shoot our rifles lest we frighten the moose.
+Moose was all we were after. There was a lake near by, and the trout in
+those lakes up there attain remarkable size and numbers. We heard of
+35-pound specked trout, of lake trout twice as large, and of enormous
+muskallonge. The most reliable persons told of lakes farther in the
+wilderness where the trout are thick as salmon in the British Columbia
+streams--so thick as to seem to fill the water. We were near a lake that
+was supposed to have been fished out by lumbermen a year before, yet it
+was no sport at all to fish there. With a short stick and two yards of
+line and a bass hook baited with pork, we brought up four-pound and
+five-pound beauties faster than we wanted them for food. Truly we were
+in a splendid hunting country, like the Adirondacks eighty years ago,
+but thousands of times as extensive.
+
+Finally we started for moose. Our Indians asked if they might take their
+guns. We gave the permission. Alexandre, a thin, wiry man of forty
+years, carried an old Henry rifle in a woollen case open at one end like
+a stocking. He wore a short blanket coat and tuque, and trousers tied
+tight below the knee, and let into his moccasin-tops. He and his brother
+François are famous Hudson Bay Company trappers, and are two-thirds
+Algonquin and one-third French. He has a typical swarthy, angular Indian
+face and a French mustache and goatee. Naturally, if not by rank, a
+leader among his men, his manner is commanding and his appearance grave.
+He talks bad French fluently, and makes wretched headway in English.
+Pierre is a short, thickset, walnut-stained man of thirty-five, almost
+pure Indian, and almost a perfect specimen of physical development. He
+seldom spoke while on this trip, but he impressed us with his strength,
+endurance, quickness, and knowledge of woodcraft. Poor fellow! he had
+only a shot-gun, which he loaded with buckshot. It had no case, and both
+men carried their pieces grasped by the barrels and shouldered with the
+butts behind them.
+
+We set out in Indian-file, plunging at once into the bush. Never was
+forest scenery more exquisitely beautiful than on that morning as the
+day broke, for we breakfasted at four o'clock, and started immediately
+afterwards. Everywhere the view was fairy-like. There was not snow
+enough for snow-shoeing. But the fresh fall of snow was immaculately
+white, and flecked the scene apparently from earth to sky, for there was
+not a branch or twig or limb or spray of evergreen, or wart or fungous
+growth upon any tree that did not bear its separate burden of snow. It
+was a bridal dress, not a winding-sheet, that Dame Nature was trying on
+that morning. And in the bright fresh green of the firs and pines we saw
+her complexion peeping out above her spotless gown, as one sees the rosy
+cheeks or black eyes of a girl wrapped in ermine.
+
+[Illustration: A MOOSE BULL FIGHT]
+
+Mile after mile we walked, up mountain and down dale, slapped in the
+faces by twigs, knocking snow down the backs of our necks, slipping
+knee-deep in bog mud, tumbling over loose stones, climbing across
+interlaced logs, dropping to the height of one thigh between tree
+trunks, sliding, falling, tight-rope walking on branches over thin ice,
+but forever following the cat-like tread of Alexandre, with his
+seven-league stride and long-winded persistence. Suddenly we came to a
+queer sort of clearing dotted with protuberances like the bubbles on
+molasses beginning to boil. It was a beaver meadow. The bumps in the
+snow covered stumps of trees the beavers had gnawed down. The Indians
+were looking at some trough like tracks in the snow, like the trail of a
+tired man who had dragged his heels. "Moose; going this way," said
+Alexandre; and we turned and walked in the tracks. Across the meadow and
+across a lake and up another mountain they led us. Then we came upon
+fresher prints. At each new track the Indians stooped, and making a
+scoop of one hand, brushed the new-fallen snow lightly out of the
+indentations. Thus they read the time at which the print was made. "Las'
+week," "Day 'fore yesterday," they whispered. Presently they bent over
+again, the light snow flew, and one whispered, "This morning."
+
+[Illustration: ON THE MOOSE TRAIL]
+
+Stealthily Alexandre swept ahead; very carefully we followed. We dared
+not break a twig, or speak, or slip, or stumble. As it was, the breaking
+of the crust was still far too audible. We followed a little stream, and
+approached a thick growth of tamarack. We had no means of knowing that a
+herd of moose was lying in that thicket, resting after feeding. We knew
+it afterwards. Alexandre motioned to us to get our guns ready. We each
+threw a cartridge from the cylinder into the barrel, making a "click,
+click" that was abominably loud. Alexandre forged ahead. In five minutes
+we heard him call aloud: "Moose gone. We los' him." We hastened to his
+side. He pointed at some tracks in which the prints were closer together
+than any we had seen.
+
+"See! he trot," Alexandre explained.
+
+In another five minutes we had all but completed a circle, and were on
+the other side of the tamarack thicket. And there were the prints of the
+bodies of the great beasts. We could see even the imprint of the hair of
+their coats. All around were broken twigs and balsam needles. The moose
+had left the branches ragged, and on every hand the young bark was
+chewed or rubbed raw. Loading our rifles had lost us a herd of moose.
+
+[Illustration: IN SIGHT OF THE GAME--"NOW SHOOT!"]
+
+Back once again at the beaver dam, Alexandre and Pierre studied the
+moose-tramped snow and talked earnestly. They agreed that a desperate
+battle had been fought there between two bull moose a week before, and
+that those bulls were not in the "yard" where we had blundered. They
+examined the tracks over an acre or more, and then strode off at an
+obtuse angle from our former trail. Pierre, apparently not quite
+satisfied, kept dropping behind or disappearing in the bush at one side
+of us. So magnificent was his skill at his work that I missed him at
+times, and at other times found him putting his feet down where mine
+were lifted up without ever hearing a sound of his step or of his
+contact with the undergrowth. Alexandre presently motioned us with a
+warning gesture. He slowed his pace to short steps, with long pauses
+between. He saw everything that moved, heard every sound; only a deer
+could throw more and keener faculties into play than this born hunter.
+He heard a twig snap. We heard nothing. Pierre was away on a side
+search. Alexandre motioned us to be ready. We crept close together, and
+I scarcely breathed. We moved cautiously, a step at a time, like
+chessmen. It was impossible to get an unobstructed view a hundred feet
+ahead, so thick was the soft-wood growth. It seemed out of the question
+to try to shoot that distance. We were descending a hill-side into
+marshy ground. We crossed a corner of a grove of young alders, and saw
+before us a gentle slope thickly grown with evergreen--tamarack, the
+artist called it. Suddenly Alexandre bent forward and raised his gun.
+Two steps forward gave us his view. Five moose were fifty yards away,
+alarmed and ready to run. A big bull in the front of the group had
+already thrown back his antlers. By impulse rather than through reason I
+took aim at a second bull. He was half a height lower down the slope,
+and to be seen through a web of thin foliage. Alexandre and the artist
+fired as with a single pull at one trigger. The foremost bull staggered
+and fell forward, as if his knees had been broken. He was hit twice--in
+the heart and in the neck. The second bull and two cows and a calf
+plunged into the bush and disappeared. Pierre found that bull a mile
+away, shot through the lungs.
+
+It had taken us a week to kill our moose in a country where they were
+common game. That was "hunter's luck" with a vengeance. But at another
+season such a delay could scarcely occur. The time to visit that
+district is in the autumn, before snow falls. Then in a week one ought
+to be able to bag a moose, and move into the region where caribou are
+plenty.
+
+Mr. Remington, in the picture called "Hunting the Caribou," depicts a
+scene at a critical moment in the experience of any man who has
+journeyed on westward of where we found our moose, to hunt the caribou.
+There is a precise moment for shooting in the chase of all animals of
+the deer kind, and when that moment has been allowed to pass, the chance
+of securing the animal diminishes with astonishing rapidity--with more
+than the rapidity with which the then startled animal is making his
+flight, because to his flight you must add the increasing ambush of the
+forest. What is true of caribou in this respect is true of moose and red
+deer, elk and musk-ox in America, and of all the horned animals of the
+forests of the other great hemisphere. Every hunter who sees Mr.
+Remington's realistic picture knows at a glance that the two men have
+stolen noiselessly to within easy rifle-shot of a caribou, and that
+suddenly, at the last moment, the animal has heard them.
+
+[Illustration: SUCCESS]
+
+Perhaps he has seen them, and is standing--still as a Barye bronze--with
+his great, soft, wondering eyes riveted upon theirs. That is a situation
+familiar to every hunter. His prey has been browsing in fancied
+security, and yet with that nervous prudence that causes these timid
+beasts to keep forever raising their heads, and sweeping the view around
+them with their exquisite sight, and analyzing the atmosphere with
+their magical sense of smell. In one of these cautious pauses the
+caribou has seen the hunters. Both hunters and hunted seem instantly to
+turn to stone. Neither moves a muscle or a hair. If the knee or the foot
+of one of the men presses too hard upon a twig and it snaps, the caribou
+is as certain to throw his head high up and dart into the ingulfing
+net-work of the forest trunks and brush as day is certain to follow
+night. But when no movement has been made and no mishap has alarmed the
+beast, it has often happened that the two or more parties to this
+strangely thrilling situation have held their places for minutes at a
+stretch--minutes that seemed like quarters of an hour. In such cases the
+deer or caribou has been known to lower his head and feed again, assured
+in its mind that the suspected hunter is inanimate and harmless. Nine
+times in ten, though, the first to move is the beast, which tosses up
+its head, and "Shoot! shoot!" is the instant command, for the upward
+throwing of the head is a movement made to put the beast's great antlers
+into position for flight through the forest.
+
+[Illustration: HUNTING THE CARIBOU--"SHOOT! SHOOT!"]
+
+The caribou has very wide, heavy horns, and they are almost always
+circular--that is, the main part or trunk of each horn curves outward
+from the skull and then inward towards the point, in an almost true
+semicircle. They are more or less branched, but both the general shape
+of the whole horns and of the branches is such that when the head is
+thrown up and back they aid the animal's flight by presenting what may
+be called the point of a wedge towards the saplings and limbs and small
+forest growths through which the beast runs, parting and spreading every
+pair of obstacles to either side, and bending every single one out of
+the way of his flying body. The caribou of North America is the reindeer
+of Greenland; the differences between the two are very slight. The
+animal's home is the arctic circle, but in America it feeds and roams
+farther south than in Europe and Asia. It is a large and clumsy-looking
+beast, with thick and rather short legs and bulky body, and, seen in
+repose, gives no hint of its capacity for flight. Yet the caribou can
+run "like a streak of wind," and makes its way through leaves and brush
+and brittle, sapless vegetation with a modicum of noise so slight as to
+seem inexplicable. Nature has ingeniously added to its armament, always
+one, and usually two, palmated spurs at the root of its horns, and
+these grow at an obtuse angle with the head, upward and outward
+towards the nose. With these spurs--like shovels used sideways--the
+caribou roots up the snow, or breaks its crust and disperses it, to get
+at his food on the ground. The caribou are very large deer, and their
+strength is attested by the weight of their horns. I have handled
+caribou horns in Canada that I could not hold out with both hands when
+seated in a chair. It seemed hard to believe that an animal of the size
+of a caribou could carry a burden apparently so disproportioned to his
+head and neck. But it is still more difficult to believe, as all the
+woodsmen say, that these horns are dropped and new ones grown every
+year.
+
+It is not the especial beauty of Frederic Remington's drawings and
+paintings that they are absolutely accurate in every detail, but it is
+one of their beauties, and gives them especial value apart from their
+artistic excellence. He draws what he knows, and he knows what he draws.
+This scene of the electrically exquisite moment in a hunter's life, when
+great game is before him, and the instant has come for claiming it as
+his own with a steadily held and wisely chosen aim, will give the reader
+a perfect knowledge of how the Indians and hunters dress and equip
+themselves beyond the Canadian border. The scene is in the wilderness
+north of the Great Lakes. The Indian is of one of those tribes that are
+offshoots of the great Algonquin nation. He carries in that load he
+bears that which the plainsmen call "the grub stake," or quota of
+provisions for himself and his employer, as well as blankets to sleep
+in, pots, pans, sugar, the inevitable tea of those latitudes, and much
+else besides. Those Indians are not as lazy or as physically degenerate
+as many of the tribes in our country. They turn themselves into
+wonderful beasts of burden, and go forever equipped with a long, broad
+strap that they call a "tomp line," and which they pass around their
+foreheads and around their packs, the latter resting high up on their
+backs. It seems incredible, but they can carry one hundred to one
+hundred and fifty pounds of necessaries all day long in the roughest
+regions. The Hudson Bay Company made their ancestors its wards and
+dependents two centuries ago, and taught them to work and to earn their
+livelihood.
+
+
+
+
+  V
+
+  BIG FISHING
+
+
+
+
+In October every year there are apt to be more fish upon the land in the
+Nepigon country than one would suppose could find life in the waters.
+Most families have laid in their full winter supply, the main exceptions
+being those semi-savage families which leave their fish out--in
+preference to laying them in--upon racks whereon they are to be seen in
+rows and by the thousands.
+
+Nepigon, the old Hudson Bay post which is the outfitting place for this
+region, is 928 miles west of Montreal, on the Canadian Pacific Railway,
+and on an arm of Lake Superior. The Nepigon River, which connects the
+greatest of lakes with Lake Nepigon, is the only roadway in all that
+country, and therefore its mouth, in an arm of the great lake, is the
+front door to that wonderful region. In travelling through British
+Columbia I found one district that is going to prove of greater interest
+to gentlemen sportsmen with the rod, but I know of no greater fishing
+country than the Nepigon. No single waterway or system of navigable
+inland waters in North America is likely to wrest the palm from this
+Nepigon district as the haunt of fish in the greatest plenty, unless we
+term the salmon a fresh-water fish, and thus call the Fraser, Columbia,
+and Skeena rivers into the rivalry. There is incessant fishing in this
+wilderness north of Lake Superior from New-year's Day, when the ice has
+to be cut to get at the water, all through the succeeding seasons, until
+again the ice fails to protect the game. And there is every sort of
+fishing between that which engages a navy of sailing vessels and men,
+down through all the methods of fish-taking--by nets, by spearing, still
+fishing, and fly-fishing. A half a dozen sorts of finny game succumb to
+these methods, and though the region has been famous and therefore much
+visited for nearly a dozen years, the field is so extensive, so well
+stocked, and so difficult of access except to persons of means, that
+even to-day almost the very largest known specimens of each class of
+fish are to be had there.
+
+If we could put on wings early in October, and could fly down from
+James's Bay over the dense forests and countless lakes and streams of
+western Ontario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunter in a
+canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small houses forming a Hudson
+Bay post, and at even greater distances apart small bunches of the
+cotton or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway bands.
+But with the first glance at the majestic expanse of Lake Superior there
+would burst upon the view scores upon scores of white sails upon the
+water, and near by, upon the shore, a tent for nearly every sail. That
+is the time for the annual gathering for catching the big, chunky,
+red-fleshed fish they call the salmon-trout. They catch those that weigh
+from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty pounds, and at this time of the
+year their flesh is comparatively hard.
+
+Engaged in making this great catch are the boats of the Indians from far
+up the Nepigon and the neighboring streams; of the chance white men of
+the region, who depend upon nature for their sustenance; and of Finns,
+Norwegians, Swedes, and others who come from the United States side, or
+southern shore, to fish for their home markets. These fish come at this
+season to spawn, seeking the reefs, which are plentiful off the shore in
+this part of the lake. Gill nets are used to catch them, and are set
+within five fathoms of the surface by setting the inner buoy in water of
+that depth, and then paying the net out into deeper water and anchoring
+it. The run and the fishing continue throughout October. As a rule,
+among the Canadians and Canada Indians a family goes with each boat--the
+boats being sloops of twenty-seven to thirty feet in length, and capable
+of carrying fifteen pork barrels, which are at the outset filled with
+rock-salt. Sometimes the heads of two families are partners in the
+ownership of one of these sloops, but, however that may be, the custom
+is for the women and children to camp in tents along-shore, while the
+men (usually two men and a boy for each boat) work the nets. It is a
+stormy season of the year, and the work is rough and hazardous,
+especially for the nets, which are frequently lost.
+
+Whenever a haul is made the fish are split down the back and cleaned.
+Then they are washed, rolled in salt, and packed in the barrels. Three
+days later, when the bodies of the fish have thoroughly purged
+themselves, they are taken out, washed again, and are once more rolled
+in fresh salt and put back in the barrels, which are then filled to the
+top with water. The Indians subsist all winter upon this October catch,
+and, in addition, manage to exchange a few barrels for other provisions
+and for clothing. They demand an equivalent of six dollars a barrel in
+whatever they get in exchange, but do not sell for money, because, as I
+understand it, they are not obliged to pay the provincial license fee as
+fishermen, and therefore may not fish for the market. Even sportsmen who
+throw a fly for one day in the Nepigon country must pay the Government
+for the privilege. The Indians told me that eight barrels of these fish
+will last a family of six persons an entire winter. Such a demonstration
+of prudence and fore-thought as this, of a month's fishing at the
+threshold of winter, amounts to is a rare one for an Indian to make, and
+I imagine there is a strong admixture of white blood in most of those
+who make it. The full-bloods will not take the trouble. They trust to
+their guns and their traps against the coming of that wolf which they
+are not unused to facing.
+
+Up along the shores of Lake Nepigon, which is thirty miles by an air
+line north of Lake Superior, many of the Indians lay up white-fish for
+winter. They catch them in nets and cure them by frost. They do not
+clean them. They simply make a hole in the tail end of each fish, and
+string them, as if they were beads, upon sticks, which they set up into
+racks. They usually hang the fishes in rows of ten, and frequently
+store up thousands while they are at it. The Reverend Mr. Renison, who
+has had much to do with bettering the condition of these Indians, told
+me that he had caught 1020 pounds of white-fish in two nights with two
+gill nets in Lake Nepigon. It is unnecessary to add that he cleaned his.
+
+[Illustration: INDIANS HAULING NETS ON LAKE NEPIGON]
+
+Lake Nepigon is about seventy miles in length, and two-thirds as wide,
+at the points of its greatest measurement, and is a picturesque body of
+water, surrounded by forests and dotted with islands. It is a famous
+haunt for trout, and those fishermen who are lucky may at times see
+scores of great beauties lying upon the bottom; or, with a good guide
+and at the right season, may be taken to places where the water is
+fairly astir with them. Fishermen who are not lucky may get their
+customary experience without travelling so far, for the route is by
+canoe, on top of nearly a thousand miles of railroading; and one mode of
+locomotion consumes nearly as much time as the other, despite the
+difference between the respective distances travelled. The speckled
+trout in the lake are locally reported to weigh from three to nine
+pounds, but the average stranger will lift in more of three pounds'
+weight than he will of nine. Yet whatever they average, the catching of
+them is prime sport as you float upon the water in your picturesque
+birch-bark canoe, with your guide paddling you noiselessly along, and
+your spoon or artificial minnow rippling through the water or glinting
+in the sunlight. You need a stout bait-rod, for the gluttonous fish are
+game, and make a good fight every time. The local fishermen catch the
+speckled beauties with an unpoetic lump of pork.
+
+A lively French Canadian whom I met on the cars on my way to Nepigon
+described that region as "de mos' tareeble place for de fish in all over
+de worl'." And he added another remark which had at least the same
+amount of truth at the bottom of it. Said he: "You weel find dere dose
+Mees Nancy feeshermans from der Unite State, which got dose
+hunderd-dollar poles and dose leetle humbug flies, vhich dey t'row
+around and pull 'em back again, like dey was afraid some feesh would
+bite it. Dat is all one grand stupeedity. Dose man vhich belong dere put
+on de hook some pork, and catch one tareeble pile of fish. Dey don't
+give a ---- about style, only to catch dose feesh."
+
+To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself on the distance he can
+cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that
+French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific
+angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while
+his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question
+"science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout
+(the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible
+that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the
+trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if
+possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of
+bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the
+Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they
+make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is
+going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal
+quantities, at the other.
+
+The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The
+natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece
+of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give
+them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle,
+leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the
+struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it
+is managed peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water,
+making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they
+lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along
+the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the
+resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that
+it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck
+the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then
+measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above
+soundings--that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and
+their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep
+jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent
+intervals.
+
+The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon jack-fish, or pike. They
+haunt the grassy places in little bogs and coves, and are caught by
+trolling. A jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the famous
+guide in that country, tells of those fish of such size that when a man
+of ordinary height held the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of
+the fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsible for the further
+assertion that he saw an Indian squaw drag a net, with meshes seven
+inches square, and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more than
+fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another local historian told of a
+surveyor who caught a big jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and
+could only be dragged until its head came to the surface, when he shot
+it and it broke away--that narrative I will leave for the next New
+Yorker who goes to Nepigon. And yet it seems to me that such stories
+distinguish a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually caught
+there. Men would not dare to romance like that at many places I have
+fished in, where the trout are scheduled and numbered, and where you
+have got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the month to catch
+one.
+
+The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack-fish. At night they use
+a bark torch, and slaughter the big fish with comparative ease; but
+their great skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when the pike
+are sunning themselves in the grass and weeds along-shore. But when I
+made my trip up the river, I saw them using so many nets as to threaten
+the early reduction of the stream to the plane of the ordinary resort.
+The water was so clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see each
+one's catch--here a half-dozen suckers, there a jack-fish, and next a
+couple of beautiful trout. Finding a squaw attending to her net, we
+bought a trout from her before we had cast a line. The habit of buying
+fish under such circumstances becomes second nature to a New Yorker. We
+are a peculiar people. Our fishermen are modest away from the city, but
+at home they assume the confident tone which comes of knowing the way to
+Fulton fish-market.
+
+The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and
+saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are
+records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may
+actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yourself
+seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the
+Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and
+from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay
+post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles--an old York
+boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that
+Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted
+them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you
+will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the
+Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness,
+capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are
+built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the
+bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are
+very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic
+Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into
+eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.
+
+There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the
+bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario
+and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the
+ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions
+were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted
+upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried
+salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to
+deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The
+open-air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of hunting or
+chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the
+camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he
+ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa
+in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At
+night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted
+ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp
+that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking
+his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I
+ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the
+artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips,
+that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's
+ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the
+same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and
+baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the _pièce de
+résistance_ at every meal. I know now--though I would not have confessed
+it at the time--that mixed with admiration of salt pork was a growing
+dread that in time, if no change offered itself, I should tire of that
+diet. I began to feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the Sea
+than a brother. The woodland atmosphere began to taste of it. When I
+came in-doors it seemed to me that the log shanty was gradually turning
+into fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it felt to eat
+quail a day for thirty days. One man cannot know everything. But I felt
+that I was learning.
+
+One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, and started out of
+the shanty door with an unwonted air of business.
+
+"Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. "Good job if get trout."
+
+A good job? Why the thought was like a floating spar to a sailor
+overboard! I went with him. It was a cold day, but I was dressed in
+Canadian style--the style of a country where every one puts on
+everything he owns: all his stockings at once, all his flannel shirts
+and drawers, all his coats on top of one another, and when there is
+nothing else left, draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of
+moccasins, a tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be able
+to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling with so many clothes on.
+They seem to separate you from yourself, and the person you feel inside
+your clothing might easily be mistaken for another individual. But you
+are warm, and that's the main thing.
+
+[Illustration: TROUT-FISHING THROUGH THE ICE]
+
+I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through the deathly
+stillness of the snow-choked forest, and presently, from a knoll and
+through an opening, we saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its
+unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with balsam, and pine and
+other evergreens, it looked as though some mighty hand had squeezed a
+colossal tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. Never had I
+seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so exquisitely pure and peaceful, so
+irresistibly beautiful. I think I should have hesitated to print my
+ham-like moccasin upon that virgin sheet had I been the guide, but
+"Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, making the powdery flakes fly before
+and behind him, and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly faded
+from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed the signs of a fox and a
+deer that had crossed during the night, so that our profanation of the
+scene was neither serious nor exclusive.
+
+The Indian walked to an island near the farther shore, and using his axe
+with the light, easy freedom that a white man sometimes attains with a
+penknife, he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six yards of
+fish-line in two in the middle of the piece, and tied one end of each
+part to one end of each stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a
+fastening would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to each
+fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little cube of pork fat which
+had gathered an envelope of granulated smoking-tobacco while at rest in
+his pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was a foot thick,
+and over these we stood, sticks in hand, with the lines dangling through
+the holes. Hardly had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened
+around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked to one side,
+and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It was a speckled trout. This
+surprised me, for I had no idea of catching anything but lake or gray
+trout in that water. I caught a gray trout next--a smaller one than the
+first--and in another minute I had landed another three-pound speckled
+beauty. My pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to
+fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork remained on those two
+hooks a week, and caught us many a mess of trout.
+
+There came a lull, which gave us time to philosophize on the contrast
+between this sort of fishing and the fashionable sport of using the most
+costly and delicate rods--like pieces of jewelry--and of calculating to
+a nicety what sort of flies to use in matching the changing weather of
+the varying tastes of trout in waters where even all these calculations
+and provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a day. Here I
+was, armed like an urchin beside a minnow brook, and catching bigger
+trout than I ever saw outside Fulton Market--trout of the choicest
+variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew impatient, and cut himself
+a new hole out over deep water. He caught a couple of two-and-a-half-pound
+brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was as well rewarded. But
+he was still discontented, and moved to a strait opening into a little
+bay, where he cut two more holes. "Eas' wind," said he, "fish no bite."
+
+I found on that occasion that no quantity of clothing will keep a man
+warm in that almost arctic climate. First my hands became cold, and then
+my feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up the fishing
+holes if the water was not constantly disturbed. The thermometer must
+have registered ten or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became
+quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice that formed upon
+them. When they coiled for an instant upon the ice at the edge of a
+hole, they stuck to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting my
+free hand in my pocket as fast as I shifted my pole from one hand to the
+other, I managed to persist in fishing. I noticed many interesting
+things as I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless
+wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not cold, though not half so
+warmly dressed as I. The circulation or vitality of those scions of
+nature must be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed to trouble
+them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found
+and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air,
+or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log
+fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did
+not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time.
+Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill,
+bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest
+quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised
+his head to listen. "Dat squirrel," he would say, when I asked him. Or,
+"Woodcock, him calling rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very
+queer, distant, muffled sound was. "You hear dat when you walk. Keep
+still, no hear dat," he said. It was the noise the ice made when I
+moved.
+
+As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log jutting out over the
+edge of the lake, and looked me over. A white weasel ran about in the
+bushes so close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut shell.
+That morning some partridge had been seen feeding in the bush close to
+members of our party. It was a country where small game is not hunted,
+and does not always hide at a man's approach. We had left our fish lying
+on the ice near the various holes from which we pulled them, and I
+thought of them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying out in
+their hoarse tones. They were sure to see the fish dotting the snow like
+raisins in a bowl of rice.
+
+"Won't they steal the fish?" I asked.
+
+"T'ink not," said the Indian.
+
+"I don't know anything about ravens," I said, "but if they are even
+distantly related to a crow, they will steal whatever they can lift."
+
+We could not see our fish around the bend of the lake, so the Indian
+dropped his rod and walked stolidly after the birds. As soon as he
+passed out of sight I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were
+unruly children.
+
+"'Way, there!" he cried--"'way! Leave dat fish, you. What you do dere,
+you t'ief?"
+
+It was an outcropping of the French blood in his veins that made it
+possible for him to do such violence to Indian reticence. The birds had
+seen our fish, and were about to seize them. Only the foolish bird
+tradition that renders it necessary for everything with wings to circle
+precisely so many times over its prey before taking it saved us our game
+and lost them their dinner. They had not completed half their quota of
+circles when Brossy began to yell at them. When he returned his brain
+had awakened, and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. He said
+that the lumbermen in that country pack their dinners in canvas sacks
+and hide them in the snow. Often the ravens come, and, searching out
+this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. I bade good-bye
+to pork three times a day after that. At least twice a day we feasted
+upon trout.
+
+
+
+
+  VI
+
+  "A SKIN FOR A SKIN"
+
+  The motto of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company
+
+
+Those who go to the newer parts of Canada to-day will find that several
+of those places which their school geographies displayed as Hudson Bay
+posts a few years ago are now towns and cities. In them they will find
+the trading stations of old now transformed into general stores.
+Alongside of the Canadian headquarters of the great corporation, where
+used to stand the walls of Fort Garry, they will see the principal store
+of the city of Winnipeg, an institution worthy of any city, and more
+nearly to be likened to Whiteley's Necessary Store in London than to any
+shopping-place in New York. As in Whiteley's you may buy a house, or
+anything belonging in or around a house, so you may in this great
+Manitoban establishment. The great retail emporium of Victoria, the
+capital of British Columbia, is the Hudson Bay store; and in Calgary,
+the metropolis of Alberta and the Canadian plains, the principal
+shopping-place in a territory beside which Texas dwindles to the
+proportions of a park is the Hudson Bay store.
+
+These and many other shops indicate a new development of the business of
+the last of England's great chartered monopolies, but instead of marking
+the manner in which civilization has forced it to abandon its original
+function, this merely demonstrates that the proprietors have taken
+advantage of new conditions while still pursuing their original trade.
+It is true that the huge corporation is becoming a great retail
+shop-keeping company. It is also true that by the surrender of its
+monopolistic privileges it got a consolation prize of money and of
+twenty millions of dollars' worth of land, so that its chief business
+may yet become that of developing and selling real estate. But to-day it
+is still, as it was two centuries ago, the greatest of fur-trading
+corporations, and fur-trading is to-day a principal source of its
+profits.
+
+Reminders of their old associations as forts still confront the visitor
+to the modern city shops of the company. The great shop in Victoria, for
+instance, which, as a fort, was the hub around which grew the wheel that
+is now the capital of the province, has its fur trade conducted in a
+sort of barn-like annex of the bazaar; but there it is, nevertheless,
+and busy among the great heaps of furs are men who can remember when the
+Hydahs and the T'linkets and the other neighboring tribes came down in
+their war canoes to trade their winter's catch of skins for guns and
+beads, vermilion, blankets, and the rest. Now this is the mere catch-all
+for the furs got at posts farther up the coast and in the interior. But
+upstairs, above the store, where the fashionable ladies are looking over
+laces and purchasing perfumes, you will see a collection of queer old
+guns of a pattern familiar to Daniel Boone. They are relics of the fur
+company's stock of those famous "trade-guns" which disappeared long
+before they had cleared the plains of buffalo, and which the Indians
+used to deck with brass nails and bright paint, and value as no man
+to-day values a watch. But close to the trade-guns of romantic memory is
+something yet more highly suggestive of the company's former position.
+This is a heap of unclaimed trunks, "left," the employés will tell you,
+"by travellers, hunters, and explorers who never came back to inquire
+for them."
+
+[Illustration: RIVAL TRADERS RACING TO THE INDIAN CAMP]
+
+It was not long ago that conditions existed such as in that region
+rendered the disappearance of a traveller more than a possibility. The
+wretched, squat, bow-legged, dirty laborers of that coast, who now dress
+as we do, and earn good wages in the salmon-fishing and canning
+industries, were not long ago very numerous, and still more villanous.
+They were not to be compared with the plains Indians as warriors or as
+men, but they were more treacherous, and wanting in high qualities. In
+the interior to-day are some Indians such as they were who are accused
+of cannibalism, and who have necessitated warlike defences at distant
+trading-posts. Travellers who escaped Indian treachery risked
+starvation, and stood their chances of losing their reckoning, of
+freezing to death, of encounters with grizzlies, of snow-slides, of
+canoe accidents in rapids, and of all the other casualties of life in a
+territory which to-day is not half explored. Those are not the trunks of
+Hudson Bay men, for such would have been sent home to English and
+Scottish mourners; they are the luggage of chance men who happened
+along, and outfitted at the old post before going farther. But the
+company's men were there before them, had penetrated the region
+farther and earlier, and there they are to-day, carrying on the fur
+trade under conditions strongly resembling those their predecessors once
+encountered at posts that are now towns in farming regions, and where
+now the locomotive and the steamer are familiar vehicles. Moreover, the
+status of the company in British Columbia is its status all the way
+across the North from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
+
+To me the most interesting and picturesque life to be found in North
+America, at least north of Mexico, is that which is occasioned by this
+principal phase of the company's operations. In and around the fur trade
+is found the most notable relic of the white man's earliest life on this
+continent. Our wild life in this country is, happily, gone. The
+frontiersman is more difficult to find than the frontier, the cowboy has
+become a laborer almost like any other, our Indians are as the animals
+in our parks, and there is little of our country that is not threaded by
+railroads or wagon-ways. But in new or western Canada this is not so. A
+vast extent of it north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which hugs our
+border, has been explored only as to its waterways, its valleys, or its
+open plains, and where it has been traversed much of it remains as
+Nature and her near of kin, the red men, had it of old. On the streams
+canoes are the vehicles of travel and of commerce; in the forests
+"trails" lead from trading-post to trading-post, the people are Indians,
+half-breeds, and Esquimaux, who live by hunting and fishing as their
+forebears did; the Hudson Bay posts are the seats of white population;
+the post factors are the magistrates.
+
+All this is changing with a rapidity which history will liken to the
+sliding of scenes before the lens of a magic-lantern. Miners are
+crushing the foot-hills on either side of the Rocky Mountains, farmers
+and cattle-men have advanced far northward on the prairie and on the
+plains in narrow lines, and railroads are pushing hither and thither.
+Soon the limits of the inhospitable zone this side of the Arctic Sea,
+and of the marshy, weakly-wooded country on either side of Hudson Bay
+will circumscribe the fur-trader's field, except in so far as there may
+remain equally permanent hunting-grounds in Labrador and in the
+mountains of British Columbia. Therefore now, when the Hudson Bay
+Company is laying the foundations of widely different interests, is the
+time for halting the old original view that stood in the stereopticon
+for centuries, that we may see what it revealed, and will still show far
+longer than it takes for us to view it.
+
+The Hudson Bay Company's agents were not the first hunters and
+fur-traders in British America, ancient as was their foundation. The
+French, from the Canadas, preceded them no one knows how many years,
+though it is said that it was as early as 1627 that Louis XIII.
+chartered a company of the same sort and for the same aims as the
+English company. Whatever came of that corporation I do not know, but by
+the time the Englishmen established themselves on Hudson Bay, individual
+Frenchmen and half-breeds had penetrated the country still farther west.
+They were of hardy, adventurous stock, and they loved the free roving
+life of the trapper and hunter. Fitted out by the merchants of Canada,
+they would pursue the waterways which there cut up the wilderness in
+every direction, their canoes laden with goods to tempt the savages, and
+their guns or traps forming part of their burden. They would be gone the
+greater part of a year, and always returned with a store of furs to be
+converted into money, which was, in turn, dissipated in the cities with
+devil-may-care jollity. These were the _coureurs du bois_, and theirs
+was the stock from which came the _voyageurs_ of the next era, and the
+half-breeds, who joined the service of the rival fur companies, and who,
+by-the-way, reddened the history of the North-west territories with the
+little bloodshed that mars it.
+
+Charles II. of England was made to believe that wonders in the way of
+discovery and trade would result from a grant of the Hudson Bay
+territory to certain friends and petitioners. An experimental voyage was
+made with good results in 1668, and in 1670 the King granted the charter
+to what he styled "the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England
+trading into Hudson's Bay, one body corporate and politique, in deed and
+in name, really and fully forever, for Us, Our heirs, and Successors."
+It was indeed a royal and a wholesale charter, for the King declared,
+"We have given, granted, and confirmed unto said Governor and Company
+sole trade and commerce of those Seas, Streights, Bays, Rivers, Lakes,
+Creeks, and Sounds, in whatsoever latitude they shall be, that lie
+within the entrance of the Streights commonly called Hudson's, together
+with all the Lands, Countries, and Territories upon the coasts and
+confines of the Seas, etc., . . . not already actually possessed by or
+granted to any of our subjects, or possessed by the subjects of any
+other Christian Prince or State, with the fishing of all sorts of Fish,
+Whales, Sturgeons, and all other Royal Fishes, . . . . together with the
+Royalty of the Sea upon the Coasts within the limits aforesaid, and all
+Mines Royal, as well discovered as not discovered, of Gold, Silver,
+Gems, and Precious Stones, . . . . and that the said lands be henceforth
+reckoned and reputed as one of Our Plantations or Colonies in America
+called Rupert's Land." For this gift of an empire the corporation was to
+pay yearly to the king, his heirs and successors, two elks and two black
+beavers whenever and as often as he, his heirs, or his successors "shall
+happen to enter into the said countries." The company was empowered to
+man ships of war, to create an armed force for security and defence, to
+make peace or war with any people that were not Christians, and to seize
+any British or other subject who traded in their territory. The King
+named his cousin, Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, to be first
+governor, and it was in his honor that the new territory got its name of
+Rupert's Land.
+
+In the company were the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lords Arlington
+and Ashley, and several knights and baronets, Sir Philip Carteret among
+them. There were also five esquires, or gentlemen, and John Portman,
+"citizen and goldsmith." They adopted the witty sentence, "_Pro pelle
+cutem_" (A skin for a skin), as their motto, and established as their
+coat of arms a fox sejant as the crest, and a shield showing four
+beavers in the quarters, and the cross of St. George, the whole upheld
+by two stags.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEAR TRAP]
+
+The "adventurers" quickly established forts on the shores of Hudson Bay,
+and began trading with the Indians, with such success that it was
+rumored they made from twenty-five to fifty per cent. profit every year.
+But they exhibited all of that timidity which capital is ever said to
+possess. They were nothing like as enterprising as the French _coureurs
+du bois_. In a hundred years they were no deeper in the country then at
+first, excepting as they extended their little system of forts or
+"factories" up and down and on either side of Hudson and James bays. In
+view of their profits, perhaps this lack of enterprise is not to be
+wondered at. On the other hand, their charter was given as a reward for
+the efforts they had made, and were to make, to find "the Northwest
+passage to the Southern seas." In this quest they made less of a trial
+than in the getting of furs; how much less we shall see. But the company
+had no lack of brave and hardy followers. At first many of the men at
+the factories were from the Orkney Islands, and those islands remained
+until recent times the recruiting-source for this service. This was
+because the Orkney men were inured to a rigorous climate, and to a diet
+largely composed of fish. They were subject to less of a change in the
+company's service than must have been endured by men from almost any
+part of England.
+
+I am going, later, to ask the reader to visit Rupert's Land when the
+company had shaken off its timidity, overcome its obstacles, and dotted
+all British America with its posts and forts. Then we shall see the
+interiors of the forts, view the strange yet not always hard or uncouth
+life of the company's factors and clerks, and glance along the trails
+and watercourses, mainly unchanged to-day, to note the work and
+surroundings of the Indians, the _voyageurs_, and the rest who inhabit
+that region. But, fortunately, I can first show, at least roughly, much
+that is interesting about the company's growth and methods a century and
+a half ago. The information is gotten from some English Parliamentary
+papers forming a report of a committee of the House of Commons in 1749.
+
+Arthur Dobbs and others petitioned Parliament to give them either the
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company or a similar charter. It seems that
+England had offered £20,000 reward to whosoever should find the
+bothersome passage to the Southern seas _viâ_ this northern route, and
+that these petitioners had sent out two ships for that purpose. They
+said that when others had done no more than this in Charles II.'s time,
+that monarch had given them "the greatest privileges as lords
+proprietors" of the Hudson Bay territory, and that those recipients of
+royal favor were bounden to attempt the discovery of the desired
+passage. Instead of this, they not only failed to search effectually or
+in earnest for the passage, but they had rather endeavored to conceal
+the same, and to obstruct the discovery thereof by others. They had not
+possessed or occupied any of the lands granted to them, or extended
+their trade, or made any plantations or settlements, or permitted other
+British subjects to plant, settle, or trade there. They had established
+only four factories and one small trading-house; yet they had connived
+at or allowed the French to encroach, settle, and trade within their
+limits, to the great detriment and loss of Great Britain. The
+petitioners argued that the Hudson Bay charter was monopolistic, and
+therefore void, and at any rate it had been forfeited "by non-user or
+abuser."
+
+In the course of the hearing upon both sides, the "voyages upon
+discovery," according to the company's own showing, were not undertaken
+until the corporation had been in existence nearly fifty years, and then
+the search had only been prosecuted during eighteen years, and with only
+ten expeditions. Two ships sent out from England never reached the bay,
+but those which succeeded, and were then ready for adventurous cruising,
+made exploratory voyages that lasted only between one month and ten
+weeks, so that, as we are accustomed to judge such expeditions, they
+seem farcical and mere pretences. Yet their largest ship was only of 190
+tons burden, and the others were a third smaller--vessels like our small
+coasting schooners. The most particular instructions to the captains
+were to trade with all natives, and persuade them to kill whales,
+sea-horses, and seals; and, subordinately and incidentally, "by God's
+permission," to find out the Strait of Annian, a fanciful sheet of
+water, with tales of which that irresponsible Greek sea-tramp, Juan de
+Fuca, had disturbed all Christendom, saying that it led between a great
+island in the Pacific (Vancouver) and the main-land into the inland
+lakes. To the factors at their forts the company sent such lukewarm
+messages as, "and if you can by any means find out any discovery or
+matter to the northward or elsewhere in the company's interest or
+advantage, do not fail to let us know every year."
+
+The attitude of the company towards discovery suggests a Dogberry at its
+head, bidding his servants to "comprehend" the North-west passage, but
+should they fail, to thank God they were rid of a villain. In truth,
+they were traders pure and simple, and were making great profits with
+little trouble and expense.
+
+[Illustration: HUSKIE DOGS FIGHTING]
+
+They brought from England about £4000 worth of powder, shot, guns,
+fire-steels, flints, gun-worms, powder-horns, pistols, hatchets, sword
+blades, awl blades, ice-chisels, files, kettles, fish-hooks, net-lines,
+burning-glasses, looking-glasses, tobacco, brandy, goggles, gloves,
+hats, lace, needles, thread, thimbles, breeches, vermilion, worsted
+sashes, blankets, flannels, red feathers, buttons, beads, and "shirts,
+shoes, and stockens." They spent, in keeping up their posts and ships,
+about £15,000, and in return they brought to England castorum,
+whale-fins, whale-oil, deer-horns, goose-quills, bed-feathers, and
+skins--in all of a value of about £26,000 per annum. I have taken the
+average for several years in that period of the company's history, and
+it is in our money as if they spent $90,000 and got back $130,000, and
+this is their own showing under such circumstances as to make it the
+course of wisdom not to boast of their profits. They had three times
+trebled their stock and otherwise increased it, so that having been
+10,500 shares at the outset, it was now 103,950 shares.
+
+And now that we have seen how natural it was that they should not then
+bother with exploration and discovery, in view of the remuneration that
+came for simply sitting in their forts and buying furs, let me pause to
+repeat what one of their wisest men said casually, between the whiffs of
+a meditative cigar, last summer: "The search for the north pole must
+soon be taken up in earnest," said he. "Man has paused in the
+undertaking because other fields where his needs were more pressing, and
+where effort was more certain to be rewarded with success, had been
+neglected. This is no longer the fact, and geographers and other
+students of the subject all agree that the north pole must next be
+sought and found. Speaking only on my own account and from my knowledge,
+I assert that whenever any government is in earnest in this desire, it
+will employ the men of this fur service, and they will find the pole.
+The company has posts far within the arctic circle, and they are manned
+by men peculiarly and exactly fitted for the adventure. They are hardy,
+acutely intelligent, self-reliant, accustomed to the climate, and all
+that it engenders and demands. They are on the spot ready to start at
+the earliest moment in the season, and they have with them all that they
+will need on the expedition. They would do nothing hurriedly or rashly;
+they would know what they were about as no other white men would--and
+they would get there."
+
+I mention this not merely for the novelty of the suggestion and the
+interest it may excite, but because it contributes to the reader's
+understanding of the scope and character of the work of the company. It
+is not merely Western and among Indians, it is hyperborean and among
+Esquimaux. But would it not be passing strange if, beyond all that
+England has gained from the careless gift of an empire to a few
+favorites by Charles II., she should yet possess the honor and glory of
+a grand discovery due to the natural results of that action?
+
+To return to the Parliamentary inquiry into the company's affairs 140
+years ago. If it served no other purpose, it drew for us of this day an
+outline picture of the first forts and their inmates and customs. Being
+printed in the form our language took in that day, when a gun was a
+"musquet" and a stockade was a "palisadoe," we fancy we can see the
+bumptious governors--as they then called the factors or agents--swelling
+about in knee-breeches and cocked hats and colored waistcoats, and
+relying, through their fear of the savages, upon the little putty-pipe
+cannon that they speak of as "swivels." These were ostentatiously
+planted before their quarters, and in front of these again were massive
+double doors, such as we still make of steel for our bank safes, but,
+when made of wood, use only for our refrigerators. The views we get of
+the company's "servants"--which is to say, mechanics and laborers--are
+all of trembling varlets, and the testimony is full of hints of petty
+sharp practice towards the red man, suggestive of the artful ways of our
+own Hollanders, who bought beaver-skins by the weight of their feet, and
+then pressed down upon the scales with all their might.
+
+[Illustration: PAINTING THE ROBE]
+
+The witnesses had mainly been at one time in the employ of the company,
+and they made the point against it that it imported all its bread (_i.e._,
+grain) from England, and neither encouraged planting nor cultivated
+the soil for itself. But there were several who said that even in August
+they found the soil still frozen at a depth of two and a half or three
+feet. Not a man in the service was allowed to trade with the natives
+outside the forts, or even to speak with them. One fellow was put in
+irons for going into an Indian's tent; and there was a witness who had
+"heard a Governor say he would whip a Man without Tryal; and that the
+severest Punishment is a Dozen of Lashes." Of course there was no
+instructing the savages in either English or the Christian religion; and
+we read that, though there were twenty-eight Europeans in one factory,
+"witness never heard Sermon or Prayers there, nor ever heard of any such
+Thing either before his Time or since." Hunters who offered their
+services got one-half what they shot or trapped, and the captains of
+vessels kept in the bay were allowed. "25 _l. per cent._" for all the
+whalebone they got.
+
+One witness said: "The method of trade is by a standard set by the
+Governors. They never lower it, but often double it, so that where the
+Standard directs 1 Skin to be taken they generally take Two." Another
+said he "had been ordered to shorten the measure for Powder, which ought
+to be a Pound, and that within these 10 Years had been reduced an Ounce
+or Two." "The Indians made a Noise sometimes, and the Company gave them
+their Furs again." A book-keeper lately in the service said that the
+company's measures for powder were short, and yet even such measures
+were not filled above half full. Profits thus made were distinguished as
+"the overplus trade," and signified what skins were got more than were
+paid for, but he could not say whether such gains went to the company or
+to the governor. (As a matter of fact, the factors or governors shared
+in the company's profits, and were interested in swelling them in every
+way they could.)
+
+There was much news of how the French traders got the small furs of
+martens, foxes, and cats, by intercepting the Indians, and leaving them
+to carry only the coarse furs to the company's forts. A witness "had
+seen the Indians come down in fine _French_ cloaths, with as much Lace
+as he ever saw upon any Cloaths whatsoever. He believed if the Company
+would give as much for the Furs as the _French_, the _Indians_ would
+bring them down;" but the French asked only thirty marten-skins for a
+gun, whereas the company's standard was from thirty-six to forty such
+skins. Then, again, the company's plan (unchanged to-day) was to take
+the Indian's furs, and then, being possessed of them, to begin the
+barter.
+
+This shouldering the common grief upon the French was not merely the
+result of the chronic English antipathy to their ancient and their
+lively foes. The French were swarming all around the outer limits of the
+company's field, taking first choice of the furs, and even beginning to
+set up posts of their own. Canada was French soil, and peopled by as
+hardy and adventurous a class as inhabited any part of America. The
+_coureurs du bois_ and the _bois-brûlés_ (half-breeds), whose success
+afterwards led to the formation of rival companies, had begun a mosquito
+warfare, by canoeing the waters that led to Hudson Bay, and had
+penetrated 1000 miles farther west than the English. One Thomas Barnett,
+a smith, said that the French intercepted the Indians, forcing them to
+trade, "when they take what they please, giving them Toys in Exchange;
+and fright them into Compliance by Tricks of Sleight of Hand; from
+whence the _Indians_ conclude them to be Conjurers; and if the _French_
+did not compel the _Indians_ to trade, they would certainly bring all
+the Goods to the _English_."
+
+This must have seemed to the direct, practical English trading mind a
+wretched business, and worthy only of Johnny Crapeau, to worst the noble
+Briton by monkeyish acts of conjuring. It stirred the soul of one
+witness, who said that the way to meet it was "by sending some _English_
+with a little Brandy." A gallon to certain chiefs and a gallon and a
+half to others would certainly induce the natives to come down and
+trade, he thought.
+
+But while the testimony of the English was valuable as far as it went,
+which was mainly concerning trade, it was as nothing regarding the life
+of the natives compared with that of one Joseph La France, of
+Missili-Mackinack (Mackinaw), a traveller, hunter, and trader. He had
+been sent as a child to Quebec to learn French, and in later years had
+been from Lake Nipissing to Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes, the
+Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ouinipigue (Winnipeg) or Red River, and
+to Hudson Bay. He told his tales to Arthur Dobbs, who made a book of
+them, and part of that became an appendix to the committee's report. La
+France said:
+
+    "That the high price on _European_ Goods discourages the Natives
+    so much, that if it were not that they are under a Necessity of
+    having Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets, and other Iron Tools for
+    their Hunting, and Tobacco, Brandy, and some Paint for Luxury,
+    they would not go down to the Factory with what they now carry.
+    They leave great numbers of Furs and Skins behind them. A good
+    Hunter among the _Indians_ can kill 600 Beavers in a season, and
+    carry down but 100" (because their canoes were small); "the rest
+    he uses at home, or hangs them upon Branches of Trees upon the
+    Death of their Children, as an Offering to them; or use them for
+    Bedding and Coverings: they sometimes burn off the Fur, and
+    roast the Beavers, like Pigs, upon any Entertainments; and they
+    often let them rot, having no further Use of them. The Beavers,
+    he says, are of Three Colours--the Brown-reddish Colour, the
+    Black, and the White. The Black is most valued by the Company,
+    and in _England_; the White, though most valued in _Canada_, is
+    blown upon by the Company's Factors at the Bay, they not
+    allowing so much for these as for the others; and therefore the
+    _Indians_ use them at home, or burn off the Hair, when they
+    roast the Beavers, like Pigs, at an Entertainment when they
+    feast together. The Beavers are delicious Food, but the Tongue
+    and Tail the most delicious Parts of the whole. They multiply
+    very fast, and if they can empty a Pond, and take the whole
+    Lodge, they generally leave a Pair to breed, so that they are
+    fully stocked again in Two or Three Years. The _American_ Oxen,
+    or Beeves, he says, have a large Bunch upon their backs, which
+    is by far the most delicious Part of them for Food, it being all
+    as sweet as Marrow, juicy and rich, and weighs several Pounds.
+
+    "The Natives are so discouraged in their Trade with the Company
+    that no Peltry is worth the Carriage; and the finest Furs are
+    sold for very little. They gave but a Pound of Gunpowder for 4
+    Beavers, a Fathom of Tobacco for 7 Beavers, a Pound of Shot for
+    1, an Ell of coarse Cloth for 15, a Blanket for 12, Two
+    Fish-hooks or Three Flints for 1; a Gun for 25, a Pistol for 10,
+    a common Hat with white Lace, 7; an Ax, 4; a Billhook, 1; a
+    Gallon of Brandy, 4; a chequer'd Shirt, 7; all of which are sold
+    at a monstrous Profit, even to 2000 _per Cent_. Notwithstanding
+    this discouragement, he computed that there were brought to the
+    Factory in 1742, in all, 50,000 Beavers and above 9000 Martens.
+
+    "The smaller Game, got by Traps or Snares, are generally the
+    Employment of the Women and Children; such as the Martens,
+    Squirrels, Cats, Ermines, &c. The Elks, Stags, Rein-Deer, Bears,
+    Tygers, wild Beeves, Wolves, Foxes, Beavers, Otters, Corcajeu,
+    &c., are the employment of the Men. The _Indians_, when they
+    kill any Game for Food, leave it where they kill it, and send
+    their wives next Day to carry it home. They go home in a direct
+    Line, never missing their way, by observations they make of the
+    Course they take upon their going out. The Trees all bend
+    towards the South, and the Branches on that Side are larger and
+    stronger than on the North Side; as also the Moss upon the
+    Trees. To let their Wives know how to come at the killed Game,
+    they from Place to Place break off Branches and lay them in the
+    Road, pointing them the Way they should go, and sometimes Moss;
+    so that they never miss finding it.
+
+    "In Winter, when they go abroad, which they must do in all
+    Weathers, before they dress, they rub themselves all over with
+    Bears Greaze or Oil of Beavers, which does not freeze; and also
+    rub all the Fur of their Beaver Coats, and then put them on;
+    they have also a kind of Boots or Stockings of Beaver's Skin,
+    well oiled, with the Fur inwards; and above them they have an
+    oiled Skin laced about their Feet, which keeps out the Cold, and
+    also Water; and by this means they never freeze, nor suffer
+    anything by Cold. In Summer, also, when they go naked, they rub
+    themselves with these Oils or Grease, and expose themselves to
+    the Sun without being scorched, their Skins always being kept
+    soft and supple by it; nor do any Flies, Bugs, or Musketoes, or
+    any noxious Insect, ever molest them. When they want to get rid
+    of it, they go into the Water, and rub themselves all over with
+    Mud or Clay, and let it dry upon them, and then rub it off; but
+    whenever they are free from the Oil, the Flies and Musketoes
+    immediately attack them, and oblige them again to anoint
+    themselves. They are much afraid of the wild Humble Bee, they
+    going naked in Summer, that they avoid them as much as they can.
+    They use no Milk from the time they are weaned, and they all
+    hate to taste Cheese, having taken up an Opinion that it is made
+    of Dead Men's Fat. They love Prunes and Raisins, and will give a
+    Beaver-skin for Twelve of them, to carry to their Children; and
+    also for a Trump or Jew's Harp. The Women have all fine Voices,
+    but have never heard any Musical Instrument. They are very fond
+    of all Kinds of Pictures or Prints, giving a Beaver for the
+    least Print; and all Toys are like Jewels to them."
+
+He reported that "the _Indians_ west of Hudson's Bay live an erratic
+Life, and can have no Benefit by tame Fowl or Cattle. They seldom stay
+above a Fortnight in a Place, unless they find Plenty of Game. After
+having built their Hut, they disperse to get Game for their Food, and
+meet again at Night after having killed enough to maintain them for that
+Day. When they find Scarcity of Game, they remove a League or Two
+farther; and thus they traverse through woody Countries and Bogs, scarce
+missing One Day, Winter or Summer, fair or foul, in the greatest Storms
+of Snow."
+
+It has been often said that the great Peace River, which rises in
+British Columbia and flows through a pass in the Rocky Mountains into
+the northern plains, was named "the Unchaga," or Peace, "because" (to
+quote Captain W. F. Butler) "of the stubborn resistance offered by the
+all-conquering Crees, which induced that warlike tribe to make peace on
+the banks of the river, and leave at rest the beaver-hunters"--that is,
+the Beaver tribe--upon the river's banks. There is a sentence in La
+France's story that intimates a more probable and lasting reason for the
+name. He says that some Indians in the southern centre of Canada sent
+frequently to the Indians along some river near the mountains "with
+presents, to confirm the peace with them." The story is shadowy, of
+course, and yet La France, in the same narrative, gave other information
+which proved to be correct, and none which proved ridiculous. We know
+that there were "all-conquering" Crees, but there were also inferior
+ones called the Swampies, and there were others of only intermediate
+valor. As for the Beavers, Captain Butler himself offers other proof of
+their mettle besides their "stubborn resistance." He says that on one
+occasion a young Beaver chief shot the dog of another brave in the
+Beaver camp. A hundred bows were instantly drawn, and ere night eighty
+of the best men of the tribe lay dead. There was a parley, and it was
+resolved that the chief who slew the dog should leave the tribe, and
+take his friends with him. A century later a Beaver Indian, travelling
+with a white man, heard his own tongue spoken by men among the Blackfeet
+near our border. They were the Sarcis, descendants of the exiled band of
+Beavers. They had become the must reckless and valorous members of the
+warlike Blackfeet confederacy.
+
+[Illustration: COUREUR DU BOIS]
+
+La France said that the nations who "go up the river" with presents, to
+confirm the peace with certain Indians, were three months in going, and
+that the Indians in question live beyond a range of mountains beyond
+the Assiniboins (a plains tribe). Then he goes on to say that still
+farther beyond those Indians "are nations who have not the use of
+firearms, by which many of them are made slaves and sold"--to the
+Assiniboins and others. These are plainly the Pacific coast Indians. And
+even so long ago as that (about 1740), half a century before Mackenzie
+and Vancouver met on the Pacific coast, La France had told the story of
+an Indian who had gone at the head of a band of thirty braves and their
+families to make war on the Flatheads "on the Western Ocean of America."
+They were from autumn until the next April in making the journey, and
+they "saw many Black Fish spouting up in the sea." It was a case of what
+the Irish call "spoiling for a fight," for they had to journey 1500
+miles to meet "enemies" whom they never had seen, and who were peaceful,
+and inhabited more or less permanent villages. The plainsmen got more
+than they sought. They attacked a village, were outnumbered, and lost
+half their force, besides having several of their men wounded. On the
+way back all except the man who told the story died of fatigue and
+famine.
+
+The journeys which Indians made in their wildest period were tremendous.
+Far up in the wilderness of British America there are legends of visits
+by the Iroquois. The Blackfeet believe that their progenitors roamed as
+far south as Mexico for horses, and the Crees of the plains evinced a
+correct knowledge of the country that lay beyond the Rocky Mountains in
+their conversations with the first whites who traded with them. Yet
+those white men, the founders of an organized fur trade, clung to the
+scene of their first operations for more than one hundred years, while
+the bravest of their more enterprising rivals in the Northwest Company
+only reached the Pacific, with the aid of eight Iroquois braves, 120
+years after the English king chartered the senior company! The French
+were the true Yankees of that country. They and their half-breeds were
+always in the van as explorers and traders, and as early as 1731 M.
+Varennes de la Verandrye, licensed by the Canadian Government as a
+trader, penetrated the West as far as the Rockies, leading Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie to that extent by more than sixty years.
+
+But to return to the first serious trouble the Hudson Bay Company met.
+The investigation of its affairs by Parliament produced nothing more
+than the picture I have presented. The committee reported that if the
+original charter bred a monopoly, it would not help matters to give the
+same privileges to others. As the questioned legality of the charter was
+not competently adjudicated upon, they would not allow another company
+to invade the premises of the older one.
+
+At this time the great company still hugged the shores of the bay,
+fearing the Indians, the half-breeds, and the French. Their posts were
+only six in all, and were mainly fortified with palisaded enclosures,
+with howitzers and swivels, and with men trained to the use of guns.
+Moose Fort and the East Main factory were on either side of James Bay,
+Forts Albany, York, and Prince of Wales followed up the west coast, and
+Henley was the southernmost and most inland of all, being on Moose
+River, a tributary of James Bay. The French at first traded beyond the
+field of Hudson Bay operations, and their castles were their canoes. But
+when their great profits and familiarity with the trade tempted the
+thrifty French capitalists and enterprising Scotch merchants of Montreal
+into the formation of the rival Northwest Trading Company in 1783,
+fixed trading-posts began to be established all over the Prince Rupert's
+Land, and even beyond the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia. By 1818
+there were about forty Northwest posts as against about two dozen Hudson
+Bay factories. The new company not only disputed but ignored the
+chartered rights of the old company, holding that the charter had not
+been sanctioned by Parliament, and was in every way unconstitutional as
+creative of a monopoly. Their French partners and _engagés_ shared this
+feeling, especially as the French crown had been first in the field with
+a royal charter. Growing bolder and bolder, the Northwest Company
+resolved to drive the Hudson Bay Company to a legal test of their
+rights, and so in 1803-4 they established a Northwest fort under the
+eyes of the old company on the shores of Hudson Bay, and fitted out
+ships to trade with the natives in the strait. But the Englishmen did
+not accept the challenge; for the truth was they had their own doubts of
+the strength of their charter.
+
+[Illustration: A FUR-TRADER IN THE COUNCIL TEPEE]
+
+They pursued a different and for them an equally bold course. That
+hard-headed old nobleman the fifth Earl of Selkirk came uppermost in the
+company as the engineer of a plan of colonization. There was plenty of
+land, and some wholesale evictions of Highlanders in Sutherlandshire,
+Scotland, had rendered a great force of hardy men homeless. Selkirk saw
+in this situation a chance to play a long but certainly triumphant game
+with his rivals. His plan was to plant a colony which should produce
+grain and horses and men for the old company, saving the importation
+of all three, and building up not only a nursery for men to match the
+_coureurs du bois_, but a stronghold and a seat of a future government
+in the Hudson Bay interest. Thus was ushered in a new and important era
+in Canadian history. It was the opening of that part of Canada; by a
+loop-hole rather than a door, to be sure.
+
+Lord Selkirk's was a practical soul. On one occasion in animadverting
+against the Northwest Company he spoke of them contemptuously as
+fur-traders, yet he was the chief of all fur-traders, and had been known
+to barter with an Indian himself at one of the forts for a fur. He held
+up the opposition to the scorn of the world as profiting upon the
+weakness of the Indians by giving them alcohol, yet he ordered
+distilleries set up in his colony afterwards, saying, "We grant the
+trade is iniquitous, but if we don't carry it on others will; so we may
+as well put the guineas in our own pockets." But he was the man of the
+moment, if not for it. His scheme of colonization was born of
+desperation on one side and distress on the other. It was pursued amid
+terrible hardship, and against incessant violence. It was consummated
+through bloodshed. The story is as interesting as it is important. The
+facts are obtained mainly from "Papers relating to the Red River
+Settlement, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, July 12,
+1819." Lord Selkirk owned 40,000 of the £105,000 (or shares) of the
+Hudson Bay Company; therefore, since 25,000 were held by women and
+children, he held half of all that carried votes. He got from the
+company a grant of a large tract around what is now Winnipeg, to form
+an agricultural settlement for supplying the company's posts with
+provisions. We have seen how little disposed its officers were to open
+the land to settlers, or to test its agricultural capacities. No one,
+therefore, will wonder that when this grant was made several members of
+the governing committee resigned. But a queer development of the moment
+was a strong opposition from holders of Hudson Bay stock who were also
+owners in that company's great rival, the Northwest Company. Since the
+enemy persisted in prospering at the expense of the old company, the
+moneyed men of the senior corporation had taken stock of their rivals.
+These doubly interested persons were also in London, so that the
+Northwest Company was no longer purely Canadian. The opponents within
+the Hudson Bay Company declared civilization to be at all times
+unfavorable to the fur trade, and the Northwest people argued that the
+colony would form a nursery for servants of the Bay Company, enabling
+them to oppose the Northwest Company more effectually, as well as
+affording such facilities for new-comers as must destroy their own
+monopoly. The Northwest Company denied the legality of the charter
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company because Parliament had not confirmed
+Charles II.'s charter.
+
+[Illustration: BUFFALO MEAT FOR THE POST]
+
+The colonists came, and were met by Miles McDonnell, an ex-captain of
+Canadian volunteers, as Lord Selkirk's agent. The immigrants landed on
+the shore of Hudson Bay, and passed a forlorn winter. They met some of
+the Northwest Company's people under Alexander McDonnell, a cousin
+and brother-in-law to Miles McDonnell. Although Captain Miles read the
+grant to Selkirk in token of his sole right to the land, the settlers
+were hospitably received and well treated by the Northwest people. The
+settlers reached the place of colonization in August, 1812. This place
+is what was known as Fort Garry until Winnipeg was built. It was at
+first called "the Forks of the Red River," because the Assiniboin there
+joined the Red. Lord Selkirk outlined his policy at the time in a letter
+in which he bade Miles McDonnell give the Northwest people solemn
+warning that the lands were Hudson Bay property, and they must remove
+from them; that they must not fish, and that if they did their nets were
+to be seized, their buildings were to be destroyed, and they were to be
+treated "as you would poachers in England."
+
+The trouble began at once. Miles accused Alexander of trying to inveigle
+colonists away from him. He trained his men in the use of guns, and
+uniformed a number of them. He forbade the exportation of any supplies
+from the country, and when some Northwest men came to get buffalo meat
+they had hung on racks in the open air, according to the custom of the
+country, he sent armed men to send the others away. He intercepted a
+band of Northwest canoe-men, stationing men with guns and with two
+field-pieces on the river; and he sent to a Northwest post lower down
+the river demanding the provisions stored there, which, when they were
+refused, were taken by force, the door being smashed in. For this a
+Hudson Bay clerk was arrested, and Captain Miles's men went to the
+rescue. Two armed forces met, but happily slaughter was averted. Miles
+McDonnell justified his course on the ground that the colonists were
+distressed by need of food. It transpired at the time that one of his
+men while making cartridges for a cannon remarked that he was making
+them "for those ---- Northwest rascals. They have run too long, and
+shall run no longer." After this Captain Miles ordered the stoppage of
+all buffalo-hunting on horseback, as the practice kept the buffalo at a
+distance, and drove them into the Sioux country, where the local Indians
+dared not go.
+
+But though Captain McDonnell was aggressive and vexatious, the Northwest
+Company's people, who had begun the mischief, even in London, were not
+now passive. They relied on setting the half-breeds and Indians against
+the colonists. They urged that the colonists had stolen Indian real
+estate in settling on the land, and that in time every Indian would
+starve as a consequence. At the forty-fifth annual meeting of the
+Northwest Company's officers, August, 1814, Alexander McDonnell said,
+"Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some, by
+fair or foul means--a most desirable object, if it can be accomplished;
+so here is at it with all my heart and energy." In October, 1814,
+Captain McDonnell ordered the Northwest Company to remove from the
+territory within six months.
+
+[Illustration: THE INDIAN HUNTER OF 1750]
+
+The Indians, first and last, were the friends of the colonists. They
+were befriended by the whites, and in turn they gave them succor when
+famine fell upon them. Many of Captain Miles McDonnell's orders were in
+their interest, and they knew it. Katawabetay, a chief, was tempted with
+a big prize to destroy the settlement. He refused. On the opening of
+navigation in 1815 chiefs were bidden from the country around to visit
+the Northwest factors, and were by them asked to destroy the colony. Not
+only did they decline, but they hastened to Captain Miles McDonnell to
+acquaint him with the plot. Duncan Cameron now appears foremost among
+the Northwest Company's agents, being in charge of that company's post
+on the Red River, in the Selkirk grant. He told the chiefs that if they
+took the part of the colonists "their camp-fires should be totally
+extinguished." When Cameron caught one of his own servants doing a
+trifling service for Captain Miles McDonnell, he sent him upon a journey
+for which every _engagé_ of the Northwest Company bound himself liable
+in joining the company; that was to make the trip to Montreal, a voyage
+held _in terrorem_ over every servant of the corporation. More than
+that, he confiscated four horses and a wagon belonging to this man, and
+charged him on the company's books with the sum of 800 livres for an
+Indian squaw, whom the man had been told he was to have as his slave for
+a present.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTER HANGING DEER OUT OF THE REACH OF WOLVES]
+
+But though the Indians held aloof from the great and cruel conspiracy,
+the half-breeds readily joined in it. They treated Captain McDonnell's
+orders with contempt, and arrested one of the Hudson Bay men as a spy
+upon their hunting with horses. There lived along the Red River, near
+the colony, about thirty Canadians and seventy half-breeds, born of
+Indian squaws and the servants or officers of the Northwest Company.
+One-quarter of the number of "breeds" could read and write, and were fit
+to serve as clerks; the rest were literally half savage, and were
+employed as hunters, canoe-men, "packers" (freighters), and guides. They
+were naturally inclined to side with the Northwest Company, and in time
+that corporation sowed dissension among the colonists themselves,
+picturing to them exaggerated danger from the Indians, and offering them
+free passage to Canada. They paid at least one of the leading
+colonists £100 for furthering discontent in the settlement, and four
+deserters from the colony stole all the Hudson Bay field-pieces, iron
+swivels, and the howitzer. There was constant irritation and friction
+between the factions. In an affray far up at Isle-à-la-Crosse a man was
+killed on either side. Half-breeds came past the colony singing
+war-songs, and notices were posted around Fort Garry reading, "Peace
+with all the world except in Red River." The Northwest people demanded
+the surrender of Captain McDonnell that he might be tried on their
+charges, and on June 11, 1815, a band of men fired on the colonial
+buildings. The captain afterwards surrendered himself, and the remnant
+of the colony, thirteen families, went to the head of Lake Winnipeg. The
+half-breeds burned the buildings, and divided the horses and effects.
+
+But in the autumn all came back with Colin Robertson, of the Bay
+Company, and twenty clerks and servants. These were joined by Governor
+Robert Semple, who brought 160 settlers from Scotland. Semple was a man
+of consequence at home, a great traveller, and the author of a book on
+travels in Spain.[2] But he came in no conciliatory mood, and the foment
+was kept up. The Northwest Company tried to starve the colonists, and
+Governor Semple destroyed the enemy's fort below Fort Garry. Then came
+the end--a decisive battle and massacre.
+
+Sixty-five men on horses, and with some carts, were sent by Alexander
+McDonnell, of the Northwest Company, up the river towards the colony.
+They were led by Cuthbert Grant, and included six Canadians, four
+Indians, and fifty-four half-breeds. It was afterwards said they went on
+innocent business, but every man was armed, and the "breeds" were naked,
+and painted all over to look like Indians. They got their paint of the
+Northwest officers. Moreover, there had been rumors that the colonists
+were to be driven away, and that "the land was to be drenched with
+blood." It was on June 19, 1816, that runners notified the colony that
+the others were coming. Semple was at Fort Douglas, near Fort Garry.
+When apprised of the close approach of his assailants, the Governor
+seems not to have appreciated his danger, for he said, "We must go and
+meet those people; let twenty men follow me." He put on his cocked hat
+and sash, his pistols, and shouldered his double-barrelled
+fowling-piece. The others carried a wretched lot of guns--some with the
+locks gone, and many that were useless. It was marshy ground, and they
+straggled on in loose order. They met an old soldier who had served in
+the army at home, and who said the enemy was very numerous, and that the
+Governor had better bring along his two field-pieces.
+
+"No, no," said the Governor; "there is no occasion. I am only going to
+speak to them."
+
+Nevertheless, after a moment's reflection, he did send back for one of
+the great guns, saying it was well to have it in case of need. They
+halted a short time for the cannon, and then perceived the Northwest
+party pressing towards them on their horses. By a common impulse the
+Governor and his followers began a retreat, walking backwards, and at
+the same time spreading out a single line to present a longer front. The
+enemy continued to advance at a hand-gallop. From out among them rode a
+Canadian named Boucher, the rest forming a half-moon behind him. Waving
+his hand in an insolent way to the Governor, Boucher called out, "What
+do you want?"
+
+[Illustration: MAKING THE SNOW-SHOE]
+
+"What do _you_ want?" said Governor Semple.
+
+"We want our fort," said Boucher, meaning the fort Semple had destroyed.
+
+"Go to your fort," said the Governor.
+
+"Why did you destroy our fort, you rascal?" Boucher demanded.
+
+"Scoundrel, do you tell me so?" the Governor replied, and ordered the
+man's arrest.
+
+Some say he caught at Boucher's gun. But Boucher slipped off his horse,
+and on the instant a gun was fired, and a Hudson Bay clerk fell dead.
+Another shot wounded Governor Semple, and he called to his followers.
+
+"Do what you can to take care of yourselves."
+
+Then there was a volley from the Northwest force, and with the clearing
+of the smoke it looked as though all the Governor's party were killed or
+wounded. Instead of taking care of themselves, they had rallied around
+their wounded leader. Captain Rogers, of the Governor's party, who had
+fallen, rose to his feet, and ran towards the enemy crying for mercy in
+English and broken French, when Thomas McKay, a "breed" and Northwest
+clerk, shot him through the head, another cutting his body open with a
+knife.
+
+Cuthbert Grant (who, it was charged, had shot Governor Semple) now went
+to the Governor, while the others despatched the wounded.
+
+Semple said, "Are you not Mr. Grant?"
+
+"Yes," said the other.
+
+"I am not mortally wounded," said the Governor, "and if you could get me
+conveyed to the fort, I think I should live."
+
+But when Grant left his side an Indian named Ma-chi-ca-taou shot him,
+some say through the breast, and some have it that he put a pistol to
+the Governor's head. Grant could not stop the savages. The bloodshed had
+crazed them. They slaughtered all the wounded, and, worse yet, they
+terribly maltreated the bodies. Twenty-two Hudson Bay men were killed,
+and one on the other side was wounded.
+
+There is a story that Alexander McDonnell shouted for joy when he heard
+the news of the massacre. One witness, who did not hear him shout,
+reports that he exclaimed to his friends: "_Sacré nom de Dieu! Bonnes
+nouvelles; vingt-deux Anglais tués!_" (----! Good news; twenty-two
+English slain!) It was afterwards alleged that the slaughter was
+approved by every officer of the Northwest Company whose comments were
+recorded.
+
+It is a saying up in that country that twenty-six out of the sixty-five
+in the attacking party died violent deaths. The record is only valuable
+as indicating the nature and perils of the lives the hunters and
+half-breeds led. First, a Frenchman dropped dead while crossing the ice
+on the river, his son was stabbed by a comrade, his wife was shot, and
+his children were burned; "Big Head," his brother, was shot by an
+Indian; Coutonohais dropped dead at a dance; Battosh was mysteriously
+shot; Lavigne was drowned; Fraser was run through the body by a
+Frenchman in Paris; Baptiste Morallé, while drunk, was thrown into a
+fire by inebriated companions and burned to death; another died drunk on
+a roadway; another was wounded by the bursting of his gun; small-pox
+took the eleventh; Duplicis was empaled upon a hay-fork, on which he
+jumped from a hay-stack; Parisien was shot, by a person unknown, in a
+buffalo-hunt; another lost his arm by carelessness; Gardapie, "the
+brave," was scalped and shot by the Sioux; so was Vallée;
+Ka-te-tee-goose was scalped and cut in pieces by the Gros-Ventres;
+Pe-me-can-toss was thrown in a hole by his people; and another Indian
+and his wife and children were killed by lightning. Yet another was
+gored to death by a buffalo. The rest of the twenty-six died by being
+frozen, by drowning, by drunkenness, or by shameful disease.
+
+It is when things are at their worst that they begin to mend, says a
+silly old proverb; but when history is studied these desperate
+situations often seem part of the mending, not of themselves, but of the
+broken cause of progress. There was a little halt here in Canada, as we
+shall see, but the seed of settlement had been planted, and thenceforth
+continued to grow. Lord Selkirk came with all speed, reaching Canada in
+1817. It was now an English colony, and when he asked for a body-guard,
+the Government gave him two sergeants and twelve soldiers of the
+Régiment de Meuron. He made these the nucleus of a considerable force of
+Swiss and Germans who had formerly served in that regiment, and he
+pursued a triumphal progress to what he called his territory of
+Assiniboin, capturing all the Northwest Company's forts on the route,
+imprisoning the officers, and sending to jail in Canada all the
+accessaries to the massacre, on charges of arson, murder, robbery, and
+"high misdemeanors." Such was the prejudice against the Hudson Bay
+Company and the regard for the home corporation that nearly all were
+acquitted, and suits for very heavy damages were lodged against him.
+
+[Illustration: A HUDSON BAY MAN (QUARTER-BREED)]
+
+Selkirk sought to treat with the Indians for his land, which they said
+belonged to the Chippeways and the Crees. Five chiefs were found whose
+right to treat was acknowledged by all. On July 18, 1817, they deeded
+the territory to the King, "for the benefit of Lord Selkirk," giving him
+a strip two miles wide on either side of the Red River from Lake
+Winnipeg to Red Lake, north of the United States boundary, and along the
+Assiniboin from Fort Garry to the Muskrat River, as well as within two
+circles of six miles radius around Fort Garry and Pembina, now in
+Dakota. Indians do not know what miles are; they measure distance by the
+movement of the sun while on a journey. They determined two miles in
+this case to be "as far as you can see daylight under a horse's belly on
+the level prairie." On account of Selkirk's liberality they dubbed him
+"the silver chief." He agreed to give them for the land 200 pounds of
+tobacco a year. He named his settlement Kildonan, after that place in
+Helmsdale, Sutherlandshire, Scotland. He died in 1821, and in 1836 the
+Hudson Bay Company bought the land back from his heirs for £84,000. The
+Swiss and Germans of his regiment remained, and many retired servants of
+the company bought and settled there, forming the aristocracy of the
+place--a queer aristocracy to our minds, for many of the women were
+Indian squaws, and the children were "breeds."
+
+Through the perseverance and tact of the Right Hon. Edward Ellice, to
+whom the Government had appealed, all differences between the two great
+fur-trading companies were adjusted, and in 1821 a coalition was formed.
+At Ellice's suggestion the giant combination then got from Parliament
+exclusive privileges beyond the waters that flow into Hudson Bay, over
+the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific, for a term of twenty years.
+These extra privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were renewed for
+twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so far as British Columbia
+(then New Caledonia) was concerned, in 1858. That territory then became
+a crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which had taken on a
+colonial character at the time of the California gold fever (1849), were
+united in 1866. The extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore
+not again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of the Canadian
+union, whatever presumptive rights the Hudson Bay Company got under
+Charles II.'s charter were vacated in consideration of a payment by
+Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one-twentieth of all surveyed lands within
+the fertile belt, and 50,000 acres surrounding the company's posts. It
+is estimated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 of acres, worth
+$20,000,000, exclusive of all town sites.
+
+Thus we reach the present condition of the company, more than 220 years
+old, maintaining 200 central posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and
+trading in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Massett, on Queen Charlotte
+Island, in the Pacific; and deep within the Arctic Circle in the north.
+The company was newly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at
+£20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it has paid back
+£7 in every £20, reducing its capital to £1,300,000. The stock, however,
+is quoted at its original value. The supreme control of the company is
+vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five directors, elected by
+the stockholders in London. They delegate their powers to an executive
+resident in this country, who was until lately called the "Governor of
+Rupert's Land," but now is styled the chief commissioner, and is in
+absolute charge of the company and all its operations. His term of
+office is unlimited. The present head of the corporation, or governor,
+is Sir Donald A. Smith, one of the foremost spirits in Canada, who
+worked his way up from a clerkship in the company. The business of the
+company is managed on the outfit system, the most old-fogyish, yet by
+its officers declared to be the most perfect, plan in use by any
+corporation. The method is to charge against each post all the supplies
+that are sent to it between June 1st and June 1st each year, and then to
+set against this the product of each post in furs and in cash received.
+It used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a given year,
+but, owing to improved means of transportation, this is now done in two
+years.
+
+[Illustration: THE COUREUR DU BOIS AND THE SAVAGE]
+
+Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts of the Hudson Bay
+territory you find at least one free-trader's shop set up in rivalry
+with the old company's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses for
+the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are partly, general country
+stores. There can be no doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to
+the fur trade from the stand-point of the future. The great company can
+afford to miss a dividend, and can lose at some points while gaining at
+others, but the free-traders must profit in every district. The
+consequence is such a reckless destruction of game that the plan adopted
+by us for our seal-fisheries--the leasehold system--is envied and
+advocated in Canada. A greater proportion of trapping and an utter
+unconcern for the destruction of the game at all ages are now
+ravaging the wilderness. Many districts return as many furs as they ever
+yielded, but the quantity is kept up at fearful cost by the
+extermination of the game. On the other hand, the fortified wall of
+posts that opposed the development of Canada, and sent the surplus
+population of Europe to the United States, is rid of its palisades and
+field-pieces, and the main strongholds of the ancient company and its
+rivals have become cities. The old fort on Vancouver Island is now
+Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace
+River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side;
+Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the
+site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.
+
+But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as
+the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become
+cities is in no man's thought or ken. And the communication between the
+centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, more nearly like
+what it was in the old, old days than most of my readers would imagine.
+My Indian guides were battling with their paddles against the mad
+current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, one day last summer, and I
+was only a few hours away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great
+lake, when we came to a portage, and might have imagined from what we
+saw that time had pushed the hands back on the dial of eternity at least
+a century.
+
+Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the brigade that was being
+sent with supplies to a post far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A
+cumbrous, big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a sail,
+and a square-cut bateau had brought the men and goods to the "carry."
+The men were half-breeds as of old, and had brought along their women
+and children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we espied on a bluff
+close by; a typical camp, with the blankets hung on the bushes, the
+slatternly women and half-naked children squatting or running about, and
+smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive off mosquitoes and
+flies. The men were in groups below on the trail, at the water-side end
+of which were the boats' cargoes of shingles and flour and bacon and
+shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, in rawhide. They were
+dark-skinned, short, spare men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the
+crew, and with longish coarse black hair and straggling beards. Each man
+carried a tump-line, or long stout strap, which he tied in such a way
+around what he meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted over
+the crown of his head. Thus they "packed" the goods over the portage,
+their heads sustaining the loads, and their backs merely steadying them.
+When one had thrown his burden into place, he trotted off up the trail
+with springing feet, though the freight was packed so that 100 pounds
+should form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, and then all the
+others tried to pack as much, and most succeeded. All agreed that one,
+the smallest and least muscular-looking one among them, could pack 400
+pounds.
+
+As the men gathered around their "smudge" to talk with my party, it was
+seen that of all the parts of the picturesque costume of the _voyageur_
+or _bois-brûlé_ of old--the capote, the striped shirt, the
+pipe-tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and moccasins--only the
+red worsted belt and the moccasins have been retained. These men could
+recall the day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, got no
+tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, lifting one package, and
+then throwing a second one atop of it without assistance. Now they carry
+only 100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food given to them.
+
+We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the York boat coming
+down from the north with last winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to
+lift the curtain from before the great fur country beyond them, to give
+a glimpse of the habits and conditions that prevail throughout a
+majestic territory where the rivers and lakes are the only roads, and
+canoes and dog-sleds are the only vehicles.
+
+[Footnote 2: I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a
+grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero.
+He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic
+happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His
+parents were passengers on an English vessel which was captured by the
+Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where he was born on
+February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was
+slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man
+of striking and handsome appearance.]
+
+
+
+
+  VII
+
+  "TALKING MUSQUASH"
+
+  Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company
+
+
+The most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a
+century among the Hudson Bay Company's employés was started the other
+day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading
+company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had
+gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a
+box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of
+changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared
+with the sense of instability to which this appearance of
+machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a
+wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its
+goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is
+precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to
+convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George
+Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord
+Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the
+board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at
+hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it
+contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at
+Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual
+chirography such as had been received from many factories in the
+wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called
+"talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken
+by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to
+our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canvassers
+for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove
+that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any
+other--in those posts where life has hitherto been taken so gently that
+when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought
+and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the
+storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although
+it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long
+known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only
+reassuring note in the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the
+subject of candles is reached. The Governor and committee in London
+still pursue their deliberations by candlelight.
+
+But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of no avail for the
+old factors to make the point that Sir Donald found no greater trouble
+in reading their writing than they encountered when one of his missives
+had to be deciphered by them. The truth is that the tide of immigration
+which their ancient monopoly first shunted into the United States is
+now sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more than its
+face. Not only are the factors aware that the new rule confining them to
+share in the profits of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders
+far greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but a great many
+of them now find village life around their old forts, and railroads
+close at hand, and Law setting up its officers at their doors, so that
+in a great part of the territory the romance of the old life, and their
+authority as well, has fled.
+
+[Illustration: TALKING MUSQUASH]
+
+Less than four years ago I had passed by Qu'Appelle without visiting it,
+but last summer I resolved not to make the mistake again, for it was the
+last stockaded fort that could be studied without a tiresome and costly
+journey into the far north. It is on the Fishing Lakes, just beyond
+Manitoba. But on my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had just
+taken down the stockade in the spring, and that he did not know of a
+remaining "palisadoe" in all the company's system except one, which,
+curiously enough, had just been ordered to be put up around Fort
+Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern British Columbia, where some
+turbulent Indians have been very troublesome, and where whatever
+civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer than our own. This one
+example of the survival of original conditions is far more eloquent of
+their endurance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. It is true
+that there has come a tremendous change in the status and spirit of the
+company. It is true that its officers are but newly bending to external
+authority, and that settlers have poured into the south with such
+demands for food, clothes, tools, and weapons as to create within the
+old corporation one of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to-day,
+as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company remains the greatest
+fur-trading association that exists.
+
+The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated reaches from ocean to ocean
+without suffering invasion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic
+Sea is a grand belt wherein time has made no impress since the first
+factory was put up there. There and around it is a region, nearly
+two-thirds the size of the United States, which is as if our country
+were meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average distance of five
+days apart, with no other means of communication than canoe or dog
+train, and with not above a thousand white men in it, and not as many
+pure-blooded white women as you will find registered at a first-class
+New York hotel on an ordinary day. The company employs between fifteen
+hundred and two thousand white men, and I am assuming that half of them
+are in the fur country.
+
+We know that for nearly a century the company clung to the shores of
+Hudson Bay. It will be interesting to peep into one of its forts as they
+were at that time; it will be amazing to see what a country that
+bay-shore territory was and is. There and over a vast territory three
+seasons come in four months--spring in June, summer in July and August,
+and autumn in September. During the long winter the earth is blanketed
+deep in snow, and the water is locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and
+smaller birds abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in
+America, but they either give place to or share the summer with
+mosquitoes, black-flies, and "bull-dogs" (_tabanus_) without number,
+rest, or mercy. For the land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so
+wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated platforms around
+the buildings for the men to walk upon. Infrequent bunches of small
+pines and a litter of stunted swamp-willows dot the level waste, the
+only considerable timber being found upon the banks of the rivers. There
+is a wide belt called the Arctic Barrens all along the north, but below
+that, at some distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada
+bridge across the region north of the prairie and the plains, and cross
+the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox
+descends almost to meet the moose and deer, and on the near slope of the
+Rockies the wood-buffalo--larger, darker, and fiercer than the bison of
+the plains, but very like him--still roams as far south as where the
+buffalo ran highest in the days when he existed.
+
+Through all this northern country the cold in winter registers 40°, and
+even 50°, below zero, and the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in
+camp may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their winter's store
+of dried meat and frozen fish out-of-doors on racks all winter (and so
+they do down close to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only
+twice a year at the utmost; and when supplies have run out at the posts,
+we have heard of their boiling the parchment sheets they use instead of
+glass in their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of
+beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is so precious that
+such recourse could only be had when the horses and dogs had been eaten.
+As to the value of the beaver, the reader who never has purchased any
+for his wife may judge what it must be by knowing that the company has
+long imported buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways around
+Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be tempted, as of old, to make
+thongs and moccasins of the beaver; for their deer are poor, with skins
+full of worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and fine.
+
+But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in fact, common to
+all the fur territory, winter is the delightful season for the traders;
+around the bay it is the only endurable season. The winged pests of
+which I have spoken are by no means confined to the tide-soaked region
+close to the great inland sea. The whole country is as wet as that
+orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on
+the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange
+with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the
+illustration is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all sizes,
+the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make
+waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a
+vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fishing and
+hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. The "bull-dog" is a
+terror reserved for especial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect
+world, as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but carrying a
+red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in human flesh, will make the
+victim jump a foot from the ground, though there is no after-pain or
+itching or swelling from the thrust.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP]
+
+Having seen the country, let us turn to the forts. Some of them really
+were forts, in so far as palisades and sentry towers and double doors
+and guns can make a fort, and one twenty miles below Winnipeg was a
+stone fort. It is still standing. When the company ruled the territory
+as its landlord, the defended posts were on the plains among the bad
+Indians, and on the Hudson Bay shore, where vessels of foreign nations
+might be expected. In the forests, on the lakes and rivers, the
+character and behavior of the fish-eating Indians did not warrant
+armament. The stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stockade was of
+timber, of about such a height that a man might look over it on tiptoe.
+It had towers at the corners, and York Fort had a great "lookout" tower
+within the enclosure. Within the barricade were the company's buildings,
+making altogether such a picture as New York presented when the Dutch
+founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except that we had a church and
+a stadt-house in our enclosure. The Hudson Bay buildings were sometimes
+arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in the shape of a letter H,
+with the factor's house connecting the two other parts of the character.
+The factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were many smaller
+ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunters, and other non-commissioned
+men. A long, low, whitewashed log-house was apt to be the clerks' house,
+and other large buildings were the stores where merchandise was kept,
+the fur-houses where the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the
+Indian trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. A
+powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a stable or a boat-house
+for canoes completed the post. All the houses had double doors and
+windows, and wherever the men lived there was a tremendous stove set up
+to battle with the cold.
+
+The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bachelors' quarters.
+Each man had a little bedroom containing his chest, a chair, and a bed,
+with the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated papers or not,
+according to each man's taste. The big room or hall, where all met in
+the long nights and on off days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its
+whitewashed or timbered walls went, but the table in the middle was
+littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, and pens and ink, and all
+around stood (or rested on hooks overhead) guns, foils, and
+fishing-rods. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there was no work in at least
+one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine o'clock, dinner at one
+o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. The food varied in different places.
+All over the prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were kept, and
+men grew to like it very much, though it was nothing but dried buffalo
+beef pounded and mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmican they
+also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, and that was the greatest
+delicacy, except moose muffle (the nose of the moose), in all the
+territory. In the woods and lake country there were venison and moose as
+well as beaver--which is very good eating--and many sorts of birds, but
+in that region dried fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or
+white-fish nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows hunted and
+fished and smoked and drank and listened to the songs of the _voyageurs_
+and the yarns of the "breeds" and Indians. For the rest there was plenty
+of work to do.
+
+They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in that respect there has
+been a sad change, for all the people, white, red, and crossed, dressed
+picturesquely. You could always distinguish a Hudson Bay man by his
+capote of light blue cloth with brass buttons. In winter they wore as
+much as a Quebec carter. They wore leather coats lined with flannel,
+edged with fur, and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went around
+their waists, their breeches were of smoked buckskin, reaching down to
+three pairs of blanket socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth
+leggins up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung from their
+necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped a shawl of Scotch plaid around
+their necks and shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap with
+ear-pieces.
+
+[Illustration: SETTING A MINK-TRAP]
+
+The French Canadians and "breeds," who were the _voyageurs_ and hunters,
+made a gay appearance. They used to wear the company's regulation light
+blue capotes, or coats, in winter, with flannel shirts, either red or
+blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at the knee with bead-work. They
+all wore gaudy worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings--covered
+with gayly-fringed leggins--fancy moccasins, and tuques, or
+feather-decked hats or caps bound with tinsel bands. In mild weather
+their costume was formed of a blue striped cotton shirt, corduroys, blue
+cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the inevitable sash or worsted
+belt, and moccasins. Every hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his
+neck, and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also as a pipe. As
+late as 1862, Viscount Milton and W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book,
+_The North-west Passage by Land_, in the following graphic language:
+
+    "The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay
+    sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded
+    garters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed)
+    women were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly
+    embroidered leggings and white moccasins of cariboo-skin
+    beautifully worked with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and
+    moose hair."
+
+The trading-room at an open post was--and is now--like a cross-roads
+store, having its shelves laden with every imaginable article that
+Indians like and hunters need--clothes, blankets, files, scalp-knives,
+gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, needles, scissors,
+knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, powder, and shot. An Indian who came
+in with furs threw them down, and when they were counted received the
+right number of castors--little pieces of wood which served as
+money--with which, after the hours of reflection an Indian spends at
+such a time, he bought what he wanted.
+
+But there was a wide difference between such a trading-room and one in
+the plains country, or where there were dangerous Indians--such as some
+of the Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, Sioux,
+Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places the Indians were let in
+only one or two at a time, the goods were hidden so as not to excite
+their cupidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross of iron,
+whose spaces were only large enough to pass a blanket, what they wanted
+was given to them. That is all done away with now, except it be in
+northern British Columbia, where the Indians have been turbulent.
+
+Farther on we shall perhaps see a band of Indians on their way to trade
+at a post. Their custom is to wait until the first signs of spring, and
+then to pack up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of the
+last of the snow and ice for the journey. They hunt from November to
+May; but the trapping and shooting of bears go on until the 15th of
+June, for those animals do not come from their winter dens until May
+begins. They come to the posts in their best attire, and in the old days
+that formed as strong a contrast to their present dress as their leather
+tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Ballantyne, who wrote a
+book about his service with the great fur company, says merely that they
+were painted, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in Lewis
+and Clarke's journal we read description after description of the brave
+costuming of these color-and-ornament-loving people. Take the Sioux, for
+instance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft of hair, and
+feathers hung from that. Instead of the universal blanket of to-day,
+their main garment was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and
+the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with figures of beasts
+and queer designs, and fringed with porcupine quills. They wore the fur
+side out only in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a shirt of
+dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under which the ends of a
+breech-clout of cloth, blanket stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore
+leggins of dressed antelope hide with scalp-locks fringing the seams,
+and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. They had necklaces of the
+teeth or claws of wild beasts, and each carried a fire-bag, a quiver,
+and a brightly painted shield, giving up the quiver and shield when guns
+came into use.
+
+The Indians who came to trade were admitted to the store precisely as
+voters are to the polls under the Australian system--one by one. They
+had to leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, each Indian had
+to surrender his knife before he got his tin cup.
+
+[Illustration: WOOD INDIANS COME TO TRADE]
+
+The company made great use of the Iroquois, and considered them the best
+boatmen in Canada. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company,
+employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific Ocean by way of the
+Peace and Fraser rivers, and when the greatest of Hudson Bay
+executives, Sir George Simpson, travelled, Iroquois always propelled
+him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian employés--a blue,
+gray, or blanket capote, very loose, and reaching below the knee, with a
+red worsted belt around the waist, a cotton shirt, no trousers, but
+artfully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, and moccasins over
+blanket socks. In winter they wore buckskin coats lined with flannel,
+and mittens were given to them. We have seen how the half-breeds were
+dressed. They were long employed at women's work in the forts, at making
+clothing and at mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer-skin
+coats, etc., were made by them. They were also the washer-women.
+
+Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old days, or thought he did.
+He had a wife and servants and babies, and when a visitor came, which
+was not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, he entertained
+like a lord. At first the factors used to send to London, to the head
+office, for a wife, to be added to the annual consignment of goods, and
+there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys for the sweethearts
+they left there. But in time the rule came to be that they married
+Indian squaws. In doing this, not even the first among them acted
+blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent companions of the Northwest
+and X. Y. companies began the custom, and the French _voyageurs_ and
+_coureurs du bois_ had mated with Indian women before there was a Hudson
+Bay Company. These rough and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of
+half-breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early day to
+settle near the trading-posts. Sometimes they established what might be
+called villages, but were really close imitations of Indian camps,
+composed of a cluster of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a swarm
+of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee was the fireplace, beneath
+the flue formed by the open top of the habitation, and around it were
+the beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable copper
+kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or moss bags, the women and
+dogs, the gun and paddle, and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging
+overhead in the smoke. This has not changed to-day; indeed, very little
+that I shall speak of has altered in the true or far fur country. The
+camps exist yet. They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more
+dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder to get; that is
+all.
+
+[Illustration: A VOYAGEUR OR CANOE-MAN OF GREAT SLAVE LAKE]
+
+The Europeans saw that these women were docile, or were kept in order
+easily by floggings with the tent poles; that they were faithful and
+industrious, as a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing--from
+their point of view, of course. Therefore it came to pass that these
+were the most frequent alliances in and out of the posts in all that
+country. The consequences of this custom were so peculiar and important
+that I must ask leave to pause and consider them. In Canada we see that
+the white man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother in the
+truest sense. The old _coureurs_ of Norman and Breton stock, loving a
+wild, free life, and in complete sympathy with the Indian, bought or
+took the squaws to wife, learned the Indian dialects, and shared their
+food and adventures with the tribes. As more and more entered the
+wilderness, and at last came to be supported, in camps and at posts and
+as _voyageurs_, by the competing fur companies, there grew up a class of
+half-breeds who spoke English and French, married Indians, and were as
+much at home with the savages as with the whites. From this stock the
+Hudson Bay men have had a better choice of wives for more than a
+century. But when these "breeds" were turbulent and murderous--first in
+the attacks on Selkirk's colony, and next during the Riel rebellion--the
+Indians remained quiet. They defined their position when, in 1819, they
+were tempted with great bribes to massacre the Red River colonists.
+"No," said they; "the colonists are our friends." The men who sought to
+excite them to murder were the officers of the Northwest Company, who
+bought furs of them, to be sure, but the colonists had shared with the
+Indians in poverty and plenty, giving now and taking then. All were
+alike to the red men--friends, white men, and of the race that had taken
+so many of their women to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to
+tell them what was being planned against them, and not from that day to
+this has an Indian band taken the war-path against the Canadians. I have
+read General Custer's theory that the United States had to do with
+meat-eating Indians, whereas the Canadian tribes are largely
+fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 references to the better Indian
+policy of Canada; but I can see no difference in the two policies, and
+between the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that Canada had the
+Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other fierce tribes of buffalo-hunters. It
+is in the slow, close-growing acquaintance between the two races, and in
+the just policy of the Hudson Bay men towards the Indians, that I see
+the reason for Canada's enviable experience with her red men.
+
+[Illustration: IN A STIFF CURRENT]
+
+But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble with the Indians in recent
+years, and one serious affair grew out of the relations between the
+company's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette even among
+savages, and this was ignored up at old Fort St. Johns, on the Peace
+River, with the result that the Indians slaughtered the people there and
+burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that region, and after
+they had massacred the men in charge, they met a boat-load of white men
+coming up the river with goods. To them they turned their guns also, and
+only four escaped. It was up in that country likewise--just this side
+of the Rocky Mountains, where the plains begin to be forested--that a
+silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and said to him,
+"Before you come back to this post again, your wife and child will be
+dead." He spoke hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose
+happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked into the fort the
+next spring and shot the clerk without a word.
+
+To-day the posts are little village-like collections of buildings,
+usually showing white against a green background in the prettiest way
+imaginable; for, as a rule, they cluster on the lower bank of a river,
+or the lower near shore of a lake. There are not clerks enough in most
+of them to render a clerks' house necessary, for at the little posts
+half-breeds are seen to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule,
+there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house and the factor's
+house, the canoe-house and the stable, with a barn where gardening is
+done, as is often the case when soil and climate permit. Often the
+fur-house and store are combined, the furs being laid in the upper story
+over the shop. There is always a flag-staff, of course. This and the
+flag, with the letters "H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunters'
+saying that the initials stood for "Here before Christ," because, no
+matter how far away from the frontier a man might go, in regions he
+fancied no white man had been, that flag and those letters stared him in
+the face. You will often find that the factor, rid of all the ancient
+timidity that called for "palisadoes and swivels," lives on the high
+upper bank above the store. The usual half-breed or Indian village is
+seldom farther than a couple of miles away, on the same water. The
+factor is still, as he always has been, responsible only to himself for
+the discipline and management of his post, and therefore among the
+factories we will find all sorts of homes--homes where a piano and the
+magazines are prized, and daughters educated abroad shed the lustre of
+refinement upon their surroundings, homes where no woman rules, and
+homes of the French half-breed type, which we shall see is a very
+different mould from that of the two sorts of British half-breed that
+are numerous. There never was a rule by which to gauge a post. In one
+you found religion valued and missionaries welcomed, while in others
+there never was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum met the rum of
+the free-traders, and in others no rum was bartered away. To-day, in
+this latter respect, the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be given
+or sold to the red man.
+
+When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hidden away in forest,
+mountain chain, or plain, or arctic barren, seeing the same very few
+faces year in and year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine once
+a year when the winter's furs are brought in, and once a year when the
+mail-packet arrives--when one thinks of their isolation, and lack of
+most of those influences which we in our walks prize the highest, the
+reason for their choosing that company's service seems almost
+mysterious. Yet they will tell you there is a fascination in it. This
+could be understood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians were
+concerned, for they inherited the liking; and, after all, though most of
+them are only laborers, no other laborers are so free, and none spice
+life with so much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men of
+ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy responsible positions,
+and at better salaries. However, from the outset the rule has been that
+they have become as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and
+sailors always have of theirs. They have usually retired from it
+reluctantly, and some, having gone home to Europe, have begged leave to
+return.
+
+The company has always been managed upon something like a military
+basis. Perhaps the original necessity for forts and men trained to the
+use of arms suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with the rest.
+The lowest rank in the service is that of the laborer, who may happen to
+fish or hunt at times, but is employed--or enlisted, as the fact is, for
+a term of years--to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a porter or gardener,
+and labor generally about the post. The interpreter was usually a
+promoted laborer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians and whites
+alike, met each other half-way in the matter of language. The highest
+non-commissioned rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large
+posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small outposts, and we read
+that they were "on terms of equality with gentlemen." To-day the service
+has lost these fine points, and the laborers and commissioned officers
+are sharply separated. The so-called "gentleman" begins as a prentice
+clerk, and after a few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to
+the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through the grades of chief
+trader, factor, and chief factor, to the office of chief commissioner,
+or resident American manager, chosen by the London board, and having
+full powers delegated to him. A clerk--or "clark," as the rank is
+called--may never touch a pen. He may be a trader. Then again he may be
+truly an accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, and that
+entitles him to a minimum guarantee, with a conditional extra income
+based on the profits of the fur trade. Men get promotions through the
+chief commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather than
+seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are salaried for a term of
+years, the original pension fund and system having been broken up.
+
+Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the company, made his way
+to the highest post from the place of a prentice clerk. He came from
+Scotland as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to be sent
+to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as much out of both the world
+and contact with the heart of the company as it is possible to be. The
+military system was felt in that instance; but every man who accepts a
+commission engages to hold himself in readiness to go cheerfully to the
+north pole, or anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Charlotte
+Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's parts no obstacle is more
+than a temporary impediment. Though he stayed something like seventeen
+years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there was work to do, and
+in his own time he read and studied voraciously. When the Riel
+rebellion--the first one--disturbed the country's peace, he appeared on
+the scene as commissioner for the Government. Next he became chief
+commissioner for the Hudson Bay Company. After a time he resigned that
+office to go on the board in London, and thence he stepped easily to the
+governorship. His parents, whose home was in Morayshire, Scotland, gave
+him at his birth, in 1821, not only a constitution of iron, but that
+shrewdness which is only Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable
+fore-sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex situations as to
+amaze his associates.
+
+[Illustration: VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE]
+
+Of course his career is almost as singular as his gifts, and the
+governorship can scarcely be said to be the goal of the general
+ambition, for it has been most apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary
+promotion in the company is very slow, and it follows that most men live
+out their existence between the rank of clerk and that of chief factor.
+There are 200 central posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the
+officers are continually travelling from one to another, some in their
+districts, and the chief or supervising ones over vast reaches of
+country. In winter, when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a
+rule, and it has been nothing for a man to trudge 1000 miles in that way
+on a winter's journey. Roderick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the
+world up in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable explorer,
+and made most of his journeys on snow-shoes. He explored the Peel, the
+Liard, and the Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went far
+within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the most northerly post of
+the company. By the regular packet from Calgary, near our border, to the
+northernmost post is a 3000-mile journey. Macfarlane was fond of the
+study of ornithology, and classified and catalogued all the birds that
+reach the frozen regions.
+
+I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hudson Bay who reads his
+daily newspaper every morning with his coffee--but of course such an
+instance is a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set of the
+London _Times_ sent to him by each winter's packet, and each morning the
+paper of that date in the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his
+servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the press, and spread
+by the factor's plate. Thus he gets for half an hour each day a taste of
+his old habit and life at home.
+
+There was another factor who developed artistic capacity, and spent his
+leisure at drawing and painting. He did so well that he ventured many
+sketches for the illustrated papers of London, some of which were
+published.
+
+The half-breed has developed with the age and growth of Canada. There
+are now half-breeds and half-breeds, and some of them are titled, and
+others hold high official places. It occurred to an English lord not
+long ago, while he was being entertained in a Government house in one of
+the parts of newer Canada, to inquire of his host, "What are these
+half-breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one looks like." His
+host took the nobleman's breath away by his reply. "I am one," said he.
+There is no one who has travelled much in western Canada who has not now
+and then been entertained in homes where either the man or woman of the
+household was of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a high
+degree of refinement and the most polished manners. Usually one needs
+the information that such persons possess such blood. After that the
+peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the subject of such
+gossip attest the truthfulness of the assertion. There is no rule for
+measuring the character and quality of this plastic, receptive, and
+often very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one may say
+broadly that the social position and attainments of these people have
+been greatly influenced by the nationality of their fathers. For
+instance, the French _habitants_ and woodsmen far, far too often sank to
+the level of their wives when they married Indian women. Light-hearted,
+careless, unambitious, and drifting to the wilderness because of the
+absence of restraint there; illiterate, of coarse origin, fond of
+whiskey and gambling--they threw off superiority to the Indian, and
+evaded responsibility and concern in home management. Of course this is
+not a rule, but a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and English
+forced their wives up to their own standards. Their own home training,
+respect for more than the forms of religion, their love of home and of a
+permanent patch of ground of their own--all these had their effect, and
+that has been to rear half-breed children in proud and comfortable
+homes, to send them to mix with the children of cultivated persons in
+old communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition and cultivation
+for an equal start in the journey of life. Possessing such foundation
+for it, the equality has happily never been denied to them in Canada.
+
+[Illustration: VOYAGEURS IN CAMP FOR THE NIGHT]
+
+To-day the service is very little more inviting than in the olden time.
+The loneliness and removal from the touch of civilization remain
+throughout a vast region; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe remain;
+the dangers of flood and frost are undiminished. Unfortunately, among
+the changes made by time, one is that which robs the present factor's
+surroundings of a great part of that which was most picturesque. Of all
+the prettinesses of the Indian costuming one sees now only a trace here
+and there in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and tepee, and in
+some only the moccasin, remain. The birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe
+are the main reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been
+impressed into parts of the service, and most of the descendants of the
+old-time _voyageur_ preserve only his worsted belt, his knife, and his
+cap and moccasins at the utmost. In places the _engagé_ has become a
+mere deck-hand. His scarlet paddle has rotted away; he no longer awakens
+the echoes of forest or cañon with _chansons_ that died in the throats
+of a generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of intertribal war
+and of a precarious foothold among fierce and turbulent bands have
+nearly vanished; but there was a spice in them that added to the
+fascination of the service.
+
+The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of the Hudson Bay
+outfit. One does not need to go very deep into western Canada to meet
+with them. As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on Lake
+Superior, the only roads into the north are the rivers and lakes,
+traversed by canoes in summer and sleds in winter. The dogs are of a
+peculiar breed, and are called "huskies"--undoubtedly a corruption of
+the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer resemblance to the wolf than
+any of our domesticated dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that
+scavenger of the wilderness in their nature as well as their looks.
+To-day their females, if tied and left in the forest, will often attest
+companionship with its denizens by bringing forth litters of wolfish
+progeny. Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with whom the
+experiment is tried, for the wolves will be apt to bring food to them as
+long as they are thus neglected by man. They are often as large as the
+ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are shorter, and even more
+hairy, and the hair along their necks, from their shoulders to their
+skulls, stands erect in a thick, bristling mass. They have the long
+snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves, and their cry is a
+yelp rather than a bark. Like wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at
+sunrise and at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful animals,
+setting their own numbers against one, and they will kill cows, or even
+children, if they get the chance. They are disciplined only when at
+work, and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and industrious
+as to plainly show that though their nature is savage and wolfish, they
+could be reclaimed by domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them
+are. As it is, in their packs, their battles among themselves are
+terrible, and they are dangerous when loose. In some districts it is the
+custom to turn them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes,
+leaving them to hunger or feast according as the supply of dead fish
+thrown upon the shore is small or plentiful. When they are kept in dog
+quarters they are simply penned up and fed during the summer, so that
+the savage side of their nature gets full play during long periods. Fish
+is their principal diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their
+winter food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a wolf or an
+Indian, a "husky" gets along without food when there is not any, and
+will eat his own weight of it when it is plenty.
+
+A typical dog-sled is very like a toboggan. It is formed of two thin
+pieces of oak or birch lashed together with buckskin thongs and turned
+up high in front. It is usually about nine feet in length by sixteen
+inches wide. A leather cord is run along the outer edges for fastening
+whatever may be put upon the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are
+harnessed to such sleds, but the usual number is four. Traces, collars,
+and backbands form the harness, and the dogs are hitched one before the
+other. Very often the collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells,
+and sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with beads, tassels,
+fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore-goer, is always the best in the
+team. The dog next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is
+named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful animals are treated
+harshly, if not brutally. It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who
+cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three
+profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever
+has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself,
+as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian
+obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the
+driver, or mock-passenger, runs behind the dogs. The main function of
+the sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent-covers,
+blankets, food, and the like. The men run along with or behind the dogs,
+on snow-shoes, and when the dogs make better time than horses are able
+to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over daily distances of
+from 20 to 35 miles, according to the condition of the ice or snow, and
+that many a journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this way, and
+some of 2000 miles, the test of human endurance is as great as that of
+canine grit.
+
+Men travelling "light," with extra sleds for the freight, and men on
+short journeys often ride in the sleds, which in such cases are fitted
+up as "carioles" for the purpose. I have heard an unauthenticated
+account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove themselves, disciplining
+refractory or lazy dogs by simply pulling them in beside or over the
+dash-board, and holding them down by the neck while they thrashed them.
+A story is told of a worthy bishop who complained of the slow progress
+his sled was making, and was told that it was useless to complain, as
+the dogs would not work unless they were roundly and incessantly cursed.
+After a time the bishop gave his driver absolution for the profanity
+needed for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth sped over the
+snow at a gallop, every stroke of the half-breed's long and cruel whip
+being sent home with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times with
+peltings with sharp-edged bits of ice. Kane, the explorer, made an
+average of 57 miles a day behind these shaggy little brutes. Milton and
+Cheadle, in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 140 miles
+in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of Rupert's Land told me he had
+covered 20 miles in a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day,
+without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fatigue. The best time
+is made on hard snow and ice, of course, and when the conditions suit,
+the drivers whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs more
+easily. In view of what they do, it is no wonder that many of the
+Northern Indians, upon first seeing horses, named them simply "big dog."
+But to me the performances of the drivers are the more wonderful. It was
+a white youth, son of a factor, who ran behind the bishop's dogs in
+the spurt of 40 miles by daylight that I mention. The men who do such
+work explain that the "lope" of the dogs is peculiarly suited to the
+dog-trot of a human being.
+
+[Illustration: "HUSKIE" DOGS ON THE FROZEN HIGHWAY]
+
+A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or of a chief factor
+racing through a great district, will now be intelligible. If he is
+riding, he fancies that princes and lords would envy him could they see
+his luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of the best pattern--a
+little suggestive of a burial casket, to be sure, in its shape, but
+gaudily painted, and so full of soft warm furs that the man within is
+enveloped like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Perhaps there are Russian bells
+on the collars of the dogs, and their harness is "Frenchified" with
+bead-work and tassels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp and
+invigorating, and before him the lake or stream over which he rides is a
+sheet of virgin snow--not nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot
+love nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful ermine fringed and
+embroidered with dark evergreen, and that in turn flecked at every point
+with snow, as if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with his
+driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping
+over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle
+the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by
+the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If
+silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of
+foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer
+hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To
+him these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegraphers, and as
+important as stock quotations to the pallid men of Wall Street.
+
+Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. Time was that his
+predecessors would have stopped to discuss the situation and its
+dangers, for the sight of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and
+the question came, were these friendly or fierce? But now the sled
+hurries on. It is only an Indian or half-breed hunter minding his traps,
+of which he may have a sufficient number to give him a circuit of ten or
+more miles away from and back to his lodge or village. He is approached
+and hailed by the driver, and with some pretty name very often--one that
+may mean in English "hawk flying across the sky when the sun is
+setting," or "blazing sun," or whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a
+village is the next object of interest; not a village in our sense of
+the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peeping above the brush
+beside the water, the eye being led to them by the signs of slothful
+disorder close by--the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty
+tattered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam bath, such as
+Indians resort to when tired or sick or uncommonly dirty, the worn-out
+snow-shoes hung on a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat
+here and there. A dog rushes down to the water-side barking
+furiously--an Indian dog of the currish type of paupers' dogs the world
+around--and this stirs the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who
+are addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by some poetic names,
+albeit poetic license is sometimes strained to form names not at all
+pretty to polite senses, "All Stomach" being that of one dusky princess,
+and serving to indicate the lengths to which poesy may lead the
+untrammelled mind.
+
+The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be journeying in the West and
+be a lover of nature, heaven send that his face be turned towards the
+sunset! Then, be the sky anything but completely storm-draped, he will
+see a sight so glorious that eloquence becomes a naked suppliant for
+alms beyond the gift of language when set to describe it. A few clouds
+are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on celestial dyes,
+and one sees, above the vanished sun, a blaze of golden yellow thinned
+into a tone that is luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and
+breasts of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards the zenith into a
+rose tone that has body at the base, but pales at top into a mere blush.
+This I have seen night after night on the lakes and the plains and on
+the mountains. But as the glory of it beckons the traveller ever towards
+itself, so the farther he follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be
+his reward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters are more and
+more enriched, until, at the Pacific, even San Francisco's shabby
+sand-hills stir poetry and reverence in the soul by their borrowed
+magnificence.
+
+The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, and while the "breed"
+falls to at the laborious but quick and simple work, the factor either
+helps or smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would have set his
+man to bobbing for jack-fish or lake trout, or would have stopped a
+while to bag a partridge, or might have bought whatever of this sort the
+trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one, this meal would be
+of bacon and bread or dried meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as
+would bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem ethereal and
+delicious in the wilderness, particularly if made half an inch thick,
+saturated with grease, well browned, and eaten while at the temperature
+and consistency of molten lava.
+
+[Illustration: THE FACTOR'S FANCY TOBOGGAN]
+
+The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is cleared for a fire,
+wood and brush are cut, and the deft laborer starts the flame in a
+tent-like pyramid of kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This
+tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has constructed and led up
+to a conflagration of logs as thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with
+a backlog and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the hottest part
+to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The dogs will have needed
+disciplining long before this, and if the driver be like many of his
+kind, and works himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one
+and send his teeth together through its hide after he has beaten it
+until he is tired. The point of order having thus been raised and
+carried, the shaggy, often handsome, animals will be minded to forget
+their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on their haunches, with
+their intelligent faces towards the fire, will watch the cooking
+intently. The pocket-knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to
+be the only table implement in use at the meal. Canada had reached the
+possession of seigniorial mansions of great character before any
+other knife was brought to table, though the ladies used costly blades
+set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the axe ranks the knife in
+the wilderness, but he who has a knife can make and furnish his own
+table--and his house also, for that matter.
+
+Supper over, and a glass of grog having been put down, with water from
+the hole in the ice whence the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten,
+the night's rest is begun. The method for this varies. As good men as
+ever walked have asked nothing more cosey than a snug warm trough in the
+snow and a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will call for a
+shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the furs out of the sled for his
+covering. If nicer yet, he may order a low hollow chamber of three sides
+of banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks and cross-poles,
+with canvas thrown over it. Every man to his quality, of course, and
+that of the servant calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as
+soundly as if he were Santa Claus and only stirred once a year. Then
+will fall upon what seems the whole world the mighty hush of the
+wilderness, broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the cry of a
+wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on the lake, or the snoring of
+the men and dogs. But if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The
+magic shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up over that
+North country, sending its shifting lights weaving across the firmament
+with a tremulous brilliancy and energy we in this country get but pale
+hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flashing and palpitating
+incessantly, the rose-tinted waves and luminous white bars leap across
+the sky or dart up and down it in manner so fantastic and so forceful,
+even despite their shadowy thinness, that travellers have fancied
+themselves deaf to some seraphic sound that they believed such commotion
+must produce.
+
+An incident of this typical journey I am describing would, at more than
+one season, be a meeting with some band of Indians going to a post with
+furs for barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their quarry in
+the spring and early summer, some may come at any time. The procession
+may be only that of a family or of the two or more families that live
+together or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one group, is certain
+to be stalking ahead, carrying nothing but his gun. Then come the women,
+laden like pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the furs and
+drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog may bear a balanced load on his
+back, but the squaw is certain to have a spine-warping burden of meat
+and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever personal property of
+any and every sort she and her liege lord own. Children who can walk
+have to do so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and a half or
+two years old is on her back, while a newborn infant, swaddled in
+blanket stuff, and bagged and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the
+load on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a band of these
+pauperized savages form it would be difficult to imagine. On the plains
+they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women
+and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two running loose, the
+lordly men riding free, straggling curs a plenty, babies in arms, babies
+swaddled, and toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at its
+exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, distorted pots and
+pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, in all eloquently suggestive of an
+eviction in the slums of a great city.
+
+I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out of the necessity of
+truth-telling. The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the
+subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find
+him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race
+have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the
+continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is,
+as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and
+turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from
+freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make
+us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile; taught, aye, forced
+to beg, mocked at by a religion he cannot understand, from the mouths of
+men who apparently will not understand him; debauched with rum,
+despoiled by the lust of white men in every form that lust can take. Ah,
+it is a sickening story. Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern
+wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who have been in such
+pitiful stress for food and covering that the Hudson Bay Company has
+kept them alive with advances of provisions and blankets winter after
+winter. They are Indians who in their strength never gave the
+Government the concern it now fails to show for their weakness. The
+great fur company has thus added generosity to its long career of just
+dealing with these poor adult children; for it is a fact that though the
+company has made what profit it might, it has not, in a century at
+least, cheated the Indians, or made false representations to them, or
+lost their good-will and respect by any feature of its policy towards
+them. Its relation to them has been paternal, and they owe none of their
+degradation to it.
+
+[Illustration: HALT OF A YORK BOAT BRIGADE FOR THE NIGHT]
+
+I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the posts. There are two
+other arrivals of great consequence--the coming of the supplies, and of
+the winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions and trade goods
+being put up in bales in the great mercantile storehouse of the company
+in Winnipeg--a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue ladies' bazaar
+and one of our wholesale grocers' shops--and I have seen such weights of
+canned vegetables and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other
+luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is good living on high
+days and holidays if not always. The stores are packed in parcels
+averaging sixty pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them
+convenient for handling on the portages--"for packing them over the
+carries," as our traders used to say. It is in following these supplies
+that we become most keenly sensible of the changes time has wrought in
+the methods of the company. The day was, away back in the era of the
+Northwest Company, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa
+from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy _voyageurs_ in picturesque
+costumes, wielding scarlet paddles, and stirring the forests with their
+happy songs. The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the centre of
+the trade moved from old Fort William, close to where Port Arthur now is
+on Lake Superior, up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. Then
+the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, more picturesque than
+ever, and manning the great York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept
+in a long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, and thence by a
+marvellous water route all the way to the Rockies and the Arctic,
+sending off freight for side districts at fixed points along the course.
+The main factories on this line, maintained as such for more than a
+century, bear names whose very mention stirs the blood of one who knows
+the romantic, picturesque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old
+company when it was the landlord (in part, and in part monopolist) of a
+territory that cut into our Northwest and Alaska, and swept from
+Labrador to Vancouver Island. Northward and westward, by waters emptying
+into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats worked through a region
+embroidered with sheets and ways of water. The system that was next
+entered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends and bulges with
+lakes and straits like a ribbon all curved and knotted. Thus, at a great
+portage, the divide was reached and crossed; and so the waters flowing
+to the Arctic, and one--the Peace River--rising beyond the Rockies, were
+met and travelled. This was the way and the method until after the
+Canadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winnipeg route is of
+subordinate importance, and feeds only the region near the west side of
+Hudson Bay. The Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in
+Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton railroad. From Edmonton the
+goods go by cart to Athabasca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat,
+which takes them northward until some rapids are met, and avoided by the
+use of a singular combination of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow
+progress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and thence they
+follow the Athabasca, through Athabasca Lake, and so on up to a second
+rapids, on the Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts carry
+them across a sixteen-mile portage to a screw steamer, which finishes
+the 3000-mile journey to the North. Of course the shorter branch routes,
+distributing the goods on either side of the main track, are still
+traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in the old way, but with shabby
+accessories of costume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come to a
+portage, produce their tomplines, and "pack" the goods to the next
+waterway. By means of these "lines" they carry great weights, resting on
+their backs, but supported from their skulls, over which the strong
+straps are passed.
+
+The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in the depth of the
+season, goes to all the posts by dog train. The letters and papers are
+packed in great boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind which
+the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes and pelting and cursing
+the dogs. A more direct course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has
+usually been followed by this packet; but it is thought that the route
+_via_ Edmonton and Athabasca Landing will serve better yet, so that
+another change may be made. This is a small exhibition as compared with
+the brigade that takes the supplies, or those others that come plashing
+down the streams and across the country with the furs every year. But
+only fancy how eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for! It
+is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of all North America. It
+cuts a tiny trail, and here and there lesser black dots move off from it
+to cut still slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and
+lesser posts; but we may be sure that if human eyes could see so far,
+all those of the white men in all that vast tangled system of trading
+centres would be watching the little caravan, until at last each pair
+fell upon the expected missives from the throbbing world this side of
+the border.
+
+
+
+
+  VIII
+
+  CANADA'S EL DORADO
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There is on this continent a territory of imperial extent which is one
+of the Canadian sisterhood of States, and yet of which small account has
+been taken by those who discuss either the most advantageous relations
+of trade or that closer intimacy so often referred to as a possibility
+in the future of our country and its northern neighbor. Although British
+Columbia is advancing in rank among the provinces of the Dominion by
+reason of its abundant natural resources, it is not remarkable that we
+read and hear little concerning it. The people in it are few, and the
+knowledge of it is even less in proportion. It is but partially
+explored, and for what can be learned of it one must catch up
+information piecemeal from blue-books, the pamphlets of scientists, from
+tales of adventure, and from the less trustworthy literature composed to
+attract travellers and settlers.
+
+It would severely strain the slender facts to make a sizable pamphlet of
+the history of British Columbia. A wandering and imaginative Greek
+called Juan de Fuca told his people that he had discovered a passage
+from ocean to ocean between this continent and a great island in the
+Pacific. Sent there to seize and fortify it, he disappeared--at least
+from history. This was about 1592. In 1778 Captain Cook roughly surveyed
+the coast, and in 1792 Captain Vancouver, who as a boy had been with
+Cook on two voyages, examined the sound between the island and the
+main-land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the main water
+system of the interior. He gave to the strait at the entrance the
+nickname of the Greek, and in the following year received the transfer
+of authority over the country from the Spanish commissioner Bodega of
+Quadra, then established there. The two put aside false modesty, and
+named the great island "the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." At the time
+the English sailor was there it chanced that he met that hardy old
+homespun baronet Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross
+the continent, making the astonishing journey in a canoe manned by
+Iroquois Indians. The main-land became known as New Caledonia. It took
+its present name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, got its
+name from the ship _Columbia_, of Boston, Captain Gray, which entered
+its mouth in 1792, long after the Spaniards had known the stream and
+called it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The region passed into
+the hands of the fur-traders. Vancouver Island became a crown colony in
+1849, and British Columbia followed in 1858. They were united in 1866,
+and joined the Canadian confederation in 1871. Three years later the
+province exceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in the value of
+its exports, and also showed an excess of exports over imports. It has a
+Lieutenant-governor and Legislative assembly, and is represented at
+Ottawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its people have been more
+closely related to ours in business than those of any other province,
+and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the
+larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as
+a holiday.
+
+British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the
+combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the
+Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is
+larger than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire joined
+together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to
+be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery
+halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this
+necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be,
+and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the
+popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its
+present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and
+yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies
+beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of latitude
+has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent
+civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American
+Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes
+despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of
+perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the
+same parallels of latitude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we
+shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two shores
+of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California
+from Massachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world
+we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as
+England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the
+interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New
+England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching
+claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.
+
+British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and averages 400 miles in
+width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast
+earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In
+fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges,
+the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the
+Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose
+upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the
+main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of
+the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our
+North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700
+miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the
+Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser
+agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral
+possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the
+case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the
+territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered
+marketable.
+
+The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies,
+but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth.
+Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors,"
+have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity.
+But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high
+plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow
+fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the
+Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following
+the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows
+less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by
+valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and
+watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing
+land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the
+north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts
+of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the
+Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of
+the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the Pacific,
+lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets,
+which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islands, and receive the
+discharge of almost as many streams and rivers--a wondrously beautiful
+region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish
+exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of
+mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are
+parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have
+found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of
+metals, whose value industry has not yet established.
+
+It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white
+inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It
+is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field
+and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the
+miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the
+immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild,
+and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours
+the traveller sees, across the majestic cañon of the Fraser, the
+neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of
+the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony,
+for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the
+Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles
+away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian
+village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most
+part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys
+covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascades, turbulent streams,
+and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now
+he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an
+Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a
+canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily
+west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.
+
+But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power
+to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part,
+lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-grass valleys in the south he would
+see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man.
+A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country,
+where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been
+taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and
+there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash
+of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of
+an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale,
+and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of
+Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of
+larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near
+Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo
+(lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close
+together, he would see more than half the population of the province.
+
+[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA]
+
+Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the
+territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay
+Company, where the endless forests and multitudinous lakes and streams
+are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost
+one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only
+true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the
+fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either
+washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that
+penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but
+companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then,
+hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else
+there is a can for between-times!
+
+A very strange sight that my supposititious traveller would pause long
+to look at would be the herds of wild horses that defy the Queen, her
+laws, and her subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands of
+them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin country, on either side
+of the Fraser, north of Washington State. They were originally of good
+stock, but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable grass, and
+spoil every horse turned out to graze. The newspapers aver that the
+Government must soon be called upon to devise means for ridding the
+valleys of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which promise
+well for future stock-raising and agricultural operations. There are
+plenty such. The Nicola Valley has been settled twenty years, and there
+are many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good land, but rather
+high for grain, and needs irrigation. The snowfall varies greatly in all
+these valleys, but in ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well
+with four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, a valley eight
+to ten miles wide, ranching began a quarter of a century ago, during the
+gold excitement. The "cow-men" raise grain for themselves there. This
+valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Valley is lower, and is only from
+two to five miles wide, but both are of similar character, of very great
+length, and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. The greater
+part of the Okanagon does not need irrigating. A beautiful country is
+the Kettle River region, along the boundary between the Columbia and the
+Okanagon. It is narrow, but flat and smooth on the bottom, and the land
+is very fine. Bunch-grass covers the hills around it for a distance of
+from four hundred to five hundred feet, and there timber begins. It is
+only in occasional years that the Kettle River Valley needs water. In
+the Spallumcheen Valley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer,
+and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use there. These are
+mere notes of a few among almost innumerable valleys that are clothed
+with bunch-grass, and that often possess the characteristics of
+beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, possibly in most of
+them. I have notes of the successful growth of peaches, and of the
+growth of almond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, both
+in the Okanagon country.
+
+The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to those who are fond of
+the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, prairie-chicken, and partridges abound
+in them. In all probability there is no similar extent of country that
+equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, in the winter of 1888,
+between six and eight tons of deer-skins were shipped by local traders,
+the result of legitimate hunting. But the forests and mountains are as
+they were when the white man first saw them, and though the beaver and
+sea-otter, the marten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the
+rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest of the game is
+most plentiful. On the Rockies and on the Coast Range the mountain-goat,
+most difficult of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant
+yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so common, but the
+hunting thereof is usually successful if good guides are obtained. The
+cougar, the grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and
+brown bears are very numerous. Elk are going the way of the
+"big-horn"--are preceding that creature, in fact. Pheasants (imported),
+grouse, quail, and water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the
+river and lake fishing is such as is not approached in any other part of
+the Dominion. The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big
+game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone
+the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province
+is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth
+will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing
+eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances,
+their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere
+can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, king of all the beasts,
+which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest,
+and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom
+turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that
+gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the
+others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is
+the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.
+
+From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained
+the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station.
+It makes a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and is as
+follows: Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, badger, foxes (silver,
+cross, and red), fishers, martens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea
+or land), panther, raccoon, wolves (black, gray, and coyote),
+black-tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of an ox, and
+found on the hills of Vancouver Island), caribou or reindeer, hares,
+mountain-goat, big-horn (or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies),
+wood-buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from the bison,
+but larger), geese, swans, and duck.
+
+The British Columbian Indians are of such unprepossessing appearance
+that one hears with comparative equanimity of their numbering only
+20,000 in all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing principally to the
+vices of their women. They are, for the most part, canoe Indians, in the
+interior as well as on the coast, and they are (as one might suppose a
+nation of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those limbs small
+and inclined to bow. On the other hand, their exercise with the paddle
+has given them a disproportionate development of their shoulders and
+chests, so that, being too large above and too small below, their
+appearance is very peculiar. They are fish-eaters the year around; and
+though some, like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike and
+turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in the interior. It was
+the meat-eating Indian who made war a vocation and self-torture a
+dissipation. The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These short
+squat British Columbian natives are very dark-skinned, and have
+physiognomies so different from those of the Indians east of the Rockies
+that the study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into
+extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a contention which I
+prefer to avoid. It is not guessing to say that their high check-bones
+and flat faces make them resemble the Chinese. That is true to such a
+degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, and meeting alternate
+Chinamen and Siwash, it is not always easy to say which is which, unless
+one proceeds upon the assumption that if a man looks clean he is apt to
+be a Chinaman, whereas if he is dirty and ragged he is most likely to be
+a Siwash.
+
+You will find that seven in ten among the more intelligent British
+Columbians conclude these Indians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese
+current is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted Japanese junks
+to these shores. When the first traders visited the neighborhood of the
+mouth of the Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the vestiges
+of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of a junk was met with, and
+12,000 pounds of this wax was found on her. Whalers are said to have
+frequently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in the eastern
+Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 1834 remnants of a junk with
+three Japanese and a cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of
+Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should excuse even a
+rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a reflection upon the Japanese, for
+these Indians are so far from pretty that all who see them agree with
+Captain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that "if they are of the
+Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians change their type the better."
+
+[Illustration: THE TSCHUMMUM, OR TOOL USED IN MAKING CANOES]
+
+The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their dugouts do not always
+come off second best in racing with the boats of white men. With a
+primitive yet ingeniously made tool, like an adze, in the construction
+of which a blade is tied fast to a bent handle of bone, these natives
+laboriously pick out the heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer
+sides into the form of a boat. When the log is properly hollowed, they
+fill it with water, and then drop in stones which they have heated in a
+fire. Thus they steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and fit
+in the crossbars which keep it strong and preserve its shape. These
+dugouts are sometimes sixty feet long, and are used for whaling and long
+voyages in rough seas. They are capable of carrying tons of the salmon
+or oolachan or herring, of which these people, who live as their fathers
+did, catch sufficient in a few days for their maintenance throughout a
+whole year. One gets an idea of the swarms of fish that infest those
+waters by the knowledge that before nets were used the herring and the
+oolachan, or candle-fish were swept into these boats by an implement
+formed by studding a ten-foot pole with spikes or nails. This was swept
+among the fish in the water, and the boats were speedily filled with the
+creatures that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea-otter, otter,
+beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou or moose) were and still are
+the chief resources of most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and
+the peltry to the Hudson Bay Company, and ate what parts or surplus they
+did not sell. Now they work in the canneries or fish for them in summer,
+and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, while they still
+fish and sell furs, and while some are yet as their fathers were, nearly
+all the coast Indians are semi-civilized. They have at least the white
+man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have churches; they live in
+houses; they work in canneries. What little there was that was
+picturesque about them has vanished only a few degrees faster than their
+own extinction as a pure race, and they are now a lot of longshoremen.
+What Mr. Duncan did for them in Metlakahtla--especially in housing the
+families separately--has not been arrived at even in the reservation at
+Victoria, where one may still see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses
+they prefer, ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight
+families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for which no one can
+hold the white man responsible.
+
+They are a tractable people, and take as kindly to the rudiments of
+civilization, to work, and to co-operation with the whites as the plains
+Indian does to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically but not
+mentally inferior to the plainsman. They carve bowls and spoons of stone
+and bone, and their heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however
+grotesque they may be. They still make them, but they oftener carve
+little ones for white people, just as they make more silver bracelets
+for sale than for wear. They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar
+bark into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In a word,
+they were more prone to work at the outset than most Indians, so that
+the present longshore career of most of them is not greatly to be
+wondered at.
+
+To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or
+journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the
+mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes
+impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the
+majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded
+food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not
+well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since
+then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them
+terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scenery which all
+travellers in the province remember. From the railroad they may be seen
+along the Fraser, each grave apparently having a shed built over it, and
+a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. They had various burial
+customs, but a majority buried their dead in this way, with
+queerly-carved or painted sticks above them, where the cross now
+testifies to the work at the "missions." Some Indians marked a man's
+burial-place with his canoe and his gun; some still box their dead and
+leave the boxes on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. Among
+the southern tribes a man's horse was often killed, and its skin decked
+the man's grave; while in the far north it was the custom among the
+Stickeens to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when he died.
+The Indians along the Skeena River cremated their dead, and sometimes
+hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem pole. The Hydahs, the fierce
+natives of certain of the islands, have given up cremation, but they
+used to believe that if they did not burn a man's body their enemies
+would make charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, and
+monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was due to the difference in
+the worldly wealth of the Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and
+the woodsmen could only afford one apiece.
+
+To return to their canoes, which most distinguish them. When a dugout is
+hollowed and steamed, a prow and stern are added of separate wood. The
+prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies the boat. It is in
+form like the breast, neck, and bill of a bird, but the head is intended
+to represent that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth is cut
+into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are painted on the sides; bands
+of gay paint are put upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat
+is then painted red or black, with an ornamental line of another color
+along the edge or gunwale. The sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat,
+and propel it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, with
+their fierce heads uplifted before their long, slender bodies, appear
+like great serpents or nondescript marine monsters, yet they are pretty
+and graceful withal. While still holding aloof from the ethnologists'
+contention, I yet may add that a bookseller in Victoria came into the
+possession of a packet of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in
+the interior of China, and on my first visit to the province, nearly
+four years ago, I found, in looking through these views, several Chinese
+boats which were strangely and remarkably like the dugouts of the
+provincial Indians. They were too small in the pictures for it to be
+possible to decide whether they were built up or dug out, but in general
+they were of the same external appearance, and each one bore the
+upraised animal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I could see one
+block away from the bookseller's shop in Victoria. But such are not the
+canoes used by the Indians of the interior. From the Kootenay near our
+border to the Cassiar in the far north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be
+the general native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a sort of
+scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dugouts made of cotton-wood logs.
+They are narrower than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the
+birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, and fit for the
+most dangerous and deft work in threading the rapids which everywhere
+cut up the navigation of the streams of the province into separated
+reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes upon a journey in this
+province, likens these canoes to horse-troughs, but those I saw in the
+Kootenay country were of the shape of those cigars that are pointed at
+both ends.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST OF THE SALMON RUN, FRASER RIVER]
+
+Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or China or Japan, I do not
+know. My only quest for special information of that character proved
+disappointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is said to have
+studied such matters more deeply and to more purpose than all the
+others, but those who referred me to him cautioned me that he was
+eccentric.
+
+"You don't know where these Indians came from, eh?" the _savant_ replied
+to my first question. "Do you know how oyster-shells got on top of the
+Rocky Mountains? You don't, eh? Well, I know a woman who went to a
+dentist's yesterday to have eighteen teeth pulled. Do you know why women
+prefer artificial teeth to those which God has given them? You don't,
+eh? Why, man, you don't know anything."
+
+While we were--or he was--conversing, a laboring-man who carried a
+sickle came to the open door, and was asked what he wanted.
+
+"I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he.
+
+"Thistles?" said the _savant_, disturbed at the interruption. "---- the
+thistles! We are talking about Indians."
+
+Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had left the subject of
+thistles uppermost in the _savant's_ mind, and the conversation took so
+erratic a turn that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard into
+_Tristram Shandy_.
+
+"About thistles," said the _savant_, laying a gentle hand upon my knee.
+"Do you know that they are the Scotchmen's totems? Many years ago a
+Scotchman, sundered from his native land, must needs set up his totem, a
+thistle, here in this country; and now, sir, the thistle is such a curse
+that I am haled up twice a year and fined for having them in my yard."
+
+But nearly enough has been here said of the native population. Though
+the Indians boast dozens of tribal names, and almost every island on the
+coast and village in the interior seems the home of a separate tribe,
+they will be found much alike--dirty, greasy, sore-eyed, short-legged,
+and with their unkempt hair cut squarely off, as if a pot had been
+upturned over it to guide the operation. The British Columbians do not
+bother about their tribal divisions, but use the old traders' Chinook
+terms, and call every male a "siwash" and every woman a "klootchman."
+
+Since the highest Canadian authority upon the subject predicts that the
+northern half of the Cordilleran ranges will admit of as high a
+metalliferous development as that of the southern half in our Pacific
+States, it is important to review what has been done in mining, and what
+is thought of the future of that industry in the province. It may almost
+be said that the history of gold-mining there is the history of British
+Columbia. Victoria, the capital, was a Hudson Bay post established in
+1843, and Vancouver, Queen Charlotte's, and the other islands, as well
+as the main-land, were of interest to only a few white men as parts of a
+great fur-trading field with a small Indian population. The first nugget
+of gold was found at what is now called Gold Harbor, on the west coast
+of the Queen Charlotte Islands, by an Indian woman, in 1851. A part of
+it, weighing four or five ounces, was taken by the Indians to Fort
+Simpson and sold. The Hudson Bay Company, which has done a little in
+every line of business in its day, sent a brigantine to the spot, and
+found a quartz vein traceable eighty feet, and yielding a high
+percentage of gold. Blasting was begun, and the vessel was loaded with
+ore; but she was lost on the return voyage. An American vessel, ashore
+at Esquimault, near Victoria, was purchased, renamed the _Recovery_, and
+sent to Gold Harbor with thirty miners, who worked the vein until the
+vessel was loaded and sent to England. News of the mine travelled, and
+in another year a small fleet of vessels came up from San Francisco; but
+the supply was seen to be very limited, and after $20,000 in all had
+been taken out, the field was abandoned.
+
+In 1855 gold was found by a Hudson Bay Company's employé at Fort
+Colville, now in Washington State, near the boundary. Some Thompson
+River (B. C.) Indians who went to Walla Walla spread a report there
+that gold, like that discovered at Colville, was to be found in the
+valley of the Thompson. A party of Canadians and half-breeds went to the
+region referred to, and found placers nine miles above the mouth of the
+river. By 1858 the news and the authentication of it stirred the miners
+of California, and an astonishing invasion of the virgin province began.
+It is said that in the spring of 1858 more than twenty thousand persons
+reached Victoria from San Francisco by sea, distending the little
+fur-trading post of a few hundred inhabitants into what would even now
+be called a considerable city; a city of canvas, however. Simultaneously
+a third as many miners made their way to the new province on land. But
+the land was covered with mountains and dense forests, the only route to
+its interior for them was the violent, almost boiling, Fraser River, and
+there was nothing on which the lives of this horde of men could be
+sustained. By the end of the year out of nearly thirty thousand
+adventurers only a tenth part remained. Those who did stay worked the
+river bars of the lower Fraser until in five months they had shipped
+from Victoria more than half a million dollars' worth of gold. From a
+historical point of view it is a peculiar coincidence that in 1859, when
+the attention of the world was thus first attracted to this new country,
+the charter of the Hudson Bay Company expired, and the territory passed
+from its control to become like any other crown colony.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN SALMON-FISHING IN THE THRASHER]
+
+In 1860 the gold-miners, seeking the source of the "flour" gold they
+found in such abundance in the bed of the river, pursued their search
+into the heart and almost the centre of that forbidding and unbroken
+territory. The Quesnel River became the seat of their operations. Two
+years later came another extraordinary immigration. This was not
+surprising, for 1500 miners had in one year (1861) taken out $2,000,000
+in gold-dust from certain creeks in what is called the Cariboo District,
+and one can imagine (if one does not remember) what fabulous tales were
+based upon this fact. The second stampede was of persons from all over
+the world, but chiefly from England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
+After that there were new "finds" almost every year, and the miners
+worked gradually northward until, about 1874, they had travelled through
+the province, in at one end and out at the other, and were working the
+tributaries of the Yukon River in the north, beyond the 60th parallel.
+Mr. Dawson estimates that the total yield of gold between 1858 and 1888
+was $54,108,804; the average number of miners employed each year was
+2775, and the average earnings per man per year were $622.
+
+In his report, published by order of Parliament, Mr. Dawson says that
+while gold is so generally distributed over the province that scarcely a
+stream of any importance fails to show at least "colors" of the metal,
+the principal discoveries clearly indicate that the most important
+mining districts are in the systems of mountains and high plateaus lying
+to the south-west of the Rocky Mountains and parallel in direction with
+them.
+
+This mountain system next to and south-west of the Rockies is called,
+for convenience, the Gold Range, but it comprises a complex belt "of
+several more or less distinct and partly overlapping ranges"--the
+Purcell, Selkirk, and Columbia ranges in the south, and in the north the
+Cariboo, Omenica, and Cassiar ranges. "This series or system
+constitutes the most important metalliferous belt of the province. The
+richest gold fields are closely related to it, and discoveries of
+metalliferous lodes are reported in abundance from all parts of it which
+have been explored. The deposits already made known are very varied in
+character, including highly argentiferous galenas and other silver ores
+and auriferous quartz veins." This same authority asserts that the Gold
+Range is continued by the Cabinet, Coeur d'Alene, and Bitter Root
+mountains in our country. While there is no single well-developed gold
+field as in California, the extent of territory of a character to
+occasion a hopeful search for gold is greater in the province than in
+California. The average man of business to whom visitors speak of the
+mining prospects of the province is apt to declare that all that has
+been lacking is the discovery of one grand mine and the enlistment of
+capital (from the United States, they generally say) to work it. Mr.
+Dawson speaks to the same point, and incidentally accounts for the
+retarded development in his statement that one noteworthy difference
+between practically the entire area of the province and that of the
+Pacific States has been occasioned by the spread and movement of ice
+over the province during the glacial period. This produced changes in
+the distribution of surface materials and directions of drainage,
+concealed beneath "drifts" the indications to which prospectors farther
+south are used to trust, and by other means obscured the outcrops of
+veins which would otherwise be well marked. The dense woods, the broken
+navigation of the rivers, in detached reaches, the distance from the
+coast of the richest districts, and the cost of labor supplies and
+machinery--all these are additional and weighty reasons for the slowness
+of development. But this was true of the past and is not of the present,
+at least so far as southern British Columbia is concerned. Railroads are
+reaching up into it from our country and down from the transcontinental
+Canadian Railway, and capital, both Canadian and American, is rapidly
+swelling an already heavy investment in many new and promising mines.
+Here it is silver-mining that is achieving importance.
+
+[Illustration: GOING TO THE POTLATCH--BIG CANOE, NORTH-WEST COAST]
+
+Other ores are found in the province. The iron which has been located or
+worked is principally on the islands--Queen Charlotte, Vancouver,
+Texada, and the Walker group. Most of the ores are magnetites, and that
+which alone has been worked--on Texada Island--is of excellent quality.
+The output of copper from the province is likely soon to become
+considerable. Masses of it have been found from time to time in various
+parts of the province--in the Vancouver series of islands, on the
+main-land coast, and in the interior. Its constant and rich association
+with silver shows lead to be abundant in the country, but it needs the
+development of transport facilities to give it value. Platinum is more
+likely to attain importance as a product in this than in any other part
+of North America. On the coast the granites are of such quality and
+occur in such abundance as to lead to the belief that their quarrying
+will one day be an important source of income, and there are marbles,
+sandstones, and ornamental stones of which the same may be said.
+
+One of the most valuable products of the province is coal, the essential
+in which our Pacific coast States are the poorest. The white man's
+attention was first attracted to this coal in 1835 by some Indians who
+brought lumps of it from Vancouver Island to the Hudson Bay post on the
+main-land, at Milbank Sound. The _Beaver_, the first steamship that
+stirred the waters of the Pacific, reached the province in 1836, and
+used coal that was found in outcroppings on the island beach. Thirteen
+years later the great trading company brought out a Scotch coal-miner to
+look into the character and extent of the coal find, and he was followed
+by other miners and the necessary apparatus for prosecuting the inquiry.
+In the mean time the present chief source of supply at Nanaimo, seventy
+miles from Victoria and about opposite Vancouver, was discovered, and in
+1852 mining was begun in earnest. From the very outset the chief market
+for the coal was found to be San Francisco.
+
+The original mines are now owned by the Vancouver Coal-mining and Land
+Company. Near them are the Wellington Mines, which began to be worked in
+1871. Both have continued in active operation from their foundation, and
+with a constantly and rapidly growing output. A third source of supply
+has very recently been established with local and American capital in
+what is called the Comox District, back of Baynes Sound, farther north
+than Nanaimo, on the eastern side of Vancouver Island. These new works
+are called the Union Mines, and, if the predictions of my informants
+prove true, will produce an output equal to that of the older Nanaimo
+collieries combined. In 1884 the coal shipped from Nanaimo amounted to
+1000 tons for every day of the year, and in 1889 the total shipment had
+reached 500,000 tons. As to the character of the coal, I quote again
+from Mr. Dawson's report on the minerals of British Columbia, published
+by the Dominion Government:
+
+    "Rocks of cretaceous age are developed over a considerable area
+    in British Columbia, often in very great thickness, and fuels
+    occur in them in important quantity in at least two distinct
+    stages, of which the lower and older includes the coal measures
+    of the Queen Charlotte Islands and those of Quatsino Sound on
+    Vancouver Island, with those of Crow Nest Pass in the Rocky
+    Mountains; the upper, the coal measures of Nanaimo and Comox,
+    and probably also those of Suquash and other localities. The
+    lower rocks hold both anthracite and bituminous coal in the
+    Queen Charlotte Islands, but elsewhere contain bituminous coal
+    only. The upper have so far been found to yield bituminous coal
+    only. The fuels of the tertiary rocks are, generally speaking,
+    lignites, but include also various fuels intermediate between
+    these and true coals, which in a few places become true
+    bituminous coals."
+
+It is thought to be more than likely that the Comox District may prove
+far more productive than the Nanaimo region. It is estimated that
+productive measures underlie at least 300 square miles in the Comox
+District, exclusive of what may extend beyond the shore. The Nanaimo
+area is estimated at 200 square miles, and the product is no better
+than, if it equals, that of the Comox District.
+
+Specimens of good coal have been found on the main-land in the region of
+the upper Skeena River, on the British Columbia water-shed of the
+Rockies near Crow Nest Pass, and in the country adjacent to the Peace
+River in the eastern part of the province. Anthracite which compares
+favorably with that of Pennsylvania has been found at Cowgitz, Queen
+Charlotte Islands. In 1871 a mining company began work upon this coal,
+but abandoned it, owing to difficulties that were encountered. It is now
+believed that these miners did not prove the product to be of an
+unprofitable character, and that farther exploration is fully justified
+by what is known of the field. Of inferior forms of coal there is every
+indication of an abundance on the main-land of the province. "The
+tertiary or Laramie coal measures of Puget Sound and Bellingham Bay" (in
+the United States) "are continuous north of the international boundary,
+and must underlie nearly 18,000 square miles of the low country about
+the estuary of the Fraser and in the lower part of its valley." It is
+quite possible, since the better coals of Nanaimo and Comox are in
+demand in the San Francisco market, even at their high price and with
+the duty added, that these lignite fields may be worked for local
+consumption.
+
+Already the value of the fish caught in the British Columbian waters is
+estimated at $5,000,000 a year, and yet the industry is rather at its
+birth than in its infancy. All the waters in and near the province
+fairly swarm with fish. The rivers teem with them, the straits and
+fiords and gulfs abound with them, the ocean beyond is freighted with an
+incalculable weight of living food, which must soon be distributed among
+the homes of the civilized world. The principal varieties of fish are
+the salmon, cod, shad, white-fish, bass, flounder, skate, sole, halibut,
+sturgeon, oolachan, herring, trout, haddock, smelts, anchovies,
+dog-fish, perch, sardines, oysters, crayfish shrimps, crabs, and
+mussels. Of other denizens of the water, the whale, sea-otter, and seal
+prove rich prey for those who search for them.
+
+[Illustration: THE SALMON CACHE]
+
+The main salmon rivers are the Fraser, Skeena, and Nasse rivers, but the
+fish also swarm in the inlets into which smaller streams empty. The
+Nimkish, on Vancouver Island, is also a salmon stream. Setting aside
+the stories of water so thick with salmon that a man might walk upon
+their backs, as well as that tale of the stage-coach which was upset by
+salmon banking themselves against it when it was crossing a
+fording-place, there still exist absolutely trustworthy accounts of
+swarms which at their height cause the largest rivers to seem alive with
+these fish. In such cases the ripple of their back fins frets the entire
+surface of the stream. I have seen photographs that show the fish in
+incredible numbers, side by side, like logs in a raft, and I have the
+word of a responsible man for the statement that he has gotten all the
+salmon needed for a small camp, day after day, by walking to the edge of
+a river and jerking the fish out with a common poker.
+
+There are about sixteen canneries on the Fraser, six on the Skeena,
+three on the Nasse, and three scattered in other waters--River Inlet and
+Alert Bay. The total canning in 1889 was 414,294 cases, each of 48
+one-pound tins. The fish are sold to Europe, Australia, and eastern
+Canada. The American market takes the Columbia River Salmon. Around
+$1,000,000 is invested in the vessels, nets, trawls, canneries,
+oil-factories, and freezing and salting stations used in this industry
+in British Columbia, and about 5500 men are employed. "There is no
+difficulty in catching the fish," says a local historian, "for in some
+streams they are so crowded that they can readily be picked out of the
+water by hand." However, gill-nets are found to be preferable, and the
+fish are caught in these, which are stretched across the streams, and
+handled by men in flat-bottomed boats. The fish are loaded into scows
+and transported to the canneries, usually frame structures built upon
+piles close to the shores of the rivers. In the canneries the tins are
+made, and, as a rule, saw-mills near by produce the wood for the
+manufacture of the packing-cases. The fish are cleaned, rid of their
+heads and tails, and then chopped up and loaded into the tins by
+Chinamen and Indian women. The tins are then boiled, soldered, tested,
+packed, and shipped away. The industry is rapidly extending, and fresh
+salmon are now being shipped, frozen, to the markets of eastern America
+and England. My figures for 1889 (obtained from the Victoria _Times_)
+are in all likelihood under the mark for the season of 1890. The coast
+is made ragged by inlets, and into nearly every one a watercourse
+empties. All the larger streams are the haven of salmon in the spawning
+season, and in time the principal ones will be the bases of canning
+operations.
+
+The Dominion Government has founded a salmon hatchery on the Fraser,
+above New Westminster. It is under the supervision of Thomas Mowat,
+Inspector of Fisheries, and millions of small fry are now annually
+turned into the great river. Whether the unexampled run of 1889 was in
+any part due to this process cannot be said, but certainly the salmon
+are not diminishing in numbers. It was feared that the refuse from the
+canneries would injure the "runs" of live fish, but it is now believed
+that there is a profit to be derived from treating the refuse for oil
+and guano, so that it is more likely to be saved than thrown back into
+the streams in the near future.
+
+The oolachan, or candle-fish, is a valuable product of these waters,
+chiefly of the Fraser and Nasse rivers. They are said to be delicious
+when fresh, smoked, or salted, and I have it on the authority of the
+little pamphlet "British Columbia," handed me by a government official,
+that "their oil is considered superior to cod-liver oil, or any other
+fish-oil known." It is said that this oil is whitish, and of the
+consistency of thin lard. It is used as food by the natives, and is an
+article of barter between the coast Indians and the tribes of the
+interior. There is so much of it in a candle-fish of ordinary size that
+when one of them is dried, it will burn like a candle. It is the custom
+of the natives on the coast to catch the fish in immense numbers in
+purse-nets. They then boil them in iron-bottomed bins, straining the
+product in willow baskets, and running the oil into cedar boxes holding
+fifteen gallons each. The Nasse River candle-fish are the best. They
+begin running in March, and continue to come by the million for a period
+of several weeks.
+
+Codfish are supposed to be very plentiful, and to frequent extensive
+banks at sea, but these shoals have not been explored or charted by the
+Government, and private enterprise will not attempt the work. Similar
+banks off the Alaska coast are already the resorts of California
+fishermen, who drive a prosperous trade in salting large catches there.
+The skil, or black cod, formerly known as the "coal-fish," is a splendid
+deep-water product. These cod weigh from eight to twenty pounds, and
+used to be caught by the Indians with hook and line. Already white men
+are driving the Indians out by superior methods. Trawls of 300 hooks are
+used, and the fish are found to be plentiful, especially off the west
+coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The fish is described as superior
+to the cod of Newfoundland in both oil and meat. The general market is
+not yet accustomed to it, but such a ready sale is found for what are
+caught that the number of vessels engaged in this fishing increases year
+by year. It is evident that the catch of skil will soon be an important
+source of revenue to the province.
+
+[Illustration: AN IDEAL OF THE COAST]
+
+Herring are said to be plentiful, but no fleet is yet fitted out for
+them. Halibut are numerous and common. They are often of very great
+size. Sturgeon are found in the Fraser, whither they chase the salmon.
+One weighing 1400 pounds was exhibited in Victoria a few years ago, and
+those that weigh more than half as much are not unfrequently captured.
+The following is a report of the yield and value of the fisheries of the
+province for 1889:
+
+  +--------------------------+------------+-----------------+
+  |      Kind of Fish.       | Quantity.  |    Value.       |
+  |                          |            |                 |
+  +--------------------------+------------+-----------------+
+  |                          |            |                 |
+  | Salmon in cans      lbs. | 20,122,128 |  $2,414,655 36  |
+  |    "   fresh        lbs. |  2,187,000 |     218,700 00  |
+  |    "   salted      bbls. |      3,749 |      37,460 00  |
+  |    "   smoked       lbs. |     12,900 |       2,580 00  |
+  | Sturgeon, fresh          |    318,600 |      15,930 00  |
+  | Halibut,    "            |    605,050 |      30,152 50  |
+  | Herring,    "            |    190,000 |       9,500 00  |
+  |   "    smoked            |     33,000 |       3,300 00  |
+  | Oolachans,  "            |     82,500 |       8,250 00  |
+  |   "     fresh            |      6,700 |       1,340 00  |
+  |   "    salted      bbls. |        380 |       3,800 00  |
+  | Trout, fresh        lbs. |     14,025 |       1,402 50  |
+  | Fish, assorted           |    322,725 |      16,136 25  |
+  | Smelts, fresh            |     52,100 |       3,126 00  |
+  | Rock cod                 |     39,250 |       1,962 50  |
+  | Skil, salted       bbls. |      1,560 |      18,720 00  |
+  | Fooshqua, fresh          |    268,350 |      13,417 50  |
+  | Fur seal-skins       No. |     33,570 |     335,700 00  |
+  | Hair    "             "  |      7,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Sea-otter skins       "  |        115 |      11,500 00  |
+  | Fish oil           gals. |    141,420 |      70,710 00  |
+  | Oysters            sacks |      3,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Clams                 "  |      3,500 |       6,125 00  |
+  | Mussels               "  |        250 |         500 00  |
+  | Crabs                No. |    175,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Abelones           boxes |        100 |         500 00  |
+  | Isinglass           lbs. |      5,000 |       1,750 00  |
+  +--------------------------+------------+                 |
+  | Estimated fish consumed in province   |     100,000 00  |
+  | Shrimps, prawns, etc.                 |       5,000 00  |
+  | Estimated consumption by Indians--    |                 |
+  |    Salmon                             |   2,732,500 00  |
+  |    Halibut                            |     190,000 00  |
+  |    Sturgeon and other fish            |     260,000 00  |
+  |    Fish oils                          |      75,000 00  |
+  +---------------------------------------+-----------------+
+  |        Approximate yield              |  $6,605,467 61  |
+  +---------------------------------------+-----------------+
+
+When it is considered that this is the showing of one of the newest
+communities on the continent, numbering only the population of what we
+would call a small city, suffering for want of capital and nearly all
+that capital brings with it, there is no longer occasion for surprise
+at the provincial boast that they possess far more extensive and richer
+fishing-fields than any on the Atlantic coast. Time and enterprise will
+surely test this assertion, but it is already evident that there is a
+vast revenue to be wrested from those waters.
+
+I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded $236,000 in 1887, and
+may yet be decided to be exclusively an American and not a British
+Columbian source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the extraction of
+oil from herrings and from dog-fish and whales, all of which are small
+channels of revenue.
+
+I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a civil engineer of
+high repute who has explored the greater part of southern British
+Columbia--at least in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and
+mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not to place too high a
+value upon the printed matter put forth in praise of any new country, I
+was especially pleased to obtain this man's practical impressions
+concerning the store and quality and kinds of timber the province
+contains. He said, not to use his own words, that timber is found all
+the way back from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most
+plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of those mountains and on
+the west slope of the Coast Range. The very largest trees are between
+the Coast Range and the coast. The country between the Rocky Mountains
+and the Coast Range is dry by comparison with the parts where the timber
+thrives best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between the
+Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tamaracks reach six and eight
+feet in diameter, and attain a height of 200 feet not infrequently.
+There are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though not very
+many) in this region. There is very little leaf-wood, and no hard-wood.
+Maples are found, to be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than
+trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves westward the same
+timber prevails, but it grows shorter and smaller until the low coast
+country is reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests occur
+again. This coast region is largely a flat country, but there are not
+many miles of it.
+
+To this rule, as here laid down, there are some notable exceptions. One
+particular tree, called there the bull-pine--it is the pine of Lake
+Superior and the East--grows to great size all over the province. It is
+a common thing to find the trunks of these trees measuring four feet in
+diameter, or nearly thirteen feet in circumference. It is not especially
+valuable for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short-lived when
+exposed to the weather, and is therefore not in demand for railroad
+work; but for the ordinary uses to which builders put timber it answers
+very well.
+
+[Illustration: THE POTLATCH]
+
+There is a maple which attains great size at the coast, and which, when
+dressed, closely resembles bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the
+vine-maple. The trees are found with a diameter of two-and-a-half to
+three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above forty or fifty feet. The
+wood is crooked. It runs very badly. This, of course, is what gives it
+the beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner or later,
+find a ready market for it. There is plenty of hemlock in the province,
+but it is nothing like so large as that which is found in the East, and
+its bark is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for nothing
+larger than railway ties, and the trees grow in such inaccessible
+places, half-way up the mountains, that it is for the most part
+unprofitable to handle it. The red cedars--the wood of which is consumed
+in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes--are also small. On the
+other hand, the white cedar reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet
+of thickness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraordinary to
+find these cedars reaching 200 feet above the ground, and one was cut at
+Port Moody, in clearing the way for the railroad, that had a length of
+310 feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the wood of these
+trees is what is consumed, and usually the trunks, hollow and empty,
+stand grimly in their places after the fire would otherwise have been
+forgotten. These great tubes are often of such dimensions that men put
+windows and doors in them and use them for dwellings. In the valleys are
+immense numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood species, white
+birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but they are not estimated in the
+forest wealth of the province, because of the expense that marketing
+them would entail.
+
+This fact concerning the small timber indicates at once the primitive
+character of the country, and the vast wealth it possesses in what might
+be called heroic timber--that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way
+to market even from out that unopened wilderness. It was the opinion of
+the engineer to whom I have referred that timber land which does not
+attract the second glance of a prospector in British Columbia would be
+considered of the first importance in Maine and New Brunswick. To put it
+in another way, river-side timber land which in those countries would
+fetch fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British Columbia
+would not be taken up. In time it may be cut, undoubtedly it must be,
+when new railroads alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even
+roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests.
+
+A great business is carried on in the shipment of ninety-foot and
+one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to the great car-building works of
+our country and Canada. They are used in the massive bottom frames of
+palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reached in this industry
+is not in the size of the logs, but in the capacities of the saw-mills,
+and in the possibilities of transportation by rail, for these logs
+require three cars to support their length. Except for the valleys, the
+whole vast country is enormously rich in this timber, the mountains
+(excepting the Rockies) being clothed with it from their bases to their
+tops. Vancouver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. It
+bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it has the oak-tree,
+and does not possess the tamarack. The Vancouver Island oaks do not
+exceed two or two-and-a-half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir (our
+Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, especially on the north
+end of the island. In the old offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at
+Vancouver are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across,
+showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was forty feet in
+circumference. Tens of thousands of these firs are from eight to ten
+feet in diameter at the bottom.
+
+Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, the wood of which
+is not very valuable; Englemann's spruce, which is very like white
+spruce, and is very abundant; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in
+diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow cypress;
+crab-apple, occurring as a small tree or shrub; western birch, common in
+the Columbia region; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Vancouver
+Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abundance and of large size in
+the Peace River and upper Fraser regions; dogwood, arbutus, and several
+minor trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance in various
+districts or all over the province are the following: hazel, red elder,
+willow, barberry, wild red cherry, blackberry, yellow plum,
+choke-cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, bearberry, currant, and snowberry,
+mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mulberry, and blueberry.
+
+I would have liked to write at length concerning the enterprising cities
+of the province, but, after all, they may be trusted to make themselves
+known. It is the region behind them which most interests mankind, and
+the Government has begun, none too promptly, a series of expeditions for
+exploiting it. As for the cities, the chief among them and the capital,
+Victoria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its business district
+wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive appearance, and its detached
+dwellings--all of frame, and of the distinctive type which marks the
+houses of the California towns--are surrounded by gardens. It has a
+beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few years it will have spread
+to Esquimault, now less than two miles distant. This is now the seat of
+a British admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose water is of
+a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At Esquimault are government
+offices, churches, schools, hotels, stores, a naval "canteen," and a
+dry-dock 450 feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its entrance.
+The electric street railroad of Victoria was extended to Esquimault in
+the autumn of 1890. Of the climate of Victoria Lord Lorne said, "It is
+softer and more constant than that of the south of England."
+
+Vancouver, the principal city of the main-land, is slightly smaller than
+Victoria, but did not begin to displace the forest until 1886. After
+that every house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it boasts a
+hotel comparable in most important respects with any in Canada, many
+noble business buildings of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches,
+a really great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a notable
+system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The Canadian Pacific Railway
+terminates here, and so does the line of steamers for China and Japan.
+The city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an arm of Burrard
+Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights, and shows no sign of halting its
+hitherto rapid growth. Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still
+smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more than naming.
+
+In the original settlements in that territory a peculiar institution
+occasioned gala times for the red men now and then. This was the
+"potlatch," a thing to us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is
+begotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its meaning. It is a
+feast and merrymaking at the expense of some man who has earned or saved
+what he deems considerable wealth, and who desires to distribute every
+iota of it at once in edibles and drinkables among the people of his
+tribe or village. He does this because he aspires to a chieftainship, or
+merely for the credit of a "potlatch"--a high distinction. Indians have
+been known to throw away such a sum of money that their "potlatch" has
+been given in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have been
+both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and ornaments have been
+distributed in addition to the feast.
+
+The custom has a new significance now. It is the white man who is to
+enjoy a greater than all previous potlatches in that region. The
+treasure has been garnered during the ages by time or nature or
+whatsoever you may call the host, and the province itself is offered as
+the feast.
+
+
+
+
+  IX
+
+  DAN DUNN'S OUTFIT
+
+
+At Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in British Columbia, a
+small white steamboat, built on the spot, and exposing a single great
+paddle-wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her still few
+trips through a wilderness that, but for her presence, would be as
+completely primitive as almost any in North America. Her route lay down
+the Columbia River a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles to a
+point called Sproat's Landing, where some rapids interrupt navigation.
+The main load upon the steamer's deck was of steel rails for a railroad
+that was building into a new mining region in what is called the
+Kootenay District, just north of our Washington and Idaho. The sister
+range to the Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the new
+highway, which would then connect the valley of the Columbia with the
+Kootenay River. There was a temptation beyond the mere chance to join
+the first throng that pushed open a gateway and began the breaking of a
+trail in a brand-new country. There was to be witnessed the propulsion
+of civilization beyond old confines by steam-power, and this required
+railroad building in the Rockies, where that science finds its most
+formidable problems. And around and through all that was being done
+pressed a new population, made up of many of the elements that produced
+our old-time border life, and gave birth to some of the most picturesque
+and exciting chapters in American History.
+
+It should be understood that here in the very heart of British Columbia
+only the watercourses have been travelled, and there was neither a
+settlement nor a house along the Columbia in that great reach of its
+valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific Railway, except at
+the landing at which this boat stopped.
+
+Over all the varying scene, as the boat ploughed along, hung a mighty
+silence; for almost the only life on the deep wooded sides of the
+mountains was that of stealthy game. At only two points were any human
+beings lodged, and these were wood-choppers who supplied the fuel for
+the steamer--a Chinaman in one place, and two or three white men farther
+on. In this part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens in two
+long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more than two miles wide and
+twenty to thirty miles in length. Their prodigious towering walls are
+densely wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. The forest
+growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance crowds it beyond the edge of
+the grand stream in the fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose
+roots are bedded in the soft mass of centuries of forest débris.
+
+Early in the journey the clerk of the steamer told me that wild animals
+were frequently seen crossing the river ahead of the vessel; bear, he
+said, and deer and elk and porcupine. When I left him to go to my
+state-room and dress for the rough journey ahead of me, he came to my
+door, calling in excited tones for me to come out on the deck. "There's
+a big bear ahead!" he cried, and as he spoke I saw the black head of the
+animal cleaving the quiet water close to the nearer shore. Presently
+Bruin's feet touched the bottom, and he bounded into the bush and
+disappeared.
+
+The scenery was superb all the day, but at sundown nature began to revel
+in a series of the most splendid and spectacular effects. For an hour a
+haze had clothed the more distant mountains as with a transparent veil,
+rendering the view dream-like and soft beyond description. But as the
+sun sank to the summit of the uplifted horizon it began to lavish the
+most intense colors upon all the objects in view. The snowy peaks turned
+to gaudy prisms as of crystal, the wooded summits became impurpled, the
+nearer hills turned a deep green, and the tranquil lake assumed a bright
+pea-color. Above all else, the sky was gorgeous. Around its western edge
+it took on a rose-red blush that blended at the zenith with a deep blue,
+in which were floating little clouds of amber and of flame-lit pearl.
+
+A moonless night soon closed around the boat, and in the morning we were
+at Sproat's Landing, a place two months old. The village consisted of a
+tiny cluster of frame-houses and tents perched on the edge of the steep
+bank of the Columbia. One building was the office and storehouse of the
+projected railroad, two others were general trading stores, one was the
+hotel, and the other habitations were mainly tents.
+
+I firmly believe there never was a hotel like the hostlery there. In a
+general way its design was an adaptation of the plan of a hen-coop.
+Possibly a box made of gridirons suggests more clearly the principle of
+its construction. It was two stories high, and contained about a baker's
+dozen of rooms, the main one being the bar-room, of course. After the
+framework had been finished, there was perhaps half enough "slab" lumber
+to sheathe the outside of the house, and this had been made to serve for
+exterior and interior walls, and the floors and ceilings besides. The
+consequence was that a flock of gigantic canaries might have been kept
+in it with propriety, but as a place of abode for human beings it
+compared closely with the Brooklyn Bridge.
+
+[Illustration: AN INDIAN CANOE ON THE COLUMBIA]
+
+They have in our West many very frail hotels that the people call
+"telephone houses," because a tenant can hear in every room whatever is
+spoken in any part of the building; but in this house one could stand
+in any room and see into all the others. A clergyman and his wife
+stopped in it on the night before I arrived, and the good woman stayed
+up until nearly daylight, pinning papers on the walls and laying them on
+the floor until she covered a corner in which to prepare for bed.
+
+I hired a room and stored my traps in it, but I slept in one of the
+engineers' tents, and met with a very comical adventure. The tent
+contained two cots, and a bench on which the engineer, who occupied one
+of the beds, had heaped his clothing. Supposing him to be asleep, I
+undressed quietly, blew out the candle, and popped into my bed. As I did
+so one pair of its legs broke down, and it naturally occurred to me, at
+almost the same instant, that the bench was of about the proper height
+to raise the fallen end of the cot to the right level.
+
+"Broke down, eh?" said my companion--a man, by-the-way, whose face I
+have never yet seen.
+
+"Yes," I replied. "Can I put your clothing on the floor and make use of
+that bench?"
+
+"Aye, that you can."
+
+So out of bed I leaped, put his apparel in a heap on the floor, and ran
+the bench under my bed. It proved to be a neat substitute for the broken
+legs, and I was quickly under the covers again and ready for sleep.
+
+The engineer's voice roused me.
+
+"That's what I call the beauty of a head-piece," he said. Presently he
+repeated the remark.
+
+"Are you speaking to me?" I asked.
+
+"Yes; I'm saying that's what I call the beauty of a head-piece. It's
+wonderful; and many's the day and night I'll think of it, if I live.
+What do I mean? Why, I mean that that is what makes you Americans such a
+great people--it's the beauty of having head-pieces on your shoulders.
+It's so easy to think quick if you've got something to think with. Here
+you are, and your bed breaks down. What would I do? Probably nothing.
+I'd think what a beastly scrape it was, and I'd keep on thinking till I
+went to sleep. What do you do? Why, as quick as a flash you says,
+'Hello, here's a go!' 'May I have the bench?' says you. 'Yes,' says I.
+Out of bed you go, and you clap the bench under the bed, and there you
+are, as right as a trivet. That's the beauty of a head-piece, and that's
+what makes America the wonderful country she is."
+
+Never was a more sincere compliment paid to my country, and I am glad I
+obtained it so easily.
+
+There was a barber pole in front of the house, set up by a "prospector"
+who had run out of funds (and everything else except hope), and who,
+like all his kind, had stopped to "make a few dollars" wherewith to
+outfit again and continue his search for gold. He noted the local need
+of a barber, and instantly became one by purchasing a razor on credit,
+and painting a pole while waiting for custom. He was a jocular fellow--a
+born New Yorker, by-the-way.
+
+"Don't shave me close," said I.
+
+"Close?" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest victim I've slashed yet if
+I get off any of your beard at all. How's the razor?"
+
+"All right."
+
+"Oh no, it ain't," said he; "you're setting your nerves to stand it,
+so's not to be called a tender-foot. I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend
+bar when I bumped up agin this place. If you could see the blood
+streaming down your face you'd faint."
+
+In spite of his self-depreciation, he performed as artistic and painless
+an operation as I ever sat through.
+
+While I was being shaved the loungers in the barber-shop entered into a
+conversation that revealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the
+deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen cackled out-of-doors,
+and the loungers fell to questioning one another as to which hen had
+laid an egg.
+
+"It must be the black one," said the barber.
+
+"Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky's cackle," said a more
+deliberate and careful speaker.
+
+"'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled un," ventured a third.
+
+"She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber.
+
+"Could it be the bantam?" another inquired.
+
+Thus they discussed with earnestness this most interesting event of the
+morning, until a young man darted into the room with his eyes lighted by
+excitement.
+
+"Say, Bill," said he, almost breathlessly, "that's the speckled hen
+a-cackling, by thunder! She's laid an egg, I guess."
+
+[Illustration: "YOU'RE SETTING YOUR NERVES TO STAND IT"]
+
+In Sproat's Landing we saw the nucleus of a railroad terminal point. The
+queer hotel was but little more peculiar than many of the people who
+gathered on the single street on pay-day to spend their hard-earned
+money upon a great deal of illicit whiskey and a few rude necessaries
+from the limited stock on sale in the stores. There never had been any
+grave disorder there, yet the floating population was as motley a
+collection of the riffraff of the border as one could well imagine, and
+there was only one policeman to enforce the law in a territory the size
+of Rhode Island. He was quite as remarkable in his way as any other
+development of that embryotic civilization. His name was Jack Kirkup,
+and all who knew him spoke of him as being physically the most superb
+example of manhood in the Dominion. Six feet and three inches in height,
+with the chest, neck, and limbs of a giant, his three hundred pounds of
+weight were so exactly his complement as to give him the symmetry of an
+Apollo. He was good-looking, with the beauty of a round-faced,
+good-natured boy, and his thick hair fell in a cluster of ringlets over
+his forehead and upon his neck. No knight of Arthur's circle can have
+been more picturesque a figure in the forest than this "Jack." He was as
+neat as a dandy. He wore high boots and corduroy knickerbockers, a
+flannel shirt and a sack-coat, and rode his big bay horse with the ease
+and grace of a Skobeleff. He smoked like a fire of green brush, but had
+never tasted liquor in his life. In a dozen years he had slept more
+frequently in the open air, upon pebble beds or in trenches in the snow,
+than upon ordinary bedding, and he exhibited, in his graceful movements,
+his sparkling eyes and ruddy cheeks, his massive frame and his
+imperturbable good-nature, a degree of health and vigor that would seem
+insolent to the average New Yorker. Now that the railroad was building,
+he kept ever on the trail, along what was called "the right of
+way"--going from camp to camp to "jump" whiskey peddlers and gamblers
+and to quell disorder--except on pay-day, once a month, when he stayed
+at Sproat's Landing.
+
+[Illustration: JACK KIRKUP, THE MOUNTAIN SHERIFF]
+
+The echoes of his fearless behavior and lively adventures rang in every
+gathering. The general tenor of the stories was to the effect that he
+usually gave one warning to evil-doers, and if they did not heed that he
+"cleaned them out." He carried a revolver, but never had used it. Even
+when the most notorious gambler on our border had crossed over into
+"Jack's" bailiwick the policeman depended upon his fists. He had met the
+gambler and had "advised" him to take the cars next day. The gambler, in
+reply, had suggested that both would get along more quietly if each
+minded his own affairs, whereupon Kirkup had said, "You hear me: take
+the cars out of here to-morrow." The little community (it was Donald, B.
+C., a very rough place at the time) held its breathing for twenty-four
+hours, and at the approach of train-time was on tiptoe with strained
+anxiety. At twenty minutes before the hour the policeman, amiable and
+easy-going as ever in appearance, began a tour of the houses. It was in
+a tavern that he found the gambler.
+
+"You must take the train," said he.
+
+"You can't make me," replied the gambler.
+
+There were no more words. In two minutes the giant was carrying the limp
+body of the ruffian to a wagon, in which he drove him to the jail. There
+he washed the blood off the gambler's face and tidied his collar and
+scarf. From there the couple walked to the cars, where they parted
+amicably.
+
+"I had to be a little rough," said Kirkup to the loungers at the
+station, "because he was armed like a pin-cushion, and I didn't want to
+have to kill him."
+
+We made the journey from Sproat's Landing to the Kootenay River upon a
+sorry quartet of pack-horses that were at other times employed to carry
+provisions and material to the construction camps. They were of the kind
+of horses known all over the West as "cayuses." The word is the name of
+a once notable tribe of Indians in what is now the State of Washington.
+To these Indians is credited the introduction of this small and peculiar
+breed of horses, but many persons in the West think the horses get the
+nickname because of a humorous fancy begotten of their wildness, and
+suggesting that they are only part horses and part coyotes. But all the
+wildness and the characteristic "bucking" had long since been "packed"
+out of these poor creatures, and they needed the whip frequently to urge
+them upon a slow progress. Kirkup was going his rounds, and accompanied
+us on our journey of less than twenty miles to the Kootenay River. On
+the way one saw every stage in the construction of a railway. The
+process of development was reversed as we travelled, because the work
+had been pushed well along where we started, and was but at its
+commencement where we ended our trip. At the landing half a mile or more
+of the railroad had been completed, even to the addition of a locomotive
+and two gondola cars. Beyond the little strip of rails was a long reach
+of graded road-bed, and so the progress of the work dwindled, until at
+last there was little more than the trail-cutters' path to mark what had
+been determined as the "right of way."
+
+For the sake of clearness, I will first explain the steps that are taken
+at the outset in building a railroad, rather than tell what parts of the
+undertaking we came upon in passing over the various "contracts" that
+were being worked in what appeared a confusing and hap-hazard disorder.
+I have mentioned that one of the houses at the landing was the railroad
+company's storehouse, and that near by were the tents of the surveyors
+or civil engineers. The road was to be a branch of the Canadian Pacific
+system, and these engineers were the first men sent into the country,
+with instructions to survey a line to the new mining region, into which
+men were pouring from the older parts of Canada and from our country. It
+was understood by them that they were to hit upon the most direct and at
+the same time the least expensive route for the railroad to take. They
+went to the scene of their labors by canoes, and carried tents,
+blankets, instruments, and what they called their "grub stakes," which
+is to say, their food. Then they travelled over the ground between their
+two terminal points, and back by another route, and back again by still
+another route, and so back and forth perhaps four and possibly six
+times. In that way alone were they enabled to select the line which
+offered the shortest length and the least obstacles in number and degree
+for the workmen who were to come after them.
+
+[Illustration: ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY]
+
+At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. Stewart, who is famous
+in his profession as the most tireless and intrepid exponent of its
+difficulties in the Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune to
+be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. It is his custom to
+start out with a blanket, some bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to
+be gone for weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have been a
+hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes and requirements, or one
+possessing in any higher degree the quality called endurance. He has
+spent years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding and exploring
+the various passes, the most direct and feasible routes to and from
+them, the valleys between the ranges, and the characteristics of each
+section of the country. In a vast country that has not otherwise been
+one-third explored he has made himself familiar with the full southern
+half. He has not known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen an
+apple growing upon a tree in many years. During his long and
+close-succeeding trips he has run the whole gamut of the adventures
+incident to the lives of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger,
+exposure, peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes from
+frost and storm and flood that Nature unvanquished visits upon those who
+first brave her depths. Such is the work and such are the men that
+figure in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building.
+
+Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone beyond a well-settled
+region can form a more or less just estimate of that which one of these
+professional pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I had
+several "tastes," as the Irish express it, of that very Kootenay Valley.
+I can say conscientiously that I never was in a wilder region. In going
+only a few yards from the railroad "right of way" the difficulties of an
+experienced pedestrianism like my own instantly became tremendous. There
+was a particularly choice spot for fishing at a distance of
+three-quarters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled the
+road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would have strengthened the
+_Pilgrim's Progress_ had he known of such conditions with which to
+surround his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion and unsteady
+bowlders no larger than a man's head the ground was all but covered.
+Among this wreckage trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks
+of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as dense as any I ever
+saw was formed of soft-wood saplings and bushes, so that it was next to
+impossible to move a yard in any direction. It was out of the question
+for anyone to see three yards ahead, and there was often no telling when
+a foot was put down whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon
+a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows here and there were a
+foot deep or were the mouths of fissures that reached to China. I fished
+too long one night, and was obliged to make that journey after dark.
+After ten minutes crowded with falls and false steps, the task seemed so
+hopelessly impossible that I could easily have been induced to turn back
+and risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide.
+
+It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural conditions which the
+railroad men were overcoming that the gradual steps of their progress
+became most interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, after
+the specifications have been drawn up and the contracts signed, are the
+"right-of-way" men. These are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at
+the heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for the road-bed.
+The trail-cutters are guided by the long line of stakes with which the
+engineers have marked the course the road is to take. The trail-men are
+sent out to cut what in general parlance would be called a path, over
+which supplies are to be thereafter carried to the workmen's camps. The
+path they cut must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage along
+it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load will sometimes consist of
+the framework of a kitchen range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a
+five-foot swath through the forest is a trail of serviceable width. The
+trail-cutters fell the trees to right and left, and drag the fallen
+trunks out of the path as they go along, travelling and working between
+a mile and two miles each day, and moving their tents and provisions on
+pack-horses as they advance. They keep reasonably close to the projected
+line of the railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding one
+that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller ravines. Great distortions,
+such as hills or gullies, which the railroad must pass through or over,
+the trail men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose tastes
+are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock at almost any angle, like
+flies of larger growth. This trail, when finished, leads from the
+company's storehouse all along the line, and from that storehouse, on
+the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and tools and clothing,
+powder, dynamite, tents, and living utensils, to be used by the workmen,
+their bosses, and the engineers.
+
+Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the "right-of-way" men. These
+are axemen also. All that they do is to cut the trees down and drag them
+out of the way.
+
+It is when the axemen have cleared the right of way that the first view
+of the railroad in embryo is obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is
+a wide avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little like any
+forest drive that we are accustomed to in the realms of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: FALLING MONARCHS]
+
+Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards the production of an
+even and level thoroughfare, without protuberance or depression, and in
+the course of our ride to Dan Dunn's camp on the Kootenay we saw the
+rapidly developing railroad in each phase of its evolution from the
+rough surface of the wilderness. Now we would come upon a long reach of
+finished road-bed on comparatively level ground all ready for the rails,
+with carpenters at work in little gullies which they were spanning with
+timber trestles. Next we would see a battalion of men and dump-carts
+cutting into a hill of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring
+valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and symmetrical wall of
+earth-work, with sloping sides and level top, to bridge the gap between
+hill and hill. Again, we came upon places where men ran towards us
+shouting that a "blast" was to be fired. Here was what was called
+"rockwork," where some granite rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was
+being blown to flinders with dynamite.
+
+And so, through all these scenes upon the pack-trail, we came at last to
+a white camp of tents hidden in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest,
+and nestling beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water flecked
+with the foam from an eternal battle with a myriad of sunken rocks. It
+was Dunn's headquarters--the construction camp. Evening was falling, and
+the men were clambering down the hill-side trails from their work. There
+was no order in the disposition of the tents, nor had the forest been
+prepared for them. Their white sides rose here and there wherever there
+was a space between the trees, as if so many great white moths had
+settled in a garden. Huge trees had been felled and thrown across
+ravines to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and at the
+river's edge two or three tents seemed to have been pushed over the
+steep bluff to find lodgement on the sandy beach beside the turbulent
+stream.
+
+There were other camps on the line of this work, and it is worth while
+to add a word about their management and the system under which they
+were maintained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be the outfit
+of a contractor. The whole work of building a railroad is let out in
+contracts for portions of five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great
+jobs of seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one piece, it
+is customary for the contractor to divide his task and sublet it. But a
+fairly representative bit of mountain work is that which I found Dan
+Dunn superintending, as the factotum of the contractor who undertook it.
+
+If a contractor acts as "boss" himself, he stays upon the ground; but in
+this case the contractor had other undertakings in hand. Hence the
+presence of Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. Dunn is a man
+of means, and is himself a contractor by profession, who has worked his
+way up from a start as a laborer.
+
+The camp to which we came was a portable city, complete except for its
+lack of women. It had its artisans, its professional men, its store and
+workshops, its seat of government and officers, and its policeman, its
+amusement hall, its work-a-day and social sides. Its main peculiarity
+was that its boss (for it was like an American city in the possession of
+that functionary also) had announced that he was going to move it a
+couple of miles away on the following Sunday. One tent was the
+stableman's, with a capacious "corral" fenced in near by for the keeping
+of the pack horses and mules. His corps of assistants was a large one;
+for, besides the pack-horses that connected the camp with the outer
+world, he had the keeping of all the "grade-horses," so called--those
+which draw the stone and dirt carts and the little dump-cars on the
+false tracks set up on the levels near where "filling" or "cutting" is
+to be done. Another tent was the blacksmith's. He had a "helper," and
+was a busy man, charged with all the tool-sharpening, the care of all
+the horses' feet, and the repairing of all the iron-work of the wagons,
+cars, and dirt-scrapers. Near by was the harness-man's tent, the shop of
+the leather-mender. In the centre of the camp, like a low citadel, rose
+a mound of logs and earth bearing on a sign the single word "Powder,"
+but containing within its great sunken chamber a considerable store of
+various explosives--giant, black, and Judson powder, and dynamite.
+
+[Illustration: DAN DUNN ON HIS WORKS]
+
+More tremendous force is used in railroad blasting than most persons
+imagine. In order to perform a quick job of removing a section of solid
+mountain, the drill-men, after making a bore, say, twenty feet in depth,
+begin what they call "springing" it by exploding little cartridges in
+the bottom of the drill hole until they have produced a considerable
+chamber there. The average amount of explosive for which they thus
+prepare a place is 40 or 50 kegs of giant powder and 10 kegs of black
+powder; but Dunn told me he had seen 280 kegs of black powder and 500
+pounds of dynamite used in a single blast in mountain work.
+
+Another tent was that of the time-keeper. He journeyed twice a day all
+over the work, five miles up and five down. On one journey he noted what
+men were at labor in the forenoon, and on his return he tallied those
+who were entitled to pay for the second half of the day. Such an
+official knows the name of every laborer, and, moreover, he knows the
+pecuniary rating of each man, so that when the workmen stop him to order
+shoes or trousers, blankets, shirts, tobacco, penknives, or what not, he
+decides upon his own responsibility whether they have sufficient money
+coming to them to meet the accommodation.
+
+The "store" was simply another tent. In it was kept a fair supply of the
+articles in constant demand--a supply brought from the headquarters
+store at the other end of the trail, and constantly replenished by the
+pack-horses. This trading-place was in charge of a man called "the
+book-keeper," and he had two or three clerks to assist him. The stock
+was precisely like that of a cross-roads country store in one of our
+older States. Its goods included simple medicines, boots, shoes,
+clothing, cutlery, tobacco, cigars, pipes, hats and caps, blankets,
+thread and needles, and several hundred others among the ten thousand
+necessaries of a modern laborer's life. The only legal tender received
+there took the shape of orders written by the time-keeper, for the man
+in charge of the store was not required to know the ratings of the men
+upon the pay-roll.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPLY TRAIN OVER THE MOUNTAIN]
+
+The doctor's tent was among the rest, but his office might aptly have
+been said to be "in the saddle." He was nominally employed by the
+company, but each man was "docked," or charged, seventy-five cents a
+month for medical services whether he ever needed a doctor or not. When
+I was in the camp there was only one sick man--a rheumatic. He had a
+tent all to himself, and his meals were regularly carried to him. Though
+he was a stranger to every man there, and had worked only one day before
+he surrendered to sickness, a purse of about forty dollars had been
+raised for him among the men, and he was to be "packed" to Sproat's
+Landing on a mule at the company's expense whenever the doctor decreed
+it wise to move him. Of course invalidism of a more serious nature is
+not infrequent where men work in the paths of sliding rocks, beneath
+caving earth, amid falling forest trees, around giant blasts, and with
+heavy tools.
+
+Another one of the tents was that of the "boss packer." He superintended
+the transportation of supplies on the pack-trail. This "job of 200 men,"
+as Dunn styled his camp, employed thirty pack horses and mules. The
+pack-trains consisted of a "bell-horse" and boy, and six horses
+following. Each animal was rated to carry a burden of 400 pounds of dead
+weight, and to require three quarts of meal three times a day.
+
+Another official habitation was the "store-man's" tent. As a rule, there
+is a store-man to every ten miles of construction work; often every camp
+has one. The store-man keeps account of the distribution of the supplies
+of food. He issues requisitions upon the head storehouse of the company,
+and makes out orders for each day's rations from the camp store. The
+cooks are therefore under him, and this fact suggests a mention of the
+principal building in the camp--the mess hall, or "grub tent."
+
+This structure was of a size to accommodate two hundred men at once. Two
+tables ran the length of the unbroken interior--tables made roughly of
+the slabs or outside boards from a saw-mill. The benches were huge
+tree-trunks spiked fast upon stumps. There was a bench on either side of
+each table, and the places for the men were each set with a tin cup and
+a tin pie plate. The bread was heaped high on wooden platters, and all
+the condiments--catsup, vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt--were in cans
+that had once held condensed milk. The cooks worked in an open-ended
+extension at the rear of the great room. The rule is to have one cook
+and two "cookees" to each sixty men.
+
+While I was a new arrival just undergoing introduction, the men, who had
+come in from work, and who had "washed up" in the little creeks and at
+the river bank, began to assemble in the "grub tent" for supper. They
+were especially interesting to me because there was every reason to
+believe that they formed an assembly as typical of the human flotsam of
+the border as ever was gathered on the continent. Very few were what
+might be called born laborers; on the contrary, they were mainly men of
+higher origin who had failed in older civilizations; outlaws from the
+States; men who had hoped for a gold-mine until hope was all but dead;
+men in the first flush of the gold fever; ne'er-do-wells; and here and
+there a working-man by training. They ate as a good many other sorts of
+men do, with great rapidity, little etiquette, and just enough
+unselfishness to pass each other the bread. It was noticeable that they
+seemed to have no time for talking. Certainly they had earned the right
+to be hungry, and the food was good and plentiful.
+
+[Illustration: A SKETCH ON THE WORK]
+
+Dan Dunn's tent was just in front of the mess tent, a few feet away on
+the edge of the river bluff. It was a little "A" tent, with a single cot
+on one side, a wooden chest on the other, and a small table between the
+two at the farther end, opposite the door.
+
+"Are ye looking at my wolverenes?" said he. "There's good men among
+them, and some that ain't so good, and many that's worse. But
+railroading is good enough for most of 'em. It ain't too rich for any
+man's blood, I assure ye."
+
+Over six feet in height, broad-chested, athletic, and carrying not an
+ounce of flesh that could be spared, Dan Dunn's was a striking figure
+even where physical strength was the most serviceable possession of
+every man. From never having given his personal appearance a
+thought--except during a brief period of courtship antecedent to the
+establishment of a home in old Ontario--he had so accustomed himself to
+unrestraint that his habitual attitude was that of a long-bladed
+jack-knife not fully opened. His long spare arms swung limberly before a
+long spare body set upon long spare legs. His costume was one that is
+never described in the advertisements of city clothiers. It consisted of
+a dust-coated slouch felt hat, which a dealer once sold for black, of a
+flannel shirt, of homespun trousers, of socks, and of heavy "brogans."
+In all, his dress was what the æsthetes of Mr. Wilde's day might have
+aptly termed a symphony in dust. His shoes and hat had acquired a
+mud-color, and his shirt and trousers were chosen because they
+originally possessed it. Yet Dan Dunn was distinctly a cleanly man, fond
+of frequent splashing in the camp toilet basins--the Kootenay River and
+its little rushing tributaries. He was not shaven. As a rule he is not,
+and yet at times he is, as it happens. I learned that on Sundays, when
+there was nothing to do except to go fishing, or to walk over to the
+engineer's camp for intellectual society, he felt the unconscious
+impulse of a forgotten training, and put on a coat. He even tied a black
+silk ribbon under his collar on such occasions, and if no one had given
+him a good cigar during the week, he took out his best pipe (which had
+been locked up, because whatever was not under lock and key was certain
+to be stolen in half an hour). Then he felt fitted, as he would say,
+"for a hard day's work at loafing."
+
+[Illustration: THE MESS TENT AT NIGHT]
+
+If you came upon Dan Dunn on Broadway, he would look as awkward as any
+other animal removed from its element; yet on a forest trail not even
+Davy Crockett was handsomer or more picturesque. His face is
+reddish-brown and as hard-skinned as the top of a drum, befitting a man
+who has lived out-of-doors all his life. But it is a finely moulded
+face, instinct with good-nature and some gentleness. The witchery of
+quick Irish humor lurks often in his eyes, but can quickly give place
+on occasion to a firm light, which is best read in connection with the
+broad, strong sweep of his massive under-jaw. There you see his fitness
+to command small armies, even of what he calls "wolverenes." He is
+willing to thrash any man who seems to need the operation, and yet he is
+equally noted for gathering a squad of rough laborers in every camp to
+make them his wards. He collects the money such men earn, and puts it in
+bank, or sends it to their families.
+
+"It does them as much good to let me take it as to chuck it over a
+gin-mill bar," he explained.
+
+As we stood looking into the crowded booth, where the men sat elbow to
+elbow, and all the knife blades were plying to and from all the plates
+and mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed.
+
+"The time has gone by," said he, "when you could keep an outfit on salt
+pork and bacon. It's as far gone as them days when they say the Hudson
+Bay Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. Did ye never
+hear of that? Why, sure, man, 'twas only fifty years ago that when meal
+hours came the bosses of the big trading company would give a workman a
+stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, and tell him he'd have an hour
+to catch his fill. But in railroading nowadays we give them the best
+that's going, and all they want of it--beef, ham, bacon, potatoes, mush,
+beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and game right out of the woods, and
+every sort of vegetable (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well,
+or they wouldn't stay."
+
+He said that the supplies of food are calculated on the basis of
+three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to a man--all the varieties of
+food being proportioned so that the total weight will be
+three-and-a-half pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and for
+small amounts, so as to economize in the number of horses required on
+the pack-trail. The amount to be consumed by the horses is, of course,
+included in the loads. The cost of "packing" food over long distances is
+more considerable than would be supposed. It was estimated that at
+Dunn's camp the freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of
+places farther in the mountains where the cost was double that. Indeed,
+a discussion of the subject brought to light the fact that in remote
+mining camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in bottles up to
+the price of champagne. At one camp on the Kootenay bacon was selling at
+the time I was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried peaches
+fetched forty cents under competition.
+
+As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef and vegetables, with tea
+and coffee and pie. The head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp,
+and therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. Every sort of
+cook drifts into camps like these, and that camp considers itself the
+most fortunate which happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who
+has cooked on a steamboat; but a cook from a lumber camp is rated almost
+as proudly.
+
+[Illustration: "THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS"]
+
+"Ye would not think it," said Dunn, "but some of them men has been bank
+clerks, and there's doctors and teachers among 'em--everything, in fact,
+except preachers. I never knew a preacher to get into a railroad gang.
+The men are always changing--coming and going. We don't have to
+advertise for new hands. The woods is full of men out of a job, and out
+of everything--pockets, elbows, and all. They drift in like peddlers on
+a pay-day. They come here with no more clothing than will wad a gun. The
+most of them will get nothing after two months' work. You see, they're
+mortgaged with their fares against them (thirty to forty dollars for
+them which the railroad brings from the East), and then they have their
+meals to pay for, at five dollars a week while they're here, and on top
+of that is all the clothing and shoes and blankets and tobacco, and
+everything they need--all charged agin them. It's just as well for
+them, for the most of them are too rich if they're a dollar ahead.
+There's few of them can stand the luxury of thirty dollars. When they
+get a stake of them dimensions, the most of them will stay no longer
+after pay-day than John Brown stayed in heaven. The most of them bang it
+all away for drink, and they are sure to come back again, but the
+'prospectors' and chronic tramps only work to get clothes and a flirting
+acquaintance with food, as well as money enough to make an affidavit to,
+and they never come back again at all. Out of 8500 men we had in one big
+work in Canada, 1500 to 2000 knocked off every month. Ninety per cent.
+came back. They had just been away for an old-fashioned drunk."
+
+It would be difficult to draw a parallel between these laborers and any
+class or condition of men in the East. They were of every nationality
+where news of gold-mines, of free settlers' sections, or of quick
+fortunes in the New World had penetrated. I recognized Greeks, Finns,
+Hungarians, Danes, Scotch, English, Irish, and Italians among them. Not
+a man exhibited a coat, and all were tanned brown, and were as spare and
+slender as excessively hard work can make a man. There was not a
+superfluity or an ornament in sight as they walked past me; not a
+necktie, a finger-ring, nor a watch-chain. There were some very
+intelligent faces and one or two fine ones in the band. Two typical
+old-fashioned prospectors especially attracted me. They were evidently
+of gentle birth, but time and exposure had bent them, and silvered their
+long, unkempt locks. Worse than all, it had planted in their faces a
+blended expression of sadness and hope fatigued that was painful to see.
+It is the brand that is on every old prospector's face. A very few of
+the men were young fellows of thirty, or even within the twenties. Their
+youth impelled them to break away from the table earlier than the
+others, and, seizing their rods, to start off for the fishing in the
+river.
+
+But those who thought of active pleasure were few indeed. Theirs was
+killing work, the most severe kind, and performed under the broiling
+sun, that at high mountain altitudes sends the mercury above 100 on
+every summer's day, and makes itself felt as if the rarefied atmosphere
+was no atmosphere at all. After a long day at the drill or the pick or
+shovel in such a climate, it was only natural that the men should, with
+a common impulse, seek first the solace of their pipes, and then of the
+shake-downs in their tents. I did not know until the next morning how
+severely their systems were strained; but it happened at sunrise on that
+day that I was at my ablutions on the edge of the river when Dan Dunn's
+gong turned the silent forest into a bedlam. It was called the
+seven-o'clock alarum, and was rung two hours earlier than that hour, so
+that the men might take two hours after dinner out of the heat of the
+day, "else the sun would kill them," Dunn said. This was apparently his
+device, and he kept up the transparent deception by having every clock
+and watch in the camp set two hours out of time.
+
+With the sounding of the gong the men began to appear outside the little
+tents in which they slept in couples. They came stumbling down the
+bluff to wash in the river, and of all the pitiful sights I ever saw,
+they presented one of the worst; of all the straining and racking and
+exhaustion that ever hard labor gave to men, they exhibited the utmost.
+They were but half awakened, and they moved so painfully and stiffly
+that I imagined I could hear their bones creak. I have seen spavined
+work-horses turned out to die that moved precisely as these men did. It
+was shocking to see them hobble over the rough ground; it was pitiful to
+watch them as they attempted to straighten their stiffened bodies after
+they had been bent double over the water. They gained erectness by slow
+jolts, as if their joints were of iron that had rusted. Of course they
+soon regained whatever elasticity nature had left them, and were
+themselves for the day--an active, muscular force of men. But that early
+morning sight of them was not such a spectacle as a right-minded man
+enjoys seeing his fellows take part in.
+
+
+  THE END
+
+
+
+
+  Interesting Works
+
+  of
+
+  Travel and Exploration.
+
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+
+  =Transcriber's Notes:=
+  original hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in
+    the original
+  Page 7, "doctor's workshop" changed to "doctor's workshop."
+  Page 29, "he in vented concerning" changed to "he invented concerning"
+  Page 33, "through why it was" changed to "though why it was"
+  Page 110, "Nine times in-ten" changed to "Nine times in ten"
+  Page 156, "mainland" changed to "main-land" [Ed. for consistency]
+  Page 169, "to get baffalo meat" changed to "to get buffalo meat"
+  Page 238, "that we be come" changed to "that we become"
+  Page 282, "two-and-a half" changed to "two-and-a-half"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On Canada's Frontier
+       Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the
+              Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of
+              Western Canada
+
+Author: Julian Ralph
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2011 [EBook #35208]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON CANADA'S FRONTIER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marcia Brooks, Ross Cooling and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
+http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from
+images generously made available by The Internet
+Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 403px;">
+<img src="images/frontis.png" width="403" height="630" alt="frontispiece" title="" />
+</div>
+<br /><br />
+
+<h1>ON CANADA'S FRONTIER</h1>
+<br />
+<h2>Sketches</h2>
+
+<h3>OF HISTORY, SPORT, AND ADVENTURE AND OF THE INDIANS, MISSIONARIES
+FUR-TRADERS, AND NEWER SETTLERS OF WESTERN CANADA</h3>
+<br /><br />
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JULIAN RALPH</h2>
+<br />
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED</h4>
+<br /><br />
+<h3>NEW YORK<br />
+HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE<br />
+1892</h3>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h4>Copyright, 1892, by <span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span>.</h4>
+<hr style="width: 5%;" />
+<h4><i>All rights reserved</i>.</h4>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h3>TO</h3>
+
+<h2>THE PEOPLE OF CANADA</h2>
+
+<h4>THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR WHO, DURING MANY LONG
+JOURNEYS IN THE CANADIAN WEST WAS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE TREATED WITH AN
+EXTREME FRIENDLINESS TO WHICH HE HERE TESTIFIES BUT WHICH HE CANNOT
+EASILY RETURN IN EQUAL MEASURE</h4>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+
+<p>If all those into whose hands this book may fall were as well informed
+upon the Dominion of Canada as are the people of the United States,
+there would not be needed a word of explanation of the title of this
+volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer that what is here related
+applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is necessary to explain that
+the work deals solely with scenes and phases of life in the newer, and
+mainly the western, parts of that country. The great English colony
+which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of history has for its
+capitals such proud and notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto,
+Halifax, and many others, to distinguish the progressive civilization of
+the region east of Lake Huron&mdash;the older provinces. But the Canada of
+the geographies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United
+States; it is, in fact, the "British America" of old. A great
+trans-Canadian railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific
+slope to the provinces of old Canada with stitches of steel across the
+Plains. There the same mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own
+West is elbowing the fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and is
+laying out farms far north, in the smiling Peace River district, where
+it was only a little while ago supposed that there were but two seasons,
+winter and late spring. It is with that new part of Canada, between the
+ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy new cities of the
+Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some references to the North are
+added in those chapters that treat of hunting and fishing and
+fur-trading.</p>
+
+<p>The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of
+papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during the
+past three years. The first one to be published was that which describes
+a settler's colony in which a few titled foreigners took the lead; the
+others were written so recently that they should possess the same
+interest and value as if they here first met the public eye. What that
+interest and value amount to is for the reader to judge, the author's
+position being such that he may only call attention to the fact that he
+had access to private papers and documents when he prepared the sketches
+of the Hudson Bay Company, and that, in pursuing information about the
+great province of British Columbia, he was not able to learn that a
+serious and extended study of its resources had ever been made. The
+principal studies and sketches were prepared for and published in
+<span class="smcap">Harper's Magazine</span>. The spirit in which they were written was solely that
+of one who loves the open air and his fellow-men of every condition and
+color, and who has had the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada
+something of the old and almost departed life of the plainsmen and
+woodsmen, and of the newer forces of nation-building on our continent.</p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+<table summary="Contents" width="60%">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdr">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">I.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_ONE"><span class="smcap">Titled Pioneers</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">1</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">II.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_TWO"><span class="smcap">Chartering a Nation</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">11</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">III.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_THREE"><span class="smcap">A Famous Missionary</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">53</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_FOUR"><span class="smcap">Antoine's Moose-yard</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">66</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">V.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_FIVE"><span class="smcap">Big Fishing</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">115</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_SIX"><span class="smcap">"A Skin for a Skin"</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">134</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_SEVEN"><span class="smcap">"Talking Musquash"</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">190</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_EIGHT"><span class="smcap">Canada's El Dorado</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">214</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#CHAPTER_NINE"><span class="smcap">Dan Dunn's Outfit</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">290</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+<table summary="Illustrations" width="60%">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdr">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#frontis"><i>The Romantic Adventure of Old Sun's Wife</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">Frontispiece</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG2"><i>Dr. Rudolph Meyer's Place on the Pipestone</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">2</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG3"><i>Settler's Sod Cabin</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">3</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG4"><i>Whitewood, a Settlement on the Prairie</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">4</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG5"><i>Interior of Sod Cabin on the Frontier</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">5</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG7"><i>Prairie Sod Stable</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">7</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG9"><i>Trained Ox Team</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">9</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG31"><i>Indian Boys Running a Foot-race</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">31</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG36"><i>Indian Mother and Boy</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">36</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG39"><i>Opening of the Soldier Clan Dance</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">39</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG43"><i>Sketch in the Soldier Clan Dance</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">43</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG47"><i>A Fantasy from the Pony War-dance</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">47</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG51"><i>Throwing the Snow Snake</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">51</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG61"><i>Father Lacombe Heading the Indians</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">61</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG69"><i>The Hotel&mdash;Last Sign of Civilisation</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">69</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG73"><i>"Give me a light"</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">73</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG79"><i>Antoine, from Life</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">79</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG83"><i>The Portage Sleigh on a Lumber Road</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">83</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG87"><i>The Track in the Winter Forest</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">87</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG91"><i>Pierre from Life</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">91</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG93"><i>Antoine's Cabin</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">93</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG97"><i>The Camp at Night</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">97</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG101"><i>A Moose Bull Fight</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">101</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG103"><i>On the Moose Trail</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">103</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG105"><i>In sight of the Game&mdash;"Now Shoot"</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">105</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG109"><i>Success</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">109</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG111"><i>Hunting the Caribou&mdash;"Shoot! Shoot!"</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">111</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG119"><i>Indians Hunting Nets on Lake Nipigon</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">119</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG127"><i>Trout-fishing Through the Ice</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">127</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG137"><i>Rival Traders Racing to the Indian Camp</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">137</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG143"><i>The Bear-trap</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">143</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG147"><i>Huskie Dogs Fighting</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">147</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG151"><i>Painting the Robe</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">151</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG159"><i>Coureur du Bois</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">159</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG163"><i>A Fur-trader in the Council Tepee</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">163</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG167"><i>Buffalo Meat for the Post</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">167</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG171"><i>The Indian Hunter of 1750</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">171</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG173"><i>Indian Hunter Hanging Deer Out of the Reach of Wolves</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">173</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG177"><i>Making the Snow-shoe</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">177</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG181"><i>A Hudson Bay Man (Quarter-breed)</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">181</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG185"><i>The Coureur du Bois and the Savage</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">185</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG193"><i>Talking Musquash</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">193</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG198"><i>Indian Hunters Moving Camp</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">198</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG201"><i>Setting a Mink-trap</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">201</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG205"><i>Wood Indians Come to Trade</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">205</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG209"><i>A Voyageur, or Canoe-man, of Great Slave Lake</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">209</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG211"><i>In a Stiff Current</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">211</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG217"><i>Voyageur with Tumpline</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">217</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG221"><i>Voyageurs in Camp for the Night</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">221</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG227"><i>"Huskie" Dogs on the Frozen Highway</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">227</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG233"><i>The Factor's Fancy Toboggan</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">233</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG239"><i>Halt of a York Boat Brigade for the Night</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">239</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG251"><i>An Impression of Shuswap Lake, British Columbia</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">251</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG257"><i>The Tschummum, or Tool Used in Making Canoes</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">257</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG261"><i>The First of the Salmon Run, Fraser River</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">261</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG266"><i>Indian Salmon-fishing in the Thrasher</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">266</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG269"><i>Going to the Potlatch&mdash;Big Canoe, North-west Coast</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">269</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG275"><i>The Salmon Cache</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">275</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG279"><i>An Ideal of the Coast</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">279</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG283"><i>The Potlatch</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">283</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG293"><i>An Indian Canoe on the Columbia</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">293</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG297"><i>"You're setting your nerves to stand it"</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">297</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG299"><i>Jack Kirkup, the Mountain Sheriff</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">299</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG303"><i>Engineer on the Preliminary Survey</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">303</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG308"><i>Falling Monarchs</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">308</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG311"><i>Dan Dunn on His Works</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">311</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG313"><i>The Supply Train Over the Mountain</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">313</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG317"><i>A Sketch on the Work</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">317</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG319"><i>The Mess Tent at Night</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">319</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#ILLO_PG322"><i>"They Gained Erectness by Slow Jolts"</i></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">322</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ON CANADA'S FRONTIER</h2>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_ONE" id="CHAPTER_ONE"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>TITLED PIONEERS</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>here is a very remarkable bit of this continent just north of our State
+of North Dakota, in what the Canadians call Assiniboia, one of the
+North-west Provinces. Here the plains reach away in an almost level,
+unbroken, brown ocean of grass. Here are some wonderful and some very
+peculiar phases of immigration and of human endeavor. Here is Major
+Bell's farm of nearly one hundred square miles, famous as the Bell Farm.
+Here Lady Cathcart, of England, has mercifully established a colony of
+crofters, rescued from poverty and oppression. Here Count Esterhazy has
+been experimenting with a large number of Hungarians, who form a colony
+which would do better if those foreigners were not all together, with
+only each other to imitate&mdash;and to commiserate. But, stranger than all
+these, here is a little band of distinguished Europeans, partly noble
+and partly scholarly, gathered together in as lonely a spot as can be
+found short of the Rockies or the far northern regions of this
+continent.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span></p>
+<a name="ILLO_PG2" id="ILLO_PG2"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0018.jpg" width="395" height="300" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>DR. RUDOLPH MEYER'S PLACE ON THE PIPESTONE</h4>
+
+<p>These gentlemen are Dr. Rudolph Meyer, of Berlin, the Comte de Cazes and
+the Comte de Raffignac, of France, and M. Le Bidau de St. Mars, of that
+country also. They form, in all probability, the most distinguished and
+aristocratic little band of immigrants and farmers in the New World.</p>
+
+<p>Seventeen hundred miles west of Montreal, in a vast prairie where
+settlers every year go mad from loneliness, these polished Europeans
+till the soil, strive for prizes at the provincial fairs, fish, hunt,
+read the current literature of two continents, and are happy. The soil
+in that region is of remarkable depth and richness, and is so black that
+the roads and cattle-trails look like ink lines on brown paper. It is
+part of a vast territory of uniform appearance, in one portion of which
+are the richest wheat-lands of the continent. The Canadian Pacific
+Railway crosses Assiniboia,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> with stops about five miles apart&mdash;some mere
+stations and some small settlements. Here the best houses are little
+frame dwellings; but very many of the settlers live in shanties made of
+sods, with such thick walls and tight roofs, all of sod, that the awful
+winters, when the mercury falls to forty degrees below zero, are endured
+in them better than in the more costly frame dwellings.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG3" id="ILLO_PG3"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0019.jpg" width="514" height="300" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>SETTLER'S SOD CABIN</h4>
+
+<p>I stopped off the cars at Whitewood, picking that four-year-old village
+out at hap-hazard as a likely point at which to see how the immigrants
+live in a brand-new country. I had no idea of the existence of any of
+the persons I found there. The most perfect hospitality is offered to
+strangers in such infant communities, and while enjoying the shelter of
+a merchant's house I obtained news of the distinguished settlers, all
+of whom live away from the railroad in solitude not to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>be conceived by
+those who think their homes the most isolated in the older parts of the
+country. I had only time to visit Dr. Rudolph Meyer, five miles from
+Whitewood, in the valley of the Pipestone.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG4" id="ILLO_PG4"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0020.jpg" width="586" height="300" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>WHITEWOOD, A SETTLEMENT ON THE PRAIRIE</h4>
+
+<p>The way was across a level prairie, with here and there a bunch of young
+wolf-willows to break the monotonous scene, with tens of thousands of
+gophers sitting boldly on their haunches within reach of the wagon whip,
+with a sod house in sight in one direction at one time and a frame house
+in view at another. The talk of the driver was spiced with news of
+abundant wild-fowl, fewer deer, and marvellously numerous small
+quadrupeds, from wolves and foxes down. He talked of bachelors living
+here and there alone on that sea of grass, for all the world like men
+in small boats on the ocean; and I saw, contrariwise, a man and wife <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>who
+blessed Heaven for an unheard-of number of children, especially prized
+because each new-comer lessened the loneliness. I heard of the long and
+dreadful winters when the snowfall is so light that horses and mules may
+always paw down to grass, though cattle stand and starve and freeze to
+death. I heard, too, of the way the snow comes in flurried squalls, in
+which men are lost within pistol-shot of their homes. In time the wagon
+came to a sort of coulee or hollow, in which some mechanics imported
+from Pa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>ris were putting up a fine cottage for the Comte de Raffignac.
+Ten paces farther, and I stood on the edge of the valley of the
+Pipestone, looking at a scene so poetic, pastoral, and beautiful that in
+the whole transcontinental journey there were few views to compare with
+it.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG5" id="ILLO_PG5"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0021.jpg" width="432" height="385" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INTERIOR OF SOD CABIN ON THE FRONTIER</h4>
+
+<p>Reaching away far below the level of the prairie was a bowl-like valley,
+a mile long and half as wide, with a crystal stream lying like a ribbon
+of silver midway between its sloping walls. Another valley, longer yet,
+served as an extension to this. On the one side the high grassy walls
+were broken with frequent gullies, while on the other side was a
+park-like growth of forest trees. Meadows and fields lay between, and
+nestling against the eastern or grassy wall was the quaint,
+old-fashioned German house of the learned doctor. Its windows looked out
+on those beautiful little valleys, the property of the doctor&mdash;a little
+world far below the great prairie out of which sportive and patient Time
+had hollowed it. Externally the long, low, steep-roofed house was
+German, ancient, and picturesque in appearance. Its main floor was all
+enclosed in the sash and glass frame of a covered porch, and outside of
+the walls of glass were heavy curtains of straw, to keep out the sun in
+summer and the cold in winter. In-doors the house is as comfortable as
+any in the world. Its framework is filled with brick, and its trimmings
+are all of pine, oiled and varnished. In the heart of the house is a
+great Russian stove&mdash;a huge box of brick-work, which is filled full of
+wood to make a fire that is made fresh every day, and that heats the
+house for twenty-four ho<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>urs. A well-filled wine-cellar, a well-equipped
+library, where <span class="smcap">Harper's Weekly</span>, and <i>Uber Land und Mer</i>, <i>Punch</i>,
+<i>Puck</i>, and <i>Die Fliegende Bl&auml;tter</i> lie side by side, a kindly wife, and
+a stumbling baby, tell of a combination of domestic joys that no man is
+too rich to envy. The library is the doctor's workshop. He is now
+engaged in compiling a digest of the economic laws of nations. He is
+already well known as the author of a <i>History of Socialism</i> (in
+Germany, the United States, Scandinavia, Russia, France, Belgium, and
+elsewhere), and also for his <i>History of Socialism in Germany</i>. He
+writes in French and German, and his works are published in Germany.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG7" id="ILLO_PG7"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0023.jpg" width="443" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>PRAIRIE SOD STABLE</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span></p>
+<p>Dr. Meyer is fifty-three years old. He is a political exile, having been
+forced from Prussia for connection with an unsuccessful opposition to
+Bismarck. It is because he is a scholar seeking rest from the turmoil of
+politics that one is able to comprehend his living in this overlooked
+corner of the world. Yet when that is understood, and one knows what an
+Arcadia his little valley is, and how complete are his comforts
+within-doors, the placidity with which he smokes his pipe, drinks his
+beer, and is waited upon by servants imported from Paris, becomes less a
+matter for wonder than for congratulation. He has shared part of one
+valley with the Comte de Raffignac, who thinks there is nothing to
+compare with it on earth. The count has had his house built near the
+abruptly-broken edge of the prairie, so that he may look down upon the
+calm and beautiful valley and enjoy it, as he could not had he built in
+the valley itself. He is a youth of very old French family, who loves
+hunting and horses. He was contemplating the raising of horses for a
+business when I was there. But the count mars the romance of his
+membership in this little band by going to Paris now and then, as a
+young man would be likely to.</p>
+
+<p>Out-of-doors one saw what untold good it does to the present and future
+settlers to have such men among them. The hot-houses, glazed vegetable
+beds, the plots of cultivated ground, the nurseries of young trees&mdash;all
+show at what cost of money and patience the Herr Doctor is experimenting
+with every tree and flower and vegetable and cereal to discover what can
+be grown with profit in that region of rich soil and short summers, and
+what cannot. He is in communication with the see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>dsmen, to say nothing of
+the savants, of Europe and this country, and whatever he plants is of
+the best. Near his quaint dwelling he has a house for his gardener, a
+smithy, a tool-house, a barn, and a cheese-factory, for he makes gruyere
+cheese in great quantities. He also raises horses and cattle.</p>
+
+<p>The Comte de Cazes has a sheltered, favored claim a few miles to the
+northward, near the Qu' Appele River. He lives in great comfort, and is
+so successful a farmer that he carries off nearly all the prizes for the
+province, especially those given for prime vegetables. He has his wife
+and daughter and one of his sons with him, and an abundance of means,
+as, indeed, these distinguished settlers all appear to have.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG9" id="ILLO_PG9"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0025.jpg" width="493" height="300" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>TRAINED OX TEAM</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+<p>These men have that faculty, developed in all educated and thinking
+souls, which enables them to banish loneliness and entertain themselves.
+Still, though Dr. Meyer laughs at the idea of danger, it must have been
+a little disquieting to live as he does during the Riel rebellion,
+especially as an Indian reservation is close by, and wandering red men
+are seen every day upon the prairie. Indeed, the Government thought fit
+to send men of the North-west Mounted Police to visit the doctor twice a
+week as lately as a year after the close of the half-breed uprising.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_TWO" id="CHAPTER_TWO"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>CHARTERING A NATION</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>ow it came about that we chartered the Blackfoot nation for two days
+had better not be told in straightforward fashion. There is more that is
+interesting in going around about the subject, just as in reality we did
+go around and about the neighborhood of the Indians before we determined
+to visit them.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, the most interesting Indian I ever saw&mdash;among many
+kinds and many thousands&mdash;was the late Chief Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot
+people. More like a king than a chief he looked, as he strode upon the
+plains, in a magnificent robe of white bead-work as rich as ermine, with
+a gorgeous pattern illuminating its edges, a glorious sun worked into
+the front of it, and many artistic and chromatic figures sewed in gaudy
+beads upon its back. He wore an old white chimney-pot hat, bound around
+with eagle feathers, a splendid pair of <i>chaperajos</i>, all worked with
+beads at the bottoms and fringed along the sides, and bead-worked
+moccasins, for which any lover of the Indian or collector of his
+paraphernalia would have exchanged a new Winchester rifle without a
+second's hesitation. But though Crowfoot was so royally clothed, it was
+in himself that the kingly quality was most apparent. His face was
+extraordinarily like what portraits we have of Julius C&aelig;sar, with the
+difference that Crowfoot had the complexion of an Egyptian m<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>ummy. The
+high forehead, the great aquiline nose, the thin lips, usually closed,
+the small, round, protruding chin, the strong jawbones, and the keen
+gray eyes composed a face in which every feature was finely moulded, and
+in which the warrior, the commander, and the counsellor were strongly
+suggested. And in each of these roles he played the highest part among
+the Indians of Canada from the moment that the whites and the red men
+contested the dominion of the plains until he died, a short time ago.</p>
+
+<p>He was born and lived a wild Indian, and though the good fathers of the
+nearest Roman Catholic mission believe that he died a Christian, I am
+constrained to see in the reason for their thinking so only another
+proof of the consummate shrewdness of Crowfoot's life-long policy. The
+old king lay on his death-bed in his great wig-a-wam, with twenty-seven
+of his medicine-men around him, and never once did he pretend that he
+despised or doubted their magic. When it was evident that he was about
+to die, the conjurers ceased their long-continued, exhausting formula of
+howling, drumming, and all the rest, and, Indian-like, left Death to
+take his own. Then it was that one of the watchful, zealous priests,
+whose lives have indeed been like those of fathers to the wild Indians,
+slipped into the great tepee and administered the last sacrament to the
+old pagan.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you believe?" the priest inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I believe," old Crowfoot grunted. Then he whispered, "But don't
+tell my people."</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span></p>
+<p>Among the last words of great men, those of Saponaxitaw (his Indian
+name) may never be recorded, but to the student of the American
+aborigine they betray more that is characteristic of the habitual
+attitude of mind of the wild red man towards civilizing influences than
+any words I ever knew one to utter.</p>
+
+<p>As the old chief crushed the bunch-grass beneath his gaudy moccasins at
+the time I saw him, and as his lesser chiefs and headmen strode behind
+him, we who looked on knew what a great part he was bearing and had
+taken in Canada. He had been chief of the most powerful and savage tribe
+in the North, and of several allied tribes as well, from the time when
+the region west of the Mississippi was <i>terra incognita</i> to all except a
+few fur traders and priests. His warriors ruled the Canadian wilderness,
+keeping the Ojibbeways and Crees in the forests to the east and north,
+routing the Crows, the Stonies, and the Big-Bellies whenever they
+pleased, and yielding to no tribe they met except the Sioux to the
+southward in our territory. The first white man Crowfoot ever knew
+intimately was Father Lacombe, the noble old missionary, whose fame is
+now world-wide among scholars. The peaceful priest and the warrior chief
+became fast friends, and from the day when the white men first broke
+down the border and swarmed upon the plains, until at the last they ran
+what Crowfoot called their "fire-wagons" (locomotives) through his land,
+he followed the priest's counselling in most important matters. He
+treated with the authorities, and thereafter hindered his braves from
+murder, massacre, and warfare. Better than that, during the Riel
+rebellion he more than any other man, or twenty men, kept t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>he red man of
+the plains at peace when the French half-breeds, led by their mentally
+irresponsible disturber, rebelled against the Dominion authorities.</p>
+
+<p>When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he spoke, his nation listened
+in silence. He had killed as many men as any Indian warrior alive; he
+was a mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and mangled in skin,
+limb, and bone. He never would learn English or pretend to discard his
+religion. He was an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At eighty
+odd years of age there lived no red-skin who dared answer him back when
+he spoke his mind. But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist.
+Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and because a grand old
+priest was his truest friend, he gave orders that his body should be
+buried in a coffin, Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in
+the summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a high hill, and
+knew that his bones were guarded night and day by watchers from among
+his people. Two or three days before he died his best horse was
+slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. "That was wrong," he
+said; "there was no sense in doing that; and besides, the horse was
+worth good money." But he was always at least as far as that in advance
+of his people, and it was natural that not only his horse, but his gun
+and blankets, his rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the
+happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried with him.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+<p>There are different ways of judging which is the best Indian, but from
+the stand-point of him who would examine that distinct product of
+nature, the Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian Blackfeet
+are among if not quite the best. They are almost as primitive and
+natural as any, nearly the most prosperous, physically very fine, the
+most free from white men's vices. They are the most reasonable in their
+attitude towards the whites of any who hold to the true Indian
+philosophy. The sum of that philosophy is that civilization gets men a
+great many comforts, but bundles them up with so many rules and
+responsibilities and so much hard work that, after all, the wild Indian
+has the greatest amount of pleasure and the least share of care that men
+can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of the red-skins who
+considers them as children, governed mainly by emotion, and acting upon
+undisciplined impulse; and I know of no more hearty, natural children
+than the careless, improvident, impulsive boys and girls of from five to
+eighty years of age whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three
+Bulls, his brother.</p>
+
+<p>The Blackfeet of Canada number about two thousand men, women, and
+children. They dwell upon a reserve of nearly five hundred square miles
+of plains land, watered by the beautiful Bow River, and almost within
+sight of the Rocky Mountains. It is in the province of Alberta, north of
+our Montana. There were three thousand and more of these Indians when
+the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across their hunting-ground,
+seven or eight years ago, but they are losing numbers at the rate of
+two hundred and fifty a year, roug<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>hly speaking. Their neighbors, the
+tribes called the Bloods and the Piegans, are of the same nation. The
+Sarcis, once a great tribe, became weakened by disease and war, and many
+years ago begged to be taken into the confederation. These tribes all
+have separate reserves near to one another, but all have heretofore
+acknowledged each Blackfoot chief as their supreme ruler. Their old men
+can remember when they used to roam as far south as Utah, and be gone
+twelve months on the war-path and on their foraging excursions for
+horses. They chased the Crees as far north as the Crees would run, and
+that was close to the arctic circle. They lived in their war-paint and
+by the chase. Now they are caged. They live unnaturally and die as
+unnaturally, precisely like other wild animals shut up in our parks.
+Within their park each gets a pound of meat with half a pound of flour
+every day. Not much comes to them besides, except now and then a little
+game, tobacco, and new blankets. They are so poorly lodged and so
+scantily fed that they are not fit to confront a Canadian winter, and
+lung troubles prey among them.</p>
+
+<p>It is a harsh way to put it (but it is true of our own government also)
+to say that one who has looked the subject over is apt to decide that
+the policy of the Canadian Government has been to make treaties with the
+dangerous tribes, and to let the peaceful ones starve. The latter do not
+need to starve in Canada, fortunately; they trust to the Hudson Bay
+Company for food and care, and not in vain. Having treated with the
+wilder Indians, the rest of the policy is to send the brig<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>htest of their
+boys to trade-schools, and to try to induce the men to till the soil.
+Those who do so are then treated more generously than the others. I have
+my own ideas with which to meet those who find nothing admirable in any
+except a dead Indian, and with which to discuss the treatment and policy
+the live Indian endures, but this is not the place for the discussion.
+Suffice it that it is not to be denied that between one hundred and
+fifty and two hundred Blackfeet are learning to maintain several plots
+of farming land planted with oats and potatoes. This they are doing with
+success, and with the further result of setting a good example to the
+rest. But most of the bucks are either sullenly or stupidly clinging to
+the shadow and the memory of the life that is gone.</p>
+
+<p>It was a recollection of that life which they portrayed for us. And they
+did so with a fervor, an abundance of detail and memento, and with a
+splendor few men have seen equalled in recent years&mdash;or ever may hope to
+witness again.</p>
+
+<p>We left the cars at Gleichen, a little border town which depends almost
+wholly upon the Blackfeet and their visitors for its maintenance. It has
+two stores&mdash;one where the Indians get credit and high prices (and at
+which the red men deal), and one at which they may buy at low rates for
+cash, wherefore they seldom go there. It has two hotels and a half-dozen
+railway men's dwellings, and, finally, it boasts a tiny little station
+or barracks of the North-west Mounted Police, wherein the lower of the
+two rooms is fitted with a desk, and hung with pistols, guns,
+handcuffs, and cart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>ridge belts, while the upper room contains the cots
+for the men at night.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the store that the Indians favor&mdash;just such a store as you
+see at any cross-roads you drive past in a summer's outing in the
+country&mdash;and there were half a dozen Indians beautifying the door-way
+and the interior, like magnified majolica-ware in a crockery-shop. They
+were standing or sitting about with thoughtful expressions, as Indians
+always do when they go shopping; for your true Indian generates such a
+contemplative mood when he is about to spend a quarter that one would
+fancy he must be the most prudent and deliberate of men, instead of what
+he really is&mdash;the greatest prodigal alive except the negro. These bucks
+might easily have been mistaken for waxworks. Unnaturally erect, with
+arms folded beneath their blankets, they stood or sat without moving a
+limb or muscle. Only when a new-comer entered did they stir. Then they
+turned their heads deliberately and looked at the visitor fixedly, as
+eagles look at you from out their cages. They were strapping fine
+fellows, each bundled up in a colored blanket, flapping cloth leg-gear,
+and yellow moccasins. Each had the front locks of his hair tied in an
+upright bunch, like a natural plume, and several wore little brass
+rings, like baby finger-rings, around certain side locks down beside
+their ears.</p>
+
+<p>There they stood, motionless and speechless, waiting until the impulse
+should move them to buy what they wanted, with the same deliberation
+with which they had waited for the original impulse which sent them to
+the store. If Mr. Frenchman, who kept the store, had come from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> behind
+his counter, English fashion, and had said: "Come, come; what d'you
+want? Speak up now, and be quick about it. No lounging here. Buy or get
+out." If he had said that, or anything like it, those Indians would have
+stalked out of his place, not to enter it again for a very long time, if
+ever. Bartering is a serious and complex performance to an Indian, and
+you might as well try to hurry an elephant up a gang-plank as try to
+quicken an Indian's procedure in trading.</p>
+
+<p>We purchased of the Frenchman a chest of tea, a great bag of lump sugar,
+and a small case of plug tobacco for gifts to the chief. Then we hired a
+buck-board wagon, and made ready for the journey to the reserve.</p>
+
+<p>The road to the reserve lay several miles over the plains, and commanded
+a view of rolling grass land, like a brown sea whose waves were
+petrified, with here and there a group of sickly wind-blown trees to
+break the resemblance. The road was a mere wagon track and horse-trail
+through the grass, but it was criss-crossed with the once deep ruts that
+had been worn by countless herds of buffalo seeking water.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, as we journeyed, a little line of sand-hills came into view.
+They formed the Blackfoot cemetery. We saw the "tepees of the dead" here
+and there on the knolls, some new and perfect, some old and
+weather-stained, some showing mere tatters of cotton flapping on the
+poles, and still others only skeleton tents, the poles remaining and the
+cotton covering gone completely. We knew what we would see if we looked
+into those "dead tepees" (being careful to approach fr<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>om the windward
+side). We would see, lying on the ground or raised upon a framework, a
+bundle that would be narrow at top and bottom, and broad in the
+middle&mdash;an Indian's body rolled up in a sheet of cotton, with his best
+bead-work and blanket and gun in the bundle, and near by a kettle and
+some dried meat and corn-meal against his feeling hungry on his long
+journey to the hereafter. As one or two of the tepees were new, we
+expected to see some family in mourning; and, sure enough, when we
+reached the great sheer-sided gutter which the Bow River has dug for its
+course through the plains, we halted our horse and looked down upon a
+lonely trio of tepees, with children playing around them and women
+squatted by the entrances. Three families had lost members, and were
+sequestered there in abject surrender to grief.</p>
+
+<p>Those tents of the mourners were at our feet as we rode southward, down
+in the river gully, where the grass was green and the trees were leafy
+and thriving; but when we turned our faces to the eastward, where the
+river bent around a great promontory, what a sight met our gaze! There
+stood a city of tepees, hundreds of them, showing white and yellow and
+brown and red against the clear blue sky. A silent and lifeless city it
+seemed, for we were too far off to see the people or to hear their
+noises. The great huddle of little pyramids rose abruptly from the level
+bare grass against the flawless sky, not like one of those melancholy
+new treeless towns that white men are building all over the prairie, but
+rather like a mosquito fleet becalmed at sea. There are two camps on
+the Blackfo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>ot Reserve, the North Camp and the South Camp, and this town
+of tents was between the two, and was composed of more households than
+both together; for this was the assembling for the sun-dance, their
+greatest religious festival, and hither had come Bloods, Piegans, and
+Sarcis as well as Blackfeet. Only the mourners kept away; for here were
+to be echoed the greatest ceremonials of that dead past, wherein lives
+dedicated to war and to the chase inspired the deeds of valor which each
+would now celebrate anew in speech or song. This was to be the
+anniversary of the festival at which the young men fastened themselves
+by a strip of flesh in their chests to a sort of Maypole rope, and tore
+their flesh apart to demonstrate their fitness to be considered braves.
+At this feast husbands had the right to confess their women, and to cut
+their noses off if they had been untrue, and if they yet preferred life
+to the death they richly merited. At this gala-time sacrifices of
+fingers were made by brave men to the sun. Then every warrior boasted of
+his prowess, and the young beaus feasted their eyes on gayly-clad
+maidens the while they calculated for what number of horses they could
+be purchased of their parents. And at each recurrence of this wonderful
+holiday-time every night was spent in feasting, gorging, and gambling.
+In short, it was the great event of the Indian year, and so it remains.
+Even now you may see the young braves undergo the torture; and if you
+may not see the faithless wives disciplined, you may at least perceive a
+score who have been, as well as hear the mighty boasting, and witness
+the dancing, gaming, and carous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>ing.</p>
+
+<p>We turned our backs towards the tented field, for we had not yet
+introduced ourselves to Mr. Magnus Begg, the Indian agent in charge of
+the reserve. We were soon within his official enclosure, where a pretty
+frame house, an office no bigger than a freight car, and a roomy barn
+and stable were all overtopped by a central flag-staff, and shaded by
+flourishing trees. Mr. Begg was at home, and, with his accomplished
+wife, welcomed us in such a hearty manner as one could hardly have
+expected, even where white folks were so "mighty unsartin" to appear as
+they are on the plains. The agent's house without is like any pretty
+village home in the East; and within, the only distinctive features are
+a number of ornamental mounted wild-beast's heads and a room whose walls
+are lined about with rare and beautiful Blackfoot curios in skin and
+stone and bead-work. But, to our joy, we found seated in that room the
+famous chief Old Sun. He is the husband of the most remarkable Indian
+squaw in America, and he would have been Crowfoot's successor were it
+not that he was eighty-seven years of age when the Blackfoot C&aelig;sar died.
+As chief of the North Blackfeet, Old Sun boasts the largest personal
+following on the Canadian plains, having earned his popularity by his
+fighting record, his commanding manner, his eloquence, and by that
+generosity which leads him to give away his rations and his presents. No
+man north of Mexico can dress more gorgeously than he upon occasion, for
+he still owns a buckskin outfit beaded to the value of a Worth gown.
+Moreover, he owns a red coat, such as the Governmen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>t used to give only
+to great chiefs. The old fellow had lost his vigor when we saw him, and
+as he sat wrapped in his blanket he looked like a half-emptied meal bag
+flung on a chair. He despises English, but in that marvellous Volap&uuml;k of
+the plains called the sign language he told us that his teeth were gone,
+his hearing was bad, his eyes were weak, and his flesh was spare. He
+told his age also, and much else besides, and there is no one who reads
+this but could have readily understood his every statement and
+sentiment, conveyed solely by means of his hands and fingers. I noticed
+that he looked like an old woman, and it is a fact that old Indian men
+frequently look so. Yet no one ever saw a young brave whose face
+suggested a woman's, though their beardless countenances and long hair
+might easily create that appearance.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Remington was anxious to paint Old Sun and his squaw, particularly
+the latter, and he easily obtained permission, although when the time
+for the mysterious ordeal arrived next day the old chief was greatly
+troubled in his superstitious old brain lest some mischief would befall
+him through the medium of the painting. To the Indian mind the sun,
+which they worship, has magical, even devilish, powers, and Old Sun
+developed a fear that the orb of day might "work on his picture" and
+cause him to die. Fortunately I found in Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter,
+a person who had undergone the process without dire consequences, was
+willing to undergo it again, and who added that his father and mother
+had submitted to the operation, and yet had lived to a yellow old age.
+When Old Sun <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>brought his wife to sit for her portrait I put all
+etiquette to shame in staring at her, as you will all the more readily
+believe when you know something of her history.</p>
+
+<p>Old Sun's wife sits in the council of her nation&mdash;the only woman, white,
+red, or black, of whom I have ever heard who enjoys such a prerogative
+on this continent. She earned her peculiar privileges, if any one ever
+earned anything. Forty or more years ago she was a Piegan maiden known
+only in her tribe, and there for nothing more than her good origin, her
+comeliness, and her consequent value in horses. She met with outrageous
+fortune, but she turned it to such good account that she was speedily
+ennobled. She was at home in a little camp on the plains one day, and
+had wandered away from the tents, when she was kidnapped. It was in this
+wise: other camps were scattered near there. On the night before the day
+of her adventure a band of Crows stole a number of horses from a camp of
+the Gros Ventres, and very artfully trailed their plunder towards and
+close to the Piegan camp before they turned and made their way to their
+own lodges. When the Gros Ventres discovered their loss, and followed
+the trail that seemed to lead to the Piegan camp, the girl and her
+father, an aged chief, were at a distance from their tepees, unarmed and
+unsuspecting. Down swooped the Gros Ventres. They killed and scalped the
+old man, and then their chief swung the young girl upon his horse behind
+him, and binding her to him with thongs of buckskin, clashed off
+triumphantly for his own village. That has happened to many another
+Indian maide<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>n, most of whom have behaved as would a plaster image,
+saving a few days of weeping. Not such was Old Sun's wife. When she and
+her captor were in sight of the Gros Ventre village, she reached forward
+and stole the chief's scalping-knife out of its sheath at his side. With
+it, still wet with her father's blood, she cut him in the back through
+to the heart. Then she freed his body from hers, and tossed him from the
+horse's back. Leaping to the ground beside his body, she not only
+scalped him, but cut off his right arm and picked up his gun, and rode
+madly back to her people, chased most of the way, but bringing safely
+with her the three greatest trophies a warrior can wrest from a
+vanquished enemy. Two of them would have distinguished any brave, but
+this mere village maiden came with all three. From that day she has
+boasted the right to wear three eagle feathers.</p>
+
+<p>Old Sun was a young man then, and when he heard of this feat he came and
+hitched the requisite number of horses to her mother's travois poles
+beside her tent. I do not recall how many steeds she was valued at, but
+I have heard of very high-priced Indian girls who had nothing except
+their feminine qualities to recommend them. In one case I knew that a
+young man, who had been casting what are called "sheep's eyes" at a
+maiden, went one day and tied four horses to her father's tent. Then he
+stood around and waited, but there was no sign from the tent. Next day
+he took four more, and so he went on until he had tied sixteen horses to
+the tepee. At the least they were worth $20, perhaps $30, apiece. At
+tha<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>t the maiden and her people came out, and received the young man so
+graciously that he knew he was "the young woman's choice," as we say in
+civilized circles, sometimes under very similar circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>At all events, Old Sun was rich and powerful, and easily got the savage
+heroine for his wife. She was admitted to the Blackfoot council without
+a protest, and has since proven that her valor was not sporadic, for she
+has taken the war-path upon occasion, and other scalps have gone to her
+credit.</p>
+
+<p>After a while we drove over to where the field lay littered with tepees.
+There seemed to be no order in the arrangement of the tents as we looked
+at the scene from a distance. Gradually the symptoms of a great stir and
+activity were observable, and we saw men and horses running about at one
+side of the nomad settlement, as well as hundreds of human figures
+moving in the camp. Then a nearer view brought out the fact that the
+tepees, which were of many sizes, were apt to be white at the base,
+reddish half-way up, and dark brown at the top. The smoke of the fires
+within, and the rain and sun without, paint all the cotton or canvas
+tepees like that, and very pretty is the effect. When closer still, we
+saw that each tepee was capped with a rude crown formed of pole
+ends&mdash;the ends of the ribs of each structure; that some of the tents
+were gayly ornamented with great geometric patterns in red, black, and
+yellow around the bottoms; and that others bore upon their sides rude
+but highly colored figures of animals&mdash;the clan sign of the family
+within. Against very many of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>the frail dwellings leaned a travois, the
+triangle of poles which forms the wagon of the Indians. There were three
+or four very large tents, the headquarters of the chiefs of the soldier
+bands and of the head chief of the nation; and there was one spotless
+new tent, with a pretty border painted around its base, and the figure
+of an animal on either side. It was the new establishment of a bride and
+groom. A hubbub filled the air as we drew still nearer; not any noise
+occasioned by our approach, but the ordinary uproar of the camp&mdash;the
+barking of dogs, the shouts of frolicking children, the yells of young
+men racing on horseback and of others driving in their ponies. When we
+drove between the first two tents we saw that the camp had been
+systematically arranged in the form of a rude circle, with the tents in
+bunches around a great central space, as large as Madison Square if its
+corners were rounded off.</p>
+
+<p>We were ushered into the presence of Three Bulls, in the biggest of all
+the tents. By common consent he was presiding as chief and successor to
+Crowfoot, pending the formal election, which was to take place at the
+feast of the sun-dance. European royalty could scarcely have managed to
+invest itself with more dignity or access to its presence with more
+formality than hedged about this blanketed king. He had assembled his
+chiefs and headmen to greet us, for we possessed the eminence of persons
+bearing gifts. He was in mourning for Crowfoot, who was his brother, and
+for a daughter besides, and the form of expression he gave to his grief
+caused him to wear nothing but a flanne<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>l shirt and a breech-cloth, in
+which he sat with his big brown legs bare and crossed beneath him. He is
+a powerful man, with an uncommonly large head, and his facial features,
+all generously moulded, indicate amiability, liberality, and
+considerable intelligence. Of middle age, smooth-skinned, and plump,
+there was little of the savage in his looks beyond what came of his long
+black hair. It was purposely wore unkempt and hanging in his eyes, and
+two locks of it were bound with many brass rings. When we came upon him
+our gifts had already been received and distributed, mainly to three or
+four relatives. But though the others sat about portionless, all were
+alike stolid and statuesque, and whatever feelings agitated their
+breasts, whether of satisfaction or disappointment, were equally hidden
+by all.</p>
+
+<p>When we entered the big tepee we saw twenty-one men seated in a circle
+against the wall and facing the open centre, where the ground was
+blackened by the ashes of former fires. Three Bulls sat exactly opposite
+the queer door, a horseshoe-shaped hole reaching two feet above the
+ground, and extended by the partly loosened lacing that held the edges
+of the tent-covering together. Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter, made a
+long speech in introducing each of us. We stood in the middle of the
+ring, and the chief punctuated the interpreter's remarks with that queer
+Indian grunt which it has ever been the custom to spell "ugh," but which
+you may imitate exactly if you will try to say "Ha" through your nose
+while your mouth is closed. As Mr. L'Hereux is a great talker, and is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> of
+a poetic nature, there is no telling what wild fancy of his active brain
+he invented concerning us, but he made a friendly talk, and that was
+what we wanted. As each speech closed, Three Bulls lurched forward just
+enough to make the putting out of his hand a gracious act, yet not
+enough to disturb his dignity. After each salutation he pointed out a
+seat for the one with whom he had shaken hands. He announced to the
+council in their language that we were good men, whereat the council
+uttered a single "Ha" through its twenty-one noses. If you had seen the
+rigid stateliness of Three Bulls, and had felt the frigid
+self-possession of the twenty-one ramrod-mannered under-chiefs, as well
+as the deference which was in the tones of the other white men in our
+company, you would comprehend that we were made to feel at once honored
+and subordinate. Altogether we made an odd picture: a circle of men
+seated tailor fashion, and my own and Mr. Remington's black shoes
+marring the gaudy ring of yellow moccasins in front of the savages, as
+they sat in their colored blankets and fringed and befeathered gear,
+each with the calf of one leg crossed before the shin of the other.</p>
+
+<p>But L'Hereux's next act after introducing us was one that seemed to
+indicate perfect indifference to the feelings of this august body. No
+one but he, who had spent a quarter of a century with them in closest
+intimacy, could have acted as he proceeded to do. He cast his eyes on
+the ground, and saw the mounds of sugar, tobacco, and tea heaped before
+only a certain few Indians. "Now who has done dose t'ing?" he inquired.
+"Oh, dat vill <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>nevaire do 'tall. You haf done dose t'ing, Mistaire Begg?
+No? Who den? Chief? Nevaire mind. I make him all rount again, vaire
+deeferent. You shall see somet'ing." With that, and yet without ceasing
+to talk for an instant, now in Indian and now in his English, he began
+to dump the tea back again into the chest, the sugar into the bag, and
+the plug tobacco in a heap by itself. Not an Indian moved a
+muscle&mdash;unless I was right in my suspicion that the corners of Three
+Bulls' mouth curved upward slightly, as if he were about to smile. "Vot
+kind of wa-a-y to do-o somet'ing is dat?" the interpreter continued, in
+his sing-song tone. "You moos' haf one maje-dome [major-domo] if you
+shall try satisfy dose Engine." He always called the Indians "dose
+Engine." "Dat chief gif all dose present to his broders und cousins,
+which are in his famille. Now you shall see me, vot I shall do." Taking
+his hat, he began filling it, now with sugar and now with tea, and
+emptying it before some six or seven chiefs. Finally, when a double
+share was left, he gave both bag and chest to Three Bulls, to whom he
+also gave all the tobacco. "Such tam-fool peezness," he went on, "I do
+not see in all my life. I make visitation to de t'ree soljier chief
+vhich shall make one grand darnce for dose gentlemen, und here is for
+dose soljier chief not anyt'ing 'tall, vhile everyt'ing was going to one
+lot of beggaire relation of T'ree Bull. Dat is what I call one tam-fool
+way to do some'ting."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG31" id="ILLO_PG31"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0047.jpg" width="441" height="268" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIAN BOYS RUNNING A FOOT-RACE</h4>
+
+<p>The redistribution accomplished, Three Bulls wore a grin of
+satisfaction, and one chief who had lost a great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>pile of presents, and
+who got nothing at all by the second division, stalked solemnly out of
+the tent, through not until Three Bulls had tossed the plugs of tobacco
+to all the men around the circle, precisely as he might have thrown
+bones to dogs, but always observing a certain order in making each round
+with the plugs. All were thus served according to their rank. Then Three
+Bulls rummaged with one hand behind him in the grass, and fetched
+forward a great pipe with a stone bowl and wooden handle&mdash;a sort of
+chopping-block of wood&mdash;and a large long-bladed knife. Taking a plug of
+tobacco in one hand and the knife in the other, he pared off enough
+tobacco to fill the pipe. Then he filled it, and passed it, stem
+foremost, to a young man on the left-hand side of the tepee. The
+superior chiefs all sat on the right-hand side. The young man knew that
+he had been chosen to perform the menial act of lighting the pipe, and
+he lighted it, pulling two or three whiffs of smoke to insure a good
+coal of fire in it before passing it back&mdash;though why it was not
+considered a more menial task to cut the tobacco and fill the pipe than
+to light it I don't know.</p>
+
+<p>Three Bulls puffed the pipe for a moment, and then turning the stem from
+him, pointed it at the chief next in importance, and to that personage
+the symbol of peace was passed from hand to hand. When that chief had
+drawn a few whiffs, he sent the pipe back to Three Bulls, who then
+indicated to whom it should go next. Thus it went dodging about the
+circle like a marble on a bagatelle board. When it came to me, I
+hesitated a moment whether or not to smoke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> it, but the desire to be
+polite outweighed any other prompting, and I sucked the pipe until some
+of the Indians cried out that I was "a good fellow."</p>
+
+<p>While all smoked and many talked, I noticed that Three Bulls sat upon a
+soft seat formed of his blanket, at one end of which was one of those
+wickerwork contrivances, like a chair back, upon which Indians lean when
+seated upon the ground. I noticed also that one harsh criticism passed
+upon Three Bulls was just; that was that when he spoke, others might
+interrupt him. It was said that even women "talked back" to him at times
+when he was haranguing his people. Since no one spoke when Crowfoot
+talked, the comparison between him and his predecessor was injurious to
+him; but it was Crowfoot who named Three Bulls for the chieftainship.
+Besides, Three Bulls had the largest following (under that of the too
+aged Old Sun), and was the most generous chief and ablest politician of
+all. Then, again, the Government supported him with whatever its
+influence amounted to. This was because Three Bulls favored agricultural
+employment for the tribe, and was himself cultivating a patch of
+potatoes. He was in many other ways the man to lead in the new era, as
+Crowfoot had been for the era that was past.</p>
+
+<p>When we retired from the presence of the chief, I asked Mr. L'Hereux how
+he had dared to take back the presents made to the Indians and then
+distribute them differently. The queer Frenchman said, in his
+indescribably confident, jaunty way:</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+<p>"Why, dat is how you mus' do wid dose Engine. Nevaire ask one of dose
+Engine anyt'ing, but do dose t'ing which are right, and at de same time
+make explanashion what you are doing. Den dose Engine can say no t'ing
+'tall. But if you first make explanashion and den try to do somet'ng,
+you will find one grand trouble. Can you explain dis and dat to one hive
+of de bees? Well, de hive of de bee is like dose Engine if you shall
+talk widout de promp' action."</p>
+
+<p>He said, later on, "Dose Engine are children, and mus' not haf
+consideration like mans and women."</p>
+
+<p>The news of our generosity ran from tent to tent, and the Black Soldier
+band sent out a herald to cry the news that a war-dance was to be held
+immediately. As immediately means to the Indian mind an indefinite and
+very enduring period, I amused myself by poking about the village, in
+tents and among groups of men or women, wherever chance led me. The
+herald rode from side to side of the enclosure, yelling like a New York
+fruit peddler. He was mounted on a bay pony, and was fantastically
+costumed with feathers and war-paint. Of course every man, woman, and
+child who had been in-doors, so to speak, now came out of the tepees,
+and a mighty bustle enlivened the scene. The worst thing about the camp
+was the abundance of snarling cur-dogs. It was not safe to walk about
+the camp without a cane or whip, on account of these dogs.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG36" id="ILLO_PG36"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0052.jpg" width="721" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIAN MOTHER AND BOY</h4>
+
+<p>The Blackfeet are poor enough, in all conscience, from nearly every
+stand-point from which we judge civilized Communities, but their tribal
+possessions include several horses to each head of a family; and though
+the majority of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>ir ponies would fetch no more than $20 apiece out
+there, even this gives them more wealth per capita than many civilized
+peoples can boast. They have managed, also, to keep much of the savage
+paraphernalia of other days in the form of buckskin clothes, elaborate
+bead-work, eagle headdresses, good guns, and the outlandish adornments
+of their chiefs and medicine-men. Hundreds of miles from any except such
+small and distant towns as Calgary and Medicine Hat, and kept on the
+reserve as much as possible, there has come to them less damage by
+whiskey and white men's vices than perhaps most other tribes have
+suffered. Therefore it was still possible for me to see in some tents
+the squaws at work painting the clan signs on stretched skins, and
+making bead-work for moccasins, pouches, "chaps," and the rest. And in
+one tepee I found a young and rather pretty girl wearing a suit of
+buckskin, such as Cooper and all the past historians of the Indian knew
+as the co<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>nventional every-day attire of the red-skin. I say I saw the
+girl in a tent, but, as a matter of fact, she passed me out-of-doors,
+and with true feminine art managed to allow her blanket to fall open for
+just the instant it took to disclose the precious dress beneath it. I
+asked to be taken into the tent to which she went, and there, at the
+interpreter's request, she threw off her blanket, and stood, with a
+little display of honest coyness, dressed like the traditional and the
+theatrical belle of the wilderness. The soft yellowish leather, the
+heavy fringe upon the arms, seams, and edges of the garment, her
+beautiful beaded leggings and moccasins, formed so many parts of a very
+charming picture. For herself, her face was comely, but her figure
+was&mdash;an Indian's. The figure of the typical Indian woman shows few
+graceful curves.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will inquire whether there was any real beauty, as we judge
+it, among these Indians. Yes, there was; at least there were good looks
+if there was not beauty. I saw perhaps a dozen fine-looking men, half a
+dozen attractive girls, and something like a hundred children of varying
+degrees of comeliness&mdash;pleasing, pretty, or beautiful. I had some jolly
+romps with the children, and so came to know that their faces and arms
+met my touch with the smoothness and softness of the flesh of our own
+little ones at home. I was surprised at this; indeed, the skin of the
+boys was of the texture of velvet. The madcap urchins, what riotous fun
+they were having! They flung arrows and darts, ran races and wrestled,
+and in some of their play they fairly swarmed all over one a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>nother,
+until at times one lad would be buried in the thick of a writhing mass
+of legs and arms several feet in depth. Some of the boys wore only
+"G-strings" (as, for some reason, the breech-clout is commonly called on
+the prairie), but others were wrapped in old blankets, and the larger
+ones were already wearing the Blackfoot plume-lock, or tuft of hair tied
+and trained to stand erect above the forehead. The babies within the
+tepees were clad only in their complexions.</p>
+
+<p>The result of an hour of waiting on our part and of yelling on the part
+of the herald resulted in a war-dance not very different in itself from
+the dances we have most of us seen at Wild West shows. An immense tomtom
+as big as the largest-sized bass-drum was set up between four poles,
+around which colored cloths were wrapped, and from the tops of which the
+same gay stuff floated on the wind in bunches of party-colored ribbons.
+Around this squatted four young braves, who pounded the drum-head and
+chanted a tune, which rose and fell between the shrillest and the
+deepest notes, but which consisted of simple monosyllabic sounds
+repeated thousands of times. The interpreter said that originally the
+Indians had words to their songs, but these were forgotten no man knows
+when, and only the so-called tunes (and the tradition that there once
+were words for them) are perpetuated. At all events, the four braves
+beat the drum and chanted, until presently a young warrior, hideous with
+war-paint, and carrying a shield and a tomahawk, came out of a tepee and
+began the dancing. It was the stiff-legged hopping, first on one foot
+and t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>hen on the other, which all savages appear to deem the highest form
+the terpsichorean art can take. In the course of a few circles around
+the tomtom he began shouting of valorous deeds he never had performed,
+for he was too young to have ridden after buffalo or into battle.
+Presently he pretended to see upon the ground something at once
+fascinating and awesome. It was the trail of the enemy. Then he danced
+furiously and more limberly, tossing his head back, shaking his hatchet
+and many-tailed shield high aloft, and yelling that he was following the
+foe, and would not rest while a skull and a scalp-lock remained in
+conjunction among them. He was joined by three others, and all danced
+and yelled like madmen. At the last the leader came to a sort of
+standard made of a stick and some cloth, tore it out from where it had
+been thrust in the ground, and holding it far above his head, pranced
+once around the circle, and thus ended the dance.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG39" id="ILLO_PG39"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0055.jpg" width="291" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>OPENING OF THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE</h4>
+
+<p>The novelty and interest in the celebration rested in the
+surroundings&mdash;the great circle of tepees; the braves in their blankets
+stalking hither and thither; the dogs, the horses, the intrepid riders,
+dashing across the view. More strange still was the solemn line of the
+medicine-men, who, for some reason not explained to me, sat in a row
+with their backs to the dancers a city block away, and crooned a low
+guttural accompaniment to the tomtom. But still more interesting were
+the boys, of all grades of childhood, who looked on, while not a woman
+remained in sight. The larger boys stood about in groups, watching the
+spectacle with eyes afire with admiration, but the little fellows had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+flung themselves on their stomachs in a row, and were supporting their
+chubby faces upon their little brown hands, while their elbows rested on
+the grass, forming a sort of orchestra row of Lilliputian spectators.</p>
+
+<p>We arranged for a great spectacle to be gotten up on the next afternoon,
+and were promised that it should be as notable for the numbers
+participating in it and for the trappings to be displayed as any the
+Blackfeet had ever given upon their reserve. The Indians spent the
+entire night in carousing over the gift of tea, and we knew that if they
+were true to most precedents they would brew and drink every drop of it.
+Possibly some took it with an admixture of tobacco and wild currant to
+make them drunk, or, in reality, very sick&mdash;which is much the same thing
+to a reservation Indian. The compounds which the average Indian will
+swallow in the hope of imitating the effects of whiskey are such as to
+tax the credulity of those who hear of them. A certain patent
+"painkiller" ranks almost as high as whiskey in their estimation; but
+Worcestershire sauce and gunpowder, or tea, tobacco, and wild currant,
+are not at all to be despised when alcohol, or the money to get it with,
+is wanting. I heard a characteristic story about these red men while I
+was visiting them. All who are familiar with them know that if medicine
+is given them to take in small portions at certain intervals they are
+morally sure to swallow it all at once, and that the sicker it makes
+them, the more they will value it. On the Blackfoot Reserve, only a
+short time ago, our gentle and insinuating Sedlitz-powders were classed
+as childre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>n's stuff, but now they have leaped to the front rank as
+powerful medicines. This is because some white man showed the Indian how
+to take the soda and magnesia first, and then swallow the tartaric acid.
+They do this, and when the explosion follows, and the gases burst from
+their mouths and noses, they pull themselves together and remark, "Ugh!
+him heap good."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG43" id="ILLO_PG43"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0059.jpg" width="446" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>SKETCH IN THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE</h4>
+
+<p>On the morning of the day of the great spectacle I rode with Mr. Begg
+over to the ration-house to see the meat distributed. The dust rose in
+clouds above all the trails as the cavalcade of men, women, children,
+travoises and dogs, approached the station. Men were few in the
+disjointed lines; most of them sent their women or children. All rode
+astraddle, some on saddles and some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> bareback. As all urged their horses
+in the Indian fashion, which is to whip them unceasingly, and prod them
+constantly with spurless heels, the bobbing movement of the riders'
+heads and the gymnastics of their legs produced a queer scene. Here and
+there a travois was trailed along by a horse or a dog, but the majority
+of the pensioners were content to carry their meat in bags or otherwise
+upon their horses. While the slaughtering went on, and after that, when
+the beef was being chopped up into junks, I sat in the meat-contractor's
+office, and saw the bucks, squaws, and children come, one after another,
+to beg. I could not help noticing that all were treated with marked and
+uniform kindness, and I learned that no one ever struck one of the
+Indians, or suffered himself to lose his temper with them. A few of the
+men asked for blankets, but the squaws and the children wanted soap. It
+was said that when they first made their acquaintance with this symbol
+of civilization they mistook it for an article of diet, but that now
+they use it properly and prize it. When it was announced that the meat
+was ready, the butchers threw open an aperture in the wall of the
+ration-house, and the Indians huddled before it as if they had flung
+themselves against the house in a mass. I have seen boys do the same
+thing at the opening of a ticket window for the sale of gallery seats in
+a theatre. There was no fighting or quarrelling, but every Indian pushed
+steadily and silently with all his or her might. When one got his share
+he tore himself away from the crowd as briers are pulled out of hairy
+cloth. They are a hungry and an economical people. They bring p<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>ails for
+the beef blood, and they carry home the hoofs for jelly. After a steer
+has been butchered and distributed, only his horns and his paunch
+remain.</p>
+
+<p>The sun blazed down on the great camp that afternoon and glorified the
+place so that it looked like a miniature Switzerland of snowy peaks. But
+it was hot, and blankets were stretched from the tent tops, and the
+women sat under them to catch the air and escape the heat. The salaried
+native policeman of the reserve, wearing a white stove-pipe hat with
+feathers, and a ridiculous blue coat, and Heaven alone knows what other
+absurdities, rode around, boasting of deeds he never performed, while a
+white cur made him all the more ridiculous by chasing him and yelping at
+his horse's tail.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the grand spectacle. The vast plain was forgotten, and the
+great campus within the circle of tents was transformed into a theatre.
+The scene was a setting of white and red tents that threw their
+clear-cut outlines against a matchless blue sky. The audience was
+composed of four white men and the Indian boys, who were flung about by
+the startled horses they were holding for us. The players were the
+gorgeous cavalrymen of nature, circling before their women and old men
+and children, themselves plumed like unheard-of tropical birds, the
+others displaying the minor splendor of the kaleidoscope. The play was
+"The Pony War-dance, or the Departure for Battle." The acting was
+fierce; not like the conduct of a mimic battle on our stage, but
+performed with the desperate zest of men who hope for distinction in
+war, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>may not trifle about it. It had the earnestness of a challenged
+man who tries the foils with a tutor. It was impressive, inspiring, at
+times wildly exciting.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG47" id="ILLO_PG47"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0063.jpg" width="641" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A FANTASY FROM THE PONY WAR-DANCE</h4>
+
+<p>There were threescore young men in the brilliant cavalcade. They rode
+horses that were as wild as themselves. Their evolutions were rude, but
+magnificent. Now they dashed past us in single file, and next they came
+helter-skelter, like cattle stampeding. For a while they rode around and
+around, as on a race-course, but at times they deserted the enclosure,
+parted into small bands, and were hidden behind the curtains of their
+own dust, presently to reappear with a mad rush, yelling like maniacs,
+firing their pieces, and brandishing their arms and their finery wildly
+on high. The orchestra was composed of seven tomtoms that had been dried
+taut before a camp fire. The old men and the chiefs sat in a semicircle
+behind the drummers on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>All the tribal heirlooms were in the display, the cherished gewgaws,
+trinkets, arms, apparel, and finery they had saved from the fate of
+which they will not admit they are themselves the victims. I never saw
+an old-time picture of a type of savage red man or of an extravagance of
+their costuming that was not revived in this spectacle. It was as if the
+plates in my old school-books and novels and tales of adventure were all
+animated and passing before me. The traditional Indian with the eagle
+plumes from crown to heels was there; so was he with the buffalo horns
+growing out of his skull; so were the idyllic braves in yellow
+buckskin fringed at every point. The shining bodies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>of men, bare naked,
+and frescoed like a Bowery bar-room, were not lacking; neither were
+those who wore masses of splendid embroidery with colored beads. But
+there were as many peculiar costumes which I never had seen pictured.
+And not any two men or any two horses were alike. As barber poles are
+covered with paint, so were many of these choice steeds of the nation.
+Some were spotted all over with daubs of white, and some with every
+color obtainable. Some were branded fifty times with the white hand, the
+symbol of peace, but others bore the red hand and the white hand in
+alternate prints. There were horses painted with the figures of horses
+and of serpents and of foxes. To some saddles were affixed colored
+blankets or cloths that fell upon the ground or lashed the air,
+according as the horse cantered or raced. One horse was hung all round
+with great soft woolly tails of some white material. Sleigh-bells were
+upon several.</p>
+
+<p>Only half a dozen men wore hats&mdash;mainly cowboy hats decked with
+feathers. Many carried rifles, which they used with one hand. Others
+brought out bows and arrows, lances decked with feathers or ribbons,
+poles hung with colored cloths, great shields brilliantly painted and
+fringed. Every visible inch of each warrior was painted, the naked ones
+being ringed, streaked, and striped from head to foot. I would have to
+catalogue the possessions of the whole nation to tell all that they wore
+between the brass rings in their hair and the cartridge-belts at their
+waists, and thus down to their beautiful moccasins.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span></p>
+<p>Two strange features further distinguished their pageant. One was the
+appearance of two negro minstrels upon one horse. Both had blackened
+their faces and hands; both wore old stove-pipe hats and queer
+long-tailed white men's coats. One wore a huge false white mustache, and
+the other carried a coal-scuttle. The women and children roared with
+laughter at the sight. The two comedians got down from their horse, and
+began to make grimaces, and to pose this way and that, very comically.
+Such a performance had never been seen on the reserve before. No one
+there could explain where the men had seen negro minstrels. The other
+unexpected feature required time for development. At first we noticed
+that two little Indian boys kept getting in the way of the riders. As we
+were not able to find any fixed place of safety from the excited
+horsemen, we marvelled that these children were permitted to risk their
+necks.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a hideously-painted naked man on horseback chased the little
+boys, leaving the cavalcade, and circling around the children. He rode
+back into the ranks, and still they loitered in the way. Then around
+swept the horsemen once more, and this time the naked rider flung
+himself from his horse, and seizing one boy and then the other, bore
+each to the ground, and made as if he would brain them with his hatchet
+and lift their scalps with his knife. The sight was one to paralyze an
+on-looker. But it was only a theatrical performance arranged for the
+occasion. The man was acting over again the proudest of his
+achievements. The boys played the parts of two white men whose scalps
+now grace his tepee and gladden h<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>is memory.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG51" id="ILLO_PG51"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0067.jpg" width="344" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THROWING THE SNOW SNAKE</h4>
+
+<p>For ninety minutes we watched the glorious riding, the splendid horses,
+the brilliant trappings, and the paroxysmal fervor of the excited
+Indians. The earth trembled beneath the dashing of the riders; the air
+palpitated with the noise of their war-cries and bells. We could have
+stood the day out, but we knew the players were tired, and yet would
+not cease till we withdrew. Therefore we came away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We had enjoyed a never-to-be-forgotten privilege. It was if we had seen
+the ghosts of a dead people ride back to parody scenes in an era that
+had vanished. It was like the rising of the curtain, in response to an
+"encore," upon a drama that has been played. It was as if the sudden
+up-flashing of a smouldering fire lighted, once again and for an
+instant, the scene it had ceased to illumine.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_THREE" id="CHAPTER_THREE"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>A FAMOUS MISSIONARY</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he former chief of the Blackfeet&mdash;Crowfoot&mdash;and Father Lacombe, the
+Roman Catholic missionary to the tribe, were the most interesting and
+among the most influential public characters in the newer part of
+Canada. They had much to do with controlling the peace of a territory
+the size of a great empire.</p>
+
+<p>The chief was more than eighty years old; the priest is a dozen years
+younger; and yet they represented in their experiences the two great
+epochs of life on this continent&mdash;the barbaric and the progressive. In
+the chief's boyhood the red man held undisputed sway from the Lakes to
+the Rockies. In the priest's youth he led, like a scout, beyond the
+advancing hosts from Europe. But Father Lacombe came bearing the olive
+branch of religion, and he and the barbarian became fast friends,
+intimates in a companionship as picturesque and out of the common as any
+the world could produce.</p>
+
+<p>There is something very strange about the relations of the French and
+the French half-breeds with the wild men of the plains. It is not
+altogether necessary that the Frenchman should be a priest, for I have
+heard of French half-breeds in our Territories who showed again and
+again that they could make their way through bands of hostiles in
+perfect safety, though kno<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>wing nothing of the language of the tribes
+there in war-paint. It is most likely that their swarthy skins and black
+hair, and their knowledge of savage ways aided them. But when not even a
+French half-breed has dared to risk his life among angry Indians, the
+French missionaries went about their duty fearlessly and unscathed.
+There was one, just after the dreadful massacre of the Little Big Horn,
+who built a cross of rough wood, painted it white, fastened it to his
+buck-board, and drove through a country in which a white man with a pale
+face and blond hair would not have lived two hours.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that in a vast region of country the French priest
+and <i>voyageur</i> and <i>coureur des bois</i> were the first white men the
+Indians saw, and while the explorers and traders seldom quarrelled with
+the red men or offered violence to them, the priests never did. They
+went about like women or children, or, rather, like nothing else than
+priests. They quickly learned the tongues of the savages, treated them
+fairly, showed the sublimest courage, and acted as counsellors,
+physicians, and friends. There is at least one brave Indian fighter in
+our army who will state it as his belief that if all the white men had
+done thus we would have had but little trouble with our Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Father Lacombe was one of the priests who threaded the trails of the
+North-western timber land and the Far Western prairie when white men
+were very few indeed in that country, and the only settlements were
+those that had grown around the frontier forts and the still earlier
+mission chapels. For instance, in 1849, at twenty-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>two years of age, he
+slept a night or two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was then a
+village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the great building of the St.
+Paul <i>Pioneer Press</i> now stands, then stood the village chapel. For two
+years he worked at his calling on either side of the American frontier,
+and then was sent to what is now Edmonton, in that magical region of
+long summers and great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River
+District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and Idaho. There the Rockies
+are broken and lowered, and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the
+region warmer than the land far to the south of it. But Father Lacombe
+went farther&mdash;400 miles north to Lake Labiche. There he found what he
+calls a fine colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the Hudson
+Bay Company&mdash;white men from England, France, and the Orkney Islands, and
+Indians and half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests were
+so infrequent that in the intervals between them the white men and
+Indian women married one another, not without formality and the sanction
+of the colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the Church.
+Father Lacombe was called upon to bless and solemnize many such matches,
+to baptize many children, and to teach and preach what scores knew but
+vaguely or not at all.</p>
+
+<p>In time he was sent to Calgary in the province of Alberta. It is one of
+the most bustling towns in the Dominion, and the biggest place west of
+Winnipeg. Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but
+from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>ixty
+miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with
+the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere
+post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The
+buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the
+bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed
+the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." But
+the other Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the territory
+as final, and the country thereabouts was an almost constant
+battle-ground between the Blackfoot nation of allied tribes and the
+Sioux, Crows, Flatheads, Crees, and others.</p>
+
+<p>The good priest&mdash;for if ever there was a good man Father Lacombe is
+one&mdash;saw fighting enough, as he roamed with one tribe and the other, or
+journeyed from tribe to tribe. His mission led him to ignore tribal
+differences, and to preach to all the Indians of the plains. He knew the
+chiefs and headmen among them all, and so justly did he deal with them
+that he was not only able to minister to all without attracting the
+enmity of any, but he came to wield, as he does to-day, a formidable
+power over all of them.</p>
+
+<p>He knew old Crowfoot in his prime, and as I saw them together they were
+like bosom friends. Together they had shared dreadful privation and
+survived frightful winters and storms. They had gone side by side
+through savage battles, and each respected and loved the other. I think
+I make no mistake in saying that all through his reign Crowfoot was the
+greatest Indian monarch in Canada; possibly no tribe in this country wa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>s
+stronger in numbers during the last decade or two. I have never seen a
+nobler-looking Indian or a more king-like man. He was tall and straight,
+as slim as a girl, and he had the face of an eagle or of an ancient
+Roman. He never troubled himself to learn the English language; he had
+little use for his own. His grunt or his "No" ran all through his tribe.
+He never shared his honors with a squaw. He died an old bachelor,
+saying, wittily, that no woman would take him.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that the degradation of the Canadian Indian began
+a dozen or fifteen years later than that of our own red men. In both
+countries the railroads were indirectly the destructive agents, and
+Canada's great transcontinental line is a new institution. Until it
+belted the prairie the other day the Blackfoot Indians led very much the
+life of their fathers, hunting and trading for the whites, to be sure,
+but living like Indians, fighting like Indians, and dying like them. Now
+they don't fight, and they live and die like dogs. Amid the old
+conditions lived Crowfoot&mdash;a haughty, picturesque, grand old savage. He
+never rode or walked without his headmen in his retinue, and when he
+wished to exert his authority, his apparel was royal indeed. His coat of
+gaudy bead-work was a splendid garment, and weighed a dozen pounds. His
+leg-gear was just as fine; his moccasins would fetch fifty dollars in
+any city to-day. Doubtless he thought his hat was quite as impressive
+and king-like, but to a mere scion of effeminate civilization it looked
+remarkably like an extra tall plug hat, with no crown in the top and a
+lot of crows' plum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>es in the band. You may be sure his successor wears
+that same hat to-day, for the Indians revere the "state hat" of a brave
+chief, and look at it through superstitious eyes, so that those queer
+hats (older tiles than ever see the light of St. Patrick's Day) descend
+from chief to chief, and are hallowed.</p>
+
+<p>But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of the conquest of the
+wilderness contains no more pathetic story than that of how the kind old
+priest, Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieutenants against the
+coming of the pale-faces. He went to the reservation and assembled the
+leaders before him in council. He told them that the white men were
+building a great railroad, and in a month their workmen would be in that
+virgin country. He told the wondering red men that among these laborers
+would be found many bad men seeking to sell whiskey, offering money for
+the ruin of the squaws. Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for
+him, because he loved the Indians and doubted their strength, he assured
+them that contact with these white men would result in death, in the
+destruction of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of
+disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. The Indians smoked and
+reflected. Then they spoke through old Crowfoot:</p>
+
+<p>"We have listened. We will keep upon our reservation. We will not go to
+see the railroad."</p>
+
+<p>But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more profoundly was he
+convinced of the ruin of the tribe should the "children," as he sagely
+calls all Indians, disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve,
+and gathered the c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>hief and the headmen, and warned them of the soulless,
+diabolical, selfish instincts of the white men. Again the grave warriors
+promised to obey him.</p>
+
+<p>The railroad laborers came with camps and money and liquors and numbers,
+and the prairie thundered the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And
+one morning the old priest looked out of the window of his bare bedroom
+and saw curling wisps of gray smoke ascending from a score of tepees on
+the hill beside Calgary.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Angry, amazed, he went to his doorway and
+opened it, and there upon the ground sat some of the headmen and the old
+men, with bowed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his
+questions! Note how wisely he chose the name of children for them, when
+I tell you that their spokesman at last answered with the excuse that
+the buffaloes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the white men
+brought money which the squaws could get. And what is the end? There are
+always tepees on the hills now beside every settlement near the
+Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary lifted his trembling
+forefinger towards the sky, when I was there, and said: "Mark me. In
+fifteen years there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the
+Canadian prairie&mdash;not one."</p>
+
+<p>Through all that revolutionary railroad building and the rush of new
+settlers, Father Lacombe and Crowfoot kept the Indians from war, and
+even from depredations and f<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>rom murder. When the half-breeds arose under
+Riel, and every Indian looked to his rifle and his knife, and when the
+mutterings that preface the war-cry sounded in every lodge, Father
+Lacombe made Crowfoot pledge his word that the Indians should not rise.
+The priest represented the Government on these occasions. The Canadian
+statesmen recognize the value of his services. He is the great authority
+on Indian matters beyond our border; the ambassador to and spokesman for
+the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>But Father Lacombe is more than that. He is the deepest student of the
+Indian languages that Canada possesses. The revised edition of Bishop
+Barager's <i>Grammar of the Ochipwe Language</i> bears these words upon its
+title-page: "Revised by the Rev. Father Lacombe, Oblate Mary Immaculate,
+1878." He is the author of the authoritative <i>Dictionnaire et Grammaire
+de la Langue Crise</i>, the dictionary of the Cree dialect published in
+1874. He has compiled just such another monument to the Blackfoot
+language, and will soon publish it, if he has not done so already. He is
+in constant correspondence with our Smithsonian Institution; he is
+famous to all who study the Indian; he is beloved or admired throughout
+Canada.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG61" id="ILLO_PG61"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0077.jpg" width="643" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>FATHER LACOMBE HEADING THE INDIANS</h4>
+
+<p>His work in these lines is labor of love. He is a student by nature. He
+began the study of the Algonquin language as a youth in older Canada,
+and the tongues of many of these tribes from Labrador to Athabasca are
+but dialects of the language of the great Algonquin nation&mdash;the Algic
+family. He told me that the white m<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>an's handling of Indian words in the
+nomenclature of our cities, provinces, and States is as brutal as
+anything charged against the savages. Saskatchewan, for instance, means
+nothing. "Kissiskatchewan" is the word that was intended. It means
+"rapid current." Manitoba is senseless, but "Manitowapa" (the mysterious
+strait) would have been full of local import. However, there is no need
+to sadden ourselves with this expert knowledge. Rather let us be
+grateful for every Indian name with which we have stamped individuality
+upon the map of the world be it rightly or wrong set forth.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange to think of a scholar and a priest amid the scenes that
+Father Lacombe has witnessed. It was one of the most fortunate
+happenings of my life that I chanced to be in Calgary and in the little
+mission beside the chapel when Chief Crowfoot came to pay his respects
+to his old black-habited friend. Anxious to pay the chief such a
+compliment as should present the old warrior to me in the light in which
+he would be most proud to be viewed, Father Lacombe remarked that he had
+known Crowfoot when he was a young man and a mighty warrior. The old
+copper-plated Roman smiled and swelled his chest when this was
+translated. He was so pleased that the priest was led to ask him if he
+remembered one night when a certain trouble about some horses, or a
+chance duel between the Blackfoot tribe and a band of its enemies, led
+to a midnight attack. If my memory serves me, it was the Bloods (an
+allied part of the Blackfoot nation) who picked this quarrel. The chief
+grinned and grunted wonderfully as the priest spoke. The priest asked i<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>f
+he remembered how the Bloods were routed. The chief grunted even more
+emphatically. Then the priest asked if the chief recalled what a pickle
+he, the priest, was in when he found himself in the thick of the fight.
+At that old Crowfoot actually laughed.</p>
+
+<p>After that Father Lacombe, in a few bold sentences, drew a picture of
+the quiet, sleep-enfolded camp of the Blackfoot band, of the silence and
+the darkness. Then he told of a sudden musket-shot; then of the
+screaming of the squaws, and the barking of the dogs, and the yelling of
+the children, of the general hubbub and confusion of the startled camp.
+The cry was everywhere "The Bloods! the Bloods!" The enemy shot a
+fusillade at close quarters into the Blackfoot camp, and the priest ran
+out towards the blazing muskets, crying that they must stop, for he,
+their priest, was in the camp. He shouted his own name, for he stood
+towards the Bloods precisely as he did towards the Blackfoot nation. But
+whether the Bloods heard him or not, they did not heed him. The blaze of
+their guns grew stronger and crept nearer. The bullets whistled by. It
+grew exceedingly unpleasant to be there. It was dangerous as well.
+Father Lacombe said that he did all he could to stop the fight, but when
+it was evident that his behavior would simply result in the massacre of
+his hosts and of himself in the bargain, he altered his cries into
+military commands. "Give it to 'em!" he screamed. He urged Crowfoot's
+braves to return two shots for every one from the enemy. He took
+command, and inspired the bucks with double valor. They <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>drove the Bloods
+out of reach and hearing.</p>
+
+<p>All this was translated to Crowfoot&mdash;or Saponaxitaw, for that was his
+Indian name&mdash;and he chuckled and grinned, and poked the priest in the
+side with his knuckles. And good Father Lacombe felt the magnetism of
+his own words and memory, and clapped the chief on the shoulder, while
+both laughed heartily at the climax, with the accompanying mental
+picture of the discomfited Bloods running away, and the clergyman
+ordering their instant destruction.</p>
+
+<p>There may not be such another meeting and rehearsal on this continent
+again. Those two men represented the passing and the dominant races of
+America; and yet, in my view, the learned and brave and kindly
+missionary is as much a part of the dead past as is the royalty that
+Crowfoot was the last to represent.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_FOUR" id="CHAPTER_FOUR"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>ANTOINE'S MOOSE-YARD</h3>
+
+
+<br /><br />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0082.jpg" width="254" height="317" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t was the night of a great dinner at the club. Whenever the door of the
+banqueting hall was opened, a burst of laughter or of applause disturbed
+the quiet talk of a few men who had gathered in the reading-room&mdash;men of
+the sort that extract the best enjoyment from a club by escaping its
+functions, or attending them only to draw to one side its choicest
+spirits for never-to-be-forgotten talks before an open fire, and over
+wine and cigars used sparingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm tired," an artist was saying&mdash;"so tired that I have a horror of my
+studio. My wife understands my condition and bids me go away and rest."</p>
+
+<p>"That is astonishing," said I; "for, as a rule, neither women nor men
+can comprehend the fatigue that seizes an artist or writer. At most of
+our homes there comes to be a reluctant recognition of the fact that we
+say we are tired, and that we persist in the assumption by knocking off
+work. But human fatigue is measured by the mile of walking, or the cords
+of firewood that have been cut, and the world will always hold that if
+we have not hewn wood or tramped all day, it is absurd for us to talk
+of feeling tired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>. We cannot alter this; we are too few."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said another of the little party. "The world shares the feeling
+of the Irishman who saw a very large, stout man at work at reporting in
+a courtroom. 'Faith!' said he, 'will ye look at the size of that man&mdash;to
+be airning his living wid a little pincil?' The world would acknowledge
+our right to feel tired if we used crow-bars to write or draw with; but
+pencils! pshaw! a hundred weigh less than a pound."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said I, "all the same, I am so tired that my head feels like
+cork; so tired that for two days I have not been able to summon an idea
+or turn a sentence neatly. I have been sitting at my desk writing
+wretched stuff and tearing it up, or staring blankly out of the window."</p>
+
+<p>"Glorious!" said the artist, startling us all with his vehemence and
+inapt exclamation. "Why, it is providential that I came here to-night.
+If that's the way you feel, we are a pair, and you will go with me and
+rest. Do you hunt? Are you fond of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know all about it," said I, "but I have not definitely determined
+whether I am fond of it or not. I have been hunting only once. It was
+years ago, when I was a mere boy. I went after deer with a poet, an
+editor, and a railroad conductor. We journeyed to a lovely valley in
+Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, and put ourselves in the hands of a man
+seven feet high, who had a flintlock musket a foot taller than himself,
+and a wife who gave us saleratus bread and a bowl of pork fat for supper
+and breakfast. We were not there at dinner. The man stationed us a mile
+apart on what he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>said were the paths, or "runways," the deer would take.
+Then he went to stir the game up with his dogs. There he left us from
+sunrise till supper, or would have left us had we not with great
+difficulty found one another, and enjoyed the exquisite woodland quiet
+and light and shade together, mainly flat on our backs, with the white
+sails of the sky floating in an azure sea above the reaching fingers of
+the tree-tops. The editor marred the occasion with an unworthy suspicion
+that our hunter was at the village tavern picturing to his cronies what
+simple donkeys we were, standing a mile apart in the forsaken woods. But
+the poet said something so pregnant with philosophy that it always comes
+back to me with the mention of hunting. 'Where is your gun?' he was
+asked, when we came upon him, pacing the forest path, hands in pockets,
+and no weapon in sight. 'Oh, my gun?' he repeated. 'I don't know.
+Somewhere in among those trees. I covered it with leaves so as not to
+see it. After this, if I go hunting again, I shall not take a gun. It is
+very cold and heavy, and more or less dangerous in the bargain. You
+never use it, you know. I go hunting every few years, but I never yet
+have had to fire my gun, and I begin to see that it is only brought
+along in deference to a tradition descending from an era when men got
+something more than fresh air and scenery on a hunting trip.'"</p>
+
+<p>The others laughed at my story, but the artist regarded me with an
+expression of pity. He is a famous hunter&mdash;a genuine, devoted
+hunter&mdash;and one might almost as safely speak a light word of his
+relations as of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> his favorite mode of recreation.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG69" id="ILLO_PG69"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0085.jpg" width="700" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE HOTEL&mdash;LAST SIGN OF CIVILIZATION</h4>
+
+<p>"Fresh air!" said he; "scenery! Humph! Your poet would not know which
+end of a gun to aim with. I see that you know nothing at all about
+hunting, but I will pay you the high compliment of saying that I can
+make a hunter of you. I have always insisted heretofore that a hunter
+must begin in boyhood; but never mind, I'll make a hunter of you at
+thirty-six. We will start to-morrow morning for Montreal, and in
+twenty-four hours you shall be in the greatest sporting region in
+America, incomparably the greatest hunting district. It is great because
+Americans do not know of it, and because it has all of British America
+to keep it supplied with game. Think of it! In twenty-four hours we
+shall be tracking moose near Hudson Bay, for Hudson Bay is not much
+farther from New York than Chicago&mdash;another fact that few persons are
+aware of."</p>
+
+<p>Environment is a positive force. We could feel that we were disturbing
+what the artist would call "the local tone," b<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>y rushing through the
+city's streets next morning with our guns slung upon our backs. It was
+just at the hour when the factory hands and the shop-girls were out in
+force, and the juxtaposition of those elements of society with two
+portly men bearing guns created a positive sensation. In the cars the
+artist held forth upon the terrors of the life upon which I was about to
+venture. He left upon my mind a blurred impression of sleeping
+out-of-doors like human cocoons, done up in blankets, while the savage
+mercury lurked in unknown depths below the zero mark. He said the
+camp-fire would have to be fed every two hours of each night, and he
+added, without contradiction from me, that he supposed he would have to
+perform this duty, as he was accustomed to it. Lest his forecast should
+raise my anticipation of pleasure extravagantly, he added that those
+hunters were fortunate who had fires to feed; for his part he had once
+walked around a tree stump a whole night to keep from freezing. He
+supposed that we would perform our main journeying on snow-shoes, but
+how we should enjoy that he could not say, as his knowledge of
+snow-shoeing was limited.</p>
+
+<p>At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who is always at a
+traveller's elbow with a fund of alarming information, cleared his
+throat as he sat opposite us, and inquired whether he had overheard that
+we did not know much about snow-shoes. An interesting fact concerning
+them, he said, was that they seemed easy to walk with at first, but if
+the learner fell down with them on it usually needed a considerable
+portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on his feet. Beginner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>s
+only fell down, however, in attempting to cross a log or stump, but the
+forest where we were going was literally floored with such obstructions.
+The first day's effort to navigate with snow-shoes, he remarked, is
+usually accompanied by a terrible malady called <i>mal de raquette</i>, in
+which the cords of one's legs become knotted in great and excruciatingly
+painful bunches. The cure for this is to "walk it off the next day, when
+the agony is yet more intense than at first." As the stranger had
+reached his destination, he had little more than time to remark that the
+moose is an exceedingly vicious animal, invariably attacking all hunters
+who fail to kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped upon
+the car platform he let fall a simple but touching eulogy upon a dear
+friend who had recently lost his life by being literally cut in two,
+lengthwise, by a moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly
+stiffened fore-legs. The artist protested that the stranger was a
+sensationalist, unsupported by either the camp-fire gossip or the
+literature of hunters. Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled
+with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying.</p>
+
+<p>In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had in the United States:
+woollens thick as boards, hosiery that wards off the cold as armor
+resists missiles, gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps
+and coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and rich alike,
+blanket suits that are more picturesque than any other masculine garment
+worn north of the city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed,
+so many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little of (though many
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> us need them) that at a glance we say the Montrealers are foreigners.
+Montreal is the gayest city on this continent, and I have often thought
+that the clothing there is largely responsible for that condition.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG73" id="ILLO_PG73"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0089.jpg" width="279" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>"GIVE ME A LIGHT"</h4>
+
+<p>A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid-winter finds the place
+inhospitably cold, and wonders how, as well as why, any one lives there.
+I well remember standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, with my
+teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly congealing, when my attention
+was called to the fact that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, laughing
+girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. I asked a Canadian
+lady how that could be possible, and she answered with a list of the
+principal garments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs of
+stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings over their shoes,
+with moccasins over them. They had so many woollen skirts that an
+American girl would not believe me if I gave the number. They wore heavy
+dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket suits over all this. They had
+mittens over their gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no
+longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed the cold; indeed, it
+occurred to me that their bravery amid the terrors of tobogganing was no
+bravery at all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a mass of
+woollens could scarcely expect damage if she fell from a steeple. When
+next I appeared out-of-doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel
+in a box of plash, and from that time out Montreal seemed, what it
+really is, the merriest of American capitals. And there I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>had come
+again, and was filling my trunk with this wonderful armor of
+civilization, while the artist sought advice as to which point to enter
+the wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most quickly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. W. C. Van Horne, the President of the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
+proved a friend in need. He dictated a few telegrams that agitated the
+people of a vast section of country between Ottawa and the Great Lakes.
+And in the afternoon the answers came flying back. These were from
+various points where Hudson Bay posts are situated. At one or two the
+Indian trappers and hunters were all away on their winter expeditions;
+from another a famous white hunter had just departed with a party of
+gentlemen. At Mattawa, in Ontario, moose were close at hand and
+plentiful, and two skilled Indian hunters were just in from a trapping
+expedition; but the post factor, Mr. Rankin, was sick in bed, and the
+Indians were on a spree. To Mattawa we decided to go. It is a
+twelve-hour journey from New York to Montreal, and an eleven-hour
+journey from Montreal to the heart of this hunters' paradise; so that,
+had we known at just what point to enter the forest, we could have taken
+the trail in twenty-four hours from the metropolis, as the artist had
+predicted.</p>
+
+<p>Our first taste of the frontier, at Peter O'Farrall's Ottawa Hotel, in
+Mattawa, was delicious in the extreme. O'Farrall used to be game-keeper
+to the Marquis of Waterford, and thus got "a taste of the quality" that
+prompted him to assume the position he has chosen as the most lordly
+hotel-keeper in Canada. We do not know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> what sort of men own our great
+New York and Chicago and San Francisco hotels, but certainly they cannot
+lead more leisurely, complacent lives than Mr. O'Farrall. He has a
+bartender to look after the male visitors and the bar, and a matronly
+relative to see to the women and the kitchen, so that the landlord
+arises when he likes to enjoy each succeeding day of ease and
+prosperity. He has been known to exert himself, as when he chased a man
+who spoke slightingly of his liquor. And he was momentarily ruffled at
+the trying conduct of the artist on this hunting trip. The artist could
+not find his overcoat, and had the temerity to refer the matter to Mr.
+O'Farrall.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," said the artist, "what do you suppose has become of my overcoat?
+I cannot find it anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything about your botheration overcoat," said Mr.
+O'Farrall. "Sure, I've throuble enough kaping thrack of me own."</p>
+
+<p>The reader may be sure that O'Farrall's was rightly recommended to us,
+and that it is a well-managed and popular place, with good beds and
+excellent fare, and with no extra charge for the delightful addition of
+the host himself, who is very tall and dignified and humourous, and who
+is the oddest and yet most picturesque-looking public character in the
+Dominion. Such an oddity is certain to attract queer characters to his
+side, and Mr. O'Farrall is no exception to the rule. One of the
+waiter-girls in the dining-room was found never by any chance to know
+anything that she was asked about. For instance, she had never heard of
+Mr. Rankin, the chief man of the place. To every question she made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+answer, "Sure, there does be a great dale goin' on here and I know
+nothin' of it." Of her the artist ventured the theory that "she could
+not know everything on a waiter-girl's salary." John, the bartender, was
+a delightful study. No matter what a visitor laid down in the
+smoking-room, John picked it up and carried it behind the bar. Every one
+was continually losing something and searching for it, always to observe
+that John was able to produce it with a smile and the wise remark that
+he had taken the lost article and put it away "for fear some one would
+pick it up." Finally, there was Mr. O'Farrall's dog&mdash;a ragged,
+time-worn, petulant terrier, no bigger than a pint-pot. Mr. O'Farrall
+nevertheless called him "Fairy," and said he kept him "to protect the
+village children against wild bears."</p>
+
+<p>I shall never be able to think of Mattawa as it is&mdash;a plain little
+lumbering town on the Ottawa River, with the wreck and ruin of once
+grand scenery hemming it in on all sides in the form of ragged mountains
+literally ravaged by fire and the axe. Hints of it come back to me in
+dismembered bits that prove it to have been interesting: vignettes of
+little school-boys in blanket suits and moccasins, of great-spirited
+horses forever racing ahead of fur-laden sleighs, and of troops of
+olive-skinned French-Canadian girls, bundled up from their feet to those
+mischievous features which shot roguish glances at the artist&mdash;the
+biggest man, the people said, who had ever been seen in Mattawa. But the
+place will ever yield back to my mind the impression I got of the
+wonderful preparations that were made for our adventure&mdash;preparations
+that seemed to busy or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> to interest nearly every one in the village. Our
+Indians had come in from the Indian village three miles away, and had
+said they had had enough drink. Mr. John De Sousa, accountant at the
+post, took charge of them and of us, and the work of loading a great
+portage sleigh went on apace. The men of sporting tastes came out and
+lounged in front of the post, and gave helpful advice; the Indians and
+clerks went to and from the sleigh laden with bags of necessaries; the
+harness-maker made for us belts such as the lumbermen use to preclude
+the possibility of incurable strains in the rough life in the
+wilderness. The help at O'Farrall's assisted in repacking what we needed
+so that our trunks and town clothing could be stored. Mr. De Sousa sent
+messengers hither and thither for essentials not in stock at the post.
+Some women, even, were set at work to make "neaps" for us, a neap being
+a sort of slipper or unlaced shoe made of heavy blanketing and worn
+outside one's stockings to give added warmth to the feet.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, this is no casual rabbit-hunt," said the artist. The remark
+will live in Mattawa many a year.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson Bay Company's posts differ. In the wilderness they are forts
+surrounded by stockades, but within the boundaries of civilization they
+are stores. That at Winnipeg is a splendid emporium, while that at
+Mattawa is like a village store in the United States, except that the
+top story is laden with guns, traps, snow-shoes, and the skins of wild
+beasts; while an outbuilding in the rear is the repository of scores of
+birch-bark canoes&mdash;the carriages of British America. Mr. Rank<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>in, the
+factor there, lay in a bed of suffering and could not see us. Yet it
+seemed difficult to believe that we could be made the recipients of
+greater or more kindly attentions than were lavished upon us by his
+accountant, Mr. De Sousa. He ordered our tobacco ground for us ready for
+our pipes; selected the finest from among those extraordinary blankets
+that have been made exclusively for this company for hundreds of years;
+picked out the largest snow-shoes in his stock; bade us lay aside the
+gloves we had brought, and take mittens such as he produced, and for
+which we thanked him in our hearts many times afterwards; planned our
+outfit of food with the wisdom of an old campaigner; bethought himself
+to send for baker's bread; ordered high legs sewed on our moccasins&mdash;in
+a word, he made it possible for us to say afterwards that absolutely
+nothing had been overlooked or slighted in fitting out our expedition.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG79" id="ILLO_PG79"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0095.jpg" width="300" height="300" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>ANTOINE, FROM LIFE</h4>
+
+<p>As I sat in the sleigh, tucked in under heavy skins and leaning at royal
+ease against other furs that covered a bale of hay, it seemed to me that
+I had become part of one of such pictures as we all have seen,
+portraying historic expeditions in Russia or Siberia. We carried
+fifteen hundred pounds of traps and provisions for campi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>ng, stabling,
+and food for men and beasts. We were five in all&mdash;two hunters, two
+Indians, and a teamster. We set out with the two huge mettlesome horses
+ahead, the driver on a high seat formed of a second bale of hay,
+ourselves lolling back under our furs, and the two Indians striding
+along over the resonant cold snow behind us. It was beginning to be
+evident that a great deal of effort and machinery was needed to "make a
+hunter" of a city man, and that it was going to be done thoroughly&mdash;two
+thoughts of a highly flattering nature.</p>
+
+<p>We were now clad for arctic weather, and perhaps nothing except a mummy
+was ever "so dressed up" as we were. We each wore two pairs of the
+heaviest woollen stockings I ever saw, and over them ribbed bicycle
+stockings that came to our knees. Over these in turn were our "neaps,"
+and then our moccasins, laced tightly around our ankles. We had on two
+suits of flannels of extra thickness, flannel shirts, reefing jackets,
+and "capeaux," as they call their long-hooded blanket coats, longer than
+snow-shoe coats. On our heads we had knitted tuques, and on our hands
+mittens and gloves. We were bound for Antoine's moose-yard, near Crooked
+Lake.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation of the term "moose-yard" made moose-hunting appear a
+simple operation (once we were started), for a moose-yard is the
+feeding-ground of a herd of moose, and our head Indian, Alexandre
+Antoine, knew where there was one. Each herd or family of these great
+wild cattle has two such feeding-grounds, and they are said to go
+alternately from one to the other, never herding in one place two years
+in succession. In th<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>is region of Canada they weigh between 600 and 1200
+pounds, and the reader will help his comprehension of those figures by
+recalling the fact that a 1200-pound horse is a very large one. Whether
+they desert a yard for twelve months because of the damage they do to
+the supply of food it offers to them, or whether it is instinctive
+caution that directs their movements, no one can more than conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>Their yards are always where soft wood is plentiful and water is near,
+and during a winter they will feed over a region from half a mile to a
+mile square. The prospect of going directly to the fixed home of a herd
+of moose almost robbed the trip of that speculative element that gives
+the greatest zest to hunting. But we knew not what the future held for
+us. Not even the artist, with all his experience, conjectured what was
+in store for us. And what was to come began coming almost immediately.</p>
+
+<p>The journey began upon a good highway, over which we slid along as
+comfortably as any ladies in their carriages, and with the sleigh-bells
+flinging their cheery music out over a desolate valley, with a leaden
+river at the bottom, and with small mountains rolling all about. The
+timber was cut off them, except here and there a few red or white pines
+that reared their green, brush-like tops against the general blanket of
+snow. The dull sky hung sullenly above, and now and then a raven flew
+by, croaking hoarse disapproval of our intrusion. To warn us of what we
+were to expect, Antoine had made a shy Indian joke, one of the few I
+ever heard: "In small little while," s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>aid he, "we come to all sorts of a
+road. Me call it that 'cause you get every sort riding, then you sure be
+suited."</p>
+
+<p>At five miles out we came to this remarkable highway. It can no more be
+adequately described here than could the experiences of a man who goes
+over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The reader must try to imagine the most
+primitive sort of a highway conceivable&mdash;one that has been made by
+merely felling trees through a forest in a path wide enough for a team
+and wagon. All the tree stumps were left in their places, and every here
+and there were rocks; some no larger than a bale of cotton, and some as
+small as a bushel basket. To add to the other alluring qualities of the
+road, there were tree trunks now and then directly across it, and, as a
+further inducement to traffic, the highway was frequently interrupted by
+"pitch holes." Some of these would be called pitch holes anywhere. They
+were at points where a rill crossed the road, or the road crossed the
+corner of a marsh. But there were other pitch holes that any intelligent
+New Yorker would call ravines or gullies. These were at points where one
+hill ran down to the water-level and another immediately rose
+precipitately, there being a watercourse between the two. In all such
+places there was deep black mud and broken ice. However, these were mere
+features of the character of this road&mdash;a character too profound for me
+to hope to portray it. When the road was not inclined either straight
+down or straight up, it coursed along the slanting side of a steep hill,
+so that a vehicle could keep to it only by falling against the forest
+at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> the under side and carroming along from tree to tree.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG83" id="ILLO_PG83"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0099.jpg" width="741" height="497" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE PORTAGE SLEIGH ON A LUMBER ROAD</h4>
+
+<p>Such was the road. The manner of travelling it was quite as astounding.
+For nothing short of what Alphonse, the teamster, did would I destroy a
+man's character; but Alphonse was the next thing to an idiot. He made
+that dreadful journey at a gallop! The first time he upset the sleigh
+and threw me with one leg thigh-deep between a stone and a tree trunk,
+besides sending the artist flying over my head like a shot from a sling,
+he reseated himself and remarked: "That makes tree time I upset in dat
+place. Hi, there! Get up!" It never occurred to him to stop because a
+giant tree had fallen across the trail. "Look out! Hold tight!" he would
+call out, and then he would take the obstruction at a jump. The horses
+were mammoth beasts, in the best fettle, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> sleigh was of the
+solidest, strongest pattern. There were places where even Alphonse was
+anxious to drive with caution. Such were the ravines and unbridged
+waterways. But one of the horses had cut himself badly in such a place a
+year before, and both now made it a rule to take all such places flying.
+Fancy the result! The leap in air, and then the crash of the sled as it
+landed, the snap of the harness chains, the snorts of the winded beasts,
+the yells of the driver, the anxiety and nervousness of the passengers!</p>
+
+<p>At one point we had an exciting adventure of a far different sort. There
+was a moderately good stretch of road ahead, and we invited the Indians
+to jump in and ride a while. We noticed that they took occasional
+draughts from a bottle. They finished a full pint, and presently
+Alexandre produced another and larger phial. Every one knows what a
+drunken Indian is, and so did we. We ordered the sleigh stopped and all
+hands out for "a talk." Firmly, but with both power and reason on our
+side; we demanded a promise that not another drink should be taken, or
+that the horses be turned towards Mattawa at once. The promise was
+freely given.</p>
+
+<p>"But what is that stuff? Let me see it," one of the hunters asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It is de 'igh wine," said Alexandre.</p>
+
+<p>"High wine? Alcohol?" exclaimed the hunter, and, impulse being quicker
+than reason sometimes, flung the bottle high in air into the bush. It
+was an injudicious action, but both of us at once prepared to defend
+and re-enforce it, of course. As it happened, the Indians saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> that no
+unkindness or unfairness was intended, and neither sulked nor made
+trouble afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>We were now deep in the bush. Occasionally we passed "a brul&egrave;," or tract
+denuded of trees, and littered with trunks and tops of trunks rejected
+by the lumbermen. But every mile took us nearer to the undisturbed
+primeval forest, where the trees shoot up forty feet before the branches
+begin. There were no houses, teams, or men. In a week in the bush we saw
+no other sign of civilization than what we brought or made. All around
+us rose the motionless regiments of the forest, with the snow beneath
+them, and their branches and twigs printing lacework on the sky. The
+signs of game were numerous, and varied to an extent that I never heard
+of before. There were few spaces of the length of twenty-five feet in
+which the track of some wild beast or bird did not cross the road. The
+Indians read this writing in the snow, so that the forest was to them as
+a book would be to us. "What is that?" "And that?" "And that?" I kept
+inquiring. The answers told more eloquently than any man can describe it
+the story of the abundance of game in that easily accessible wilderness.
+"Dat red deer," Antoine replied. "Him fox." "Dat bear track; dat
+squirrel; dat rabbit." "Dat moose track; pass las' week." "Dat
+pa'tridge; dat wolf." Or perhaps it was the trail of a marten, or a
+beaver, or a weasel, or a fisher, mink, lynx, or otter that he pointed
+out, for all these "signs" were there, and nearly all were repeated
+again and again. Of the birds that are plentiful there the principal
+kinds are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> partridge, woodcock, crane, geese, duck, gull, loon, and owl.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG87" id="ILLO_PG87"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0103.jpg" width="302" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE TRACK IN THE WINTER FOREST</h4>
+
+<p>When the sun set we prepared to camp, selecting a spot near a tiny rill.
+The horses were tethered to a tree, with their harness still on, and
+blankets thrown over them. We cleared a little space by the road-side,
+using our snow-shoes for shovels. The Indians, with their axes, turned
+up the moss and leaves, and levelled the small shoots and brushwood.
+Then one went off to cut balsam boughs for bedding, while the other set
+up two crotched sticks, with a pole upon them resting in the crotches,
+and throwing the canvas of an "A" tent over the frame, he looped the
+bottom of the tent to small pegs, and banked snow lightly all around it.
+The little aromatic branches of balsam were laid evenly upon the ground,
+a fur robe was thrown upon the leaves, our enormous blankets were spread
+half open side by side, and two coats were rolled up and thrown down for
+pillows. Pierre, the second Indian, made tiny slivers of some soft wood,
+and tried to start a fire. He failed. Then Alexandre Antoine brought two
+handfuls of bark, and lighting a small piece with a match, proceeded to
+build a fire in the most painstaking manner, and with an ingenuity that
+was most interesting. First he made a fire that could have been started
+in a teacup; then he built above and around it a skeleton tent of bits
+of soft wood, six to nine inches in length. This gave him a fire of the
+dimensions of a high hat. Next, he threw down two great bits of timber,
+one on either side of the fire, and a still larger back log, and upon
+these he heaped split soft wood. While this was being done, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>Pierre
+assailed one great tree after another, and brought them crashing down
+with noises that startled the forest quiet. Alphonse had opened the
+provision bags, and presently two tin pails filled with water swung from
+saplings over the fire, and a pan of fat salt pork was frizzling upon
+the blazing wood. The darkness grew dead black, and the dancing flames
+peopled the near forest with dodging shadows. Almost in the time it has
+taken me to write it, we were squatting on our heels around the fire,
+each with a massive cutting of bread, a slice of fried pork in a tin
+plate, and half a pint of tea, precisely as hot as molten lead, in a tin
+cup. Supper was a necessity, not a luxury, and was hurried out of the
+way accordingly. Then the men built their camp beside ours in front of
+the fire, and followed that by felling three or more monarchs of the
+bush. Nothing surprised me so much as the amount of wood consumed in
+these open-air fires. In five days at our permanent camp we made a great
+hole in the forest.</p>
+
+<p>But that first night in the open air, abed with nature, with British
+America for a bedroom! Only I can tell of it, for the others slept. The
+stillness was intense. There was no wind and not an animal or bird
+uttered a cry. The logs cracked and sputtered and popped, the horses
+shook their chains, the men all snored&mdash;white and red alike. The horses
+pounded the hollow earth; the logs broke and fell upon the cinders; one
+of the men talked in his sleep. But over and through it all the
+stillness grew. Then the fire sank low, the cold became intense, the
+light was lost, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>darkness swallowed everything. Some one got up
+awkwardly, with muttering, and flung wood upon the red ashes, and
+presently all that had passed was re-experienced.</p>
+
+<p>The ride next day was more exciting than the first stage. It was like
+the journey of a gun-carriage across country in a hot retreat. The sled
+was actually upset only once, but to prevent that happening fifty times
+the Indians kept springing at the uppermost side of the flying vehicle,
+and hanging to the side poles to pull the toppling construction down
+upon both runners. Often we were advised to leap out for safety's sake;
+at other times we wished we had leaped out. For seven hours we were
+flung about like cotton spools that are being polished in a revolving
+cylinder. And yet we were obliged to run long distances after the
+hurtling sleigh&mdash;long enough to tire us. The artist, who had spent years
+in rude scenes among rough men, said nothing at the time. What was the
+use? But afterwards, in New York, he remarked that this was the roughest
+travelling he had ever experienced.</p>
+
+<p>The signs of game increased. Deer and bear and wolf and fox and moose
+were evidently numerous around us. Once we stopped, and the Indians
+became excited. What they had taken for old moose tracks were the
+week-old footprints of a man. It seems strange, but they felt obliged to
+know what a man had gone into the bush for a week ago. They followed the
+signs, and came back smiling. He had gone in to cut hemlock boughs; we
+would find traces of a camp near by. We did. In a country where men are
+so few, they busy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> themselves about one another. Four or five days later,
+while we were hunting, these Indians came to the road and stopped
+suddenly, as horses do when lassoed. With a glance they read that two
+teams had passed during the night, going towards our camp. When we
+returned to camp the teams had been there, and our teamster had talked
+with the drivers. Therefore that load was lifted from the minds of our
+Indians. But their knowledge of the bush was marvellous. One point in
+the woods was precisely like another to us, yet the Indians would leap
+off the sleigh now and then and dive into the forest to return with a
+trap hidden there months before, or to find a great iron kettle.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG91" id="ILLO_PG91"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0107.jpg" width="245" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>PIERRE, FROM LIFE</h4>
+
+<p>"Do you never get lost?" I asked Alexandre.</p>
+
+<p>"Me get los'? No, no get los'."</p>
+
+<p>"But how do you find your way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Me fin' way easy. Me know way me come, or me follow my tracks, or me
+know by de sun. If no sun, me look at trees. Trees grow more branches
+on side toward sun, and got rough bark on north side. At night me kno<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>w
+by see de stars."</p>
+
+<p>We camped in a log-hut Alexandre had built for a hunting camp. It was
+very picturesque and substantial, built of huge logs, and caulked with
+moss. It had a great earthen bank in the middle for a fireplace, with an
+equally large opening in the roof, boarded several feet high at the
+sides to form a chimney. At one corner of the fire bank was an ingenious
+crane, capable of being raised and lowered, and projecting from a
+pivoted post, so that the long arm could be swung over or away from the
+fire. At one end of the single apartment were two roomy bunks built
+against the wall. With extraordinary skill and quickness the Indians
+whittled a spade out of a board, performing the task with an axe, an
+implement they can use as white men use a penknife, an implement they
+value more highly than a gun. They made a broom of balsam boughs, and
+dug and swept the dirt off the floor and walls, speedily making the
+cabin neat and clean. Two new bunks were put up for us, and bedded with
+balsam boughs and skins. Shelves were already up, and spread with pails
+and bottles, tin cups and plates, knives and forks, canned goods, etc.
+On them and on the floor were our stores.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG93" id="ILLO_PG93"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0109.jpg" width="350" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>ANTOINE'S CABIN</h4>
+
+<p>We had a week's outfit, and we needed it, because for five days we could
+not hunt on account of the crust on the snow, which made such a noise
+when a human foot broke through it that we could not have approached any
+wild animal within half a mile. On the third day it rained, but without
+melting the crust. On the fourth day it snowed furiously, burying the
+crust under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> two inches of snow. On the fifth day we got our moose.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time the log-cabin was our home. Alexandre and Pierre cut
+down trees every day for the fire, and Pierre disappeared for hours
+every now and then to look after traps set for otter, beaver, and
+marten. Alphonse attended his horses and served as cook. He could
+produce hotter tea than any other man in the world. I took mine for a
+walk in the arctic cold three times a day, the artist learned to pour
+his from one cup to another with amazing dexterity, and the Indians (who
+drank a quart each of green tea at each meal because it was stronger
+than our black tea) lifted their pans and threw the liquid fire down
+throats that had been inured to high wines. Whenever the fire was low,
+the cold was intense. Whenever it was heaped with logs, all the heat
+flew directly through the roof, and spiral blasts of cold air were
+sucked through every crack between logs in the cabin walls. Whenever the
+door opened, the cabin filled with smoke. Smoke clung to all we ate or
+wore. At night the fire kept burning out, and we arose with chattering
+teeth to build it anew. The Indians were then to be seen with their
+blankets pushed down to their knees, asleep in their shirts and
+trousers. At meal-times we had bacon or pork, speckled or lake trout,
+bread-and-butter, stewed tomatoes, and tea. There were two stools for
+the five men, but they only complicated the discomfort of those who got
+them; for it was found that if we put our tin plates on our knees, they
+fell off; if we held them in one hand, we could not cut the pork a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>nd
+hold the bread with the other hand; while if we put the plates on the
+floor beside the tea, we could not reach them. In a month we might have
+solved the problem. Life in that log shanty was precisely the life of
+the early settlers of this country. It was bound to produce great
+characters or early death. There could be no middle course with such an
+existence.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG97" id="ILLO_PG97"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0113.jpg" width="589" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE CAMP AT NIGHT</h4>
+
+<p>Partridge fed in the brush impudently before us. Rabbits bobbed about in
+the clearing before the door. Squirrels sat upon the logs near by and
+gormandized and chattered. Great saucy birds, like mouse-colored robins,
+and known to the Indians as "meat-birds," stole our provender if we left
+it out-of-doors half an hour, and one day we saw a red deer jump in the
+bush a hundred yards away. Yet we got no game, because we knew there was
+a moose-yard within two miles on one side and within three miles on the
+other, and we dared not shoot our rifles lest we frighten the moose.
+Moose was all we were after. There was a lake near by, and the trout in
+those lakes up there attain remarkable size and numbers. We heard of
+35-pound specked trout, of lake trout twice as large, and of enormous
+muskallonge. The most reliable persons told of lakes farther in the
+wilderness where the trout are thick as salmon in the British Columbia
+streams&mdash;so thick as to seem to fill the water. We were near a lake that
+was supposed to have been fished out by lumbermen a year before, yet it
+was no sport at all to fish there. With a short stick and two yards of
+line and a bass hook baited with pork, we brought up four-pound and
+five-pound beau<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>ties faster than we wanted them for food. Truly we were
+in a splendid hunting country, like the Adirondacks eighty years ago,
+but thousands of times as extensive.</p>
+
+<p>Finally we started for moose. Our Indians asked if they might take their
+guns. We gave the permission. Alexandre, a thin, wiry man of forty
+years, carried an old Henry rifle in a woollen case open at one end like
+a stocking. He wore a short blanket coat and tuque, and trousers tied
+tight below the knee, and let into his moccasin-tops. He and his brother
+Fran&ccedil;ois are famous Hudson Bay Company trappers, and are two-thirds
+Algonquin and one-third French. He has a typical swarthy, angular Indian
+face and a French mustache and goatee. Naturally, if not by rank, a
+leader among his men, his manner is commanding and his appearance grave.
+He talks bad French fluently, and makes wretched headway in English.
+Pierre is a short, thickset, walnut-stained man of thirty-five, almost
+pure Indian, and almost a perfect specimen of physical development. He
+seldom spoke while on this trip, but he impressed us with his strength,
+endurance, quickness, and knowledge of woodcraft. Poor fellow! he had
+only a shot-gun, which he loaded with buckshot. It had no case, and both
+men carried their pieces grasped by the barrels and shouldered with the
+butts behind them.</p>
+
+<p>We set out in Indian-file, plunging at once into the bush. Never was
+forest scenery more exquisitely beautiful than on that morning as the
+day broke, for we breakfasted at four o'clock, and started immediately
+aft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>erwards. Everywhere the view was fairy-like. There was not snow
+enough for snow-shoeing. But the fresh fall of snow was immaculately
+white, and flecked the scene apparently from earth to sky, for there was
+not a branch or twig or limb or spray of evergreen, or wart or fungous
+growth upon any tree that did not bear its separate burden of snow. It
+was a bridal dress, not a winding-sheet, that Dame Nature was trying on
+that morning. And in the bright fresh green of the firs and pines we saw
+her complexion peeping out above her spotless gown, as one sees the rosy
+cheeks or black eyes of a girl wrapped in ermine.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG101" id="ILLO_PG101"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0117.jpg" width="663" height="383" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A MOOSE BULL FIGHT</h4>
+
+<p>Mile after mile we walked, up mountain and down dale, slapped in the
+faces by twigs, knocking snow down the backs of our necks, slipping
+knee-deep in bog mud, tumbling over loose stones, climbing across
+interlaced logs, dropping to the height of one thigh between tree
+trunks, sliding, falling, tight-rope walking on branches over thin ice,
+but forever following the cat-like tread of Alexandre, with his
+seven-league stride and long-winded persistence. Suddenly we came to a
+queer sort of clearing dotted with protuberances like the bubbles on
+molasses beginning to boil. It was a beaver meadow. The bumps in the
+snow covered stumps of trees the beavers had gnawed down. The Indians
+were looking at some trough like tracks in the snow, like the trail of a
+tired man who had dragged his heels. "Moose; going this way," said
+Alexandre; and we turned and walked in the tracks. Across the meadow and
+across a lake and up another mountain they led us. Then we came upon
+fresher print<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>s. At each new track the Indians stooped, and making a
+scoop of one hand, brushed the new-fallen snow lightly out of the
+indentations. Thus they read the time at which the print was made. "Las'
+week," "Day 'fore yesterday," they whispered. Presently they bent over
+again, the light snow flew, and one whispered, "This morning."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG103" id="ILLO_PG103"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0119.jpg" width="682" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>ON THE MOOSE TRAIL</h4>
+
+<p>Stealthily Alexandre swept ahead; very carefully we followed. We dared
+not break a twig, or speak, or slip, or stumble. As it was, the breaking
+of the crust was still far too audible. We followed a little stream, and
+approached a thick growth of tamarack. We had no means of knowing that a
+herd of moose was lying in that thicket, resting after feeding. We knew
+it afterwards. Alexandre motioned to us to get our guns ready. We each
+threw a cartridge from the cylinder into t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>he barrel, making a "click,
+click" that was abominably loud. Alexandre forged ahead. In five minutes
+we heard him call aloud: "Moose gone. We los' him." We hastened to his
+side. He pointed at some tracks in which the prints were closer together
+than any we had seen.</p>
+
+<p>"See! he trot," Alexandre explained.</p>
+
+<p>In another five minutes we had all but completed a circle, and were on
+the other side of the tamarack thicket. And there were the prints of the
+bodies of the great beasts. We could see even the imprint of the hair of
+their coats. All around were broken twigs and balsam needles. The moose
+had left the branches ragged, and on every hand the young bark was
+chewed or rubbed raw. Loading our rifles had lost us a herd of moose.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG105" id="ILLO_PG105"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0121.jpg" width="673" height="403" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>IN SIGHT OF THE GAME&mdash;"NOW SHOOT!"</h4>
+
+<p>Back once again at the beaver dam, Alexandre and Pierre studied the
+moose-tramped snow and talked earnestly. They agreed that a desperate
+battle had been fought there between two bull moose a week before, and
+that those bulls were not in the "yard" where we had blundered. They
+examined the tracks over an acre or more, and then strode off at an
+obtuse angle from our former trail. Pierre, apparently not quite
+satisfied, kept dropping behind or disappearing in the bush at one side
+of us. So magnificent was his skill at his work that I missed him at
+times, and at other times found him putting his feet down where mine
+were lifted up without ever hearing a sound of his step or of his
+contact with the undergrowth. Alexandre presently motioned us with a
+warning gesture. He slowed his pace to short steps, with long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> pauses
+between. He saw everything that moved, heard every sound; only a deer
+could throw more and keener faculties into play than this born hunter.
+He heard a twig snap. We heard nothing. Pierre was away on a side
+search. Alexandre motioned us to be ready. We crept close together, and
+I scarcely breathed. We moved cautiously, a step at a time, like
+chessmen. It was impossible to get an unobstructed view a hundred feet
+ahead, so thick was the soft-wood growth. It seemed out of the question
+to try to shoot that distance. We were descending a hill-side into
+marshy ground. We crossed a corner of a grove of young alders, and saw
+before us a gentle slope thickly grown with evergreen&mdash;tamarack, the
+artist called it. Suddenly Alexandre bent forward and raised his gun.
+Two steps forward gave us his view. Five moose were fifty yards away,
+alarmed and ready to run. A big bull in the front of the group had
+already thrown back his antlers. By impulse rather than through reason I
+took aim at a second bull. He was half a height lower down the slope,
+and to be seen through a web of thin foliage. Alexandre and the artist
+fired as with a single pull at one trigger. The foremost bull staggered
+and fell forward, as if his knees had been broken. He was hit twice&mdash;in
+the heart and in the neck. The second bull and two cows and a calf
+plunged into the bush and disappeared. Pierre found that bull a mile
+away, shot through the lungs.</p>
+
+<p>It had taken us a week to kill our moose in a country where they were
+common game. That was "hunter's luck" with a vengeance. But at another
+season such a delay c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>ould scarcely occur. The time to visit that
+district is in the autumn, before snow falls. Then in a week one ought
+to be able to bag a moose, and move into the region where caribou are
+plenty.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Remington, in the picture called "Hunting the Caribou," depicts a
+scene at a critical moment in the experience of any man who has
+journeyed on westward of where we found our moose, to hunt the caribou.
+There is a precise moment for shooting in the chase of all animals of
+the deer kind, and when that moment has been allowed to pass, the chance
+of securing the animal diminishes with astonishing rapidity&mdash;with more
+than the rapidity with which the then startled animal is making his
+flight, because to his flight you must add the increasing ambush of the
+forest. What is true of caribou in this respect is true of moose and red
+deer, elk and musk-ox in America, and of all the horned animals of the
+forests of the other great hemisphere. Every hunter who sees Mr.
+Remington's realistic picture knows at a glance that the two men have
+stolen noiselessly to within easy rifle-shot of a caribou, and that
+suddenly, at the last moment, the animal has heard them.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG109" id="ILLO_PG109"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0125.jpg" width="577" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>SUCCESS</h4>
+
+<p>Perhaps he has seen them, and is standing&mdash;still as a Barye bronze&mdash;with
+his great, soft, wondering eyes riveted upon theirs. That is a situation
+familiar to every hunter. His prey has been browsing in fancied
+security, and yet with that nervous prudence that causes these timid
+beasts to keep forever raising their heads, and sweeping the view around
+them with their exquisite sight, and analyzing the atmosphere with
+thei<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>r magical sense of smell. In one of these cautious pauses the
+caribou has seen the hunters. Both hunters and hunted seem instantly to
+turn to stone. Neither moves a muscle or a hair. If the knee or the foot
+of one of the men presses too hard upon a twig and it snaps, the caribou
+is as certain to throw his head high up and dart into the ingulfing
+net-work of the forest trunks and brush as day is certain to follow
+night. But when no movement has been made and no mishap has alarmed the
+beast, it has often happened that the two or more parties to this
+strangely thrilling situation have held their places for minutes at a
+stretch&mdash;minutes that seemed like quarters of an hour. In such cases the
+deer or caribou has been known to lower his head and feed again, assured
+in its mind that the suspected hunter is inanimate and harmless. Nine
+times in ten, though, the firs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>t to move is the beast, which tosses up
+its head, and "Shoot! shoot!" is the instant command, for the upward
+throwing of the head is a movement made to put the beast's great antlers
+into position for flight through the forest.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG111" id="ILLO_PG111"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0127.jpg" width="559" height="348" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>HUNTING THE CARIBOU&mdash;"SHOOT! SHOOT!"</h4>
+
+<p>The caribou has very wide, heavy horns, and they are almost always
+circular&mdash;that is, the main part or trunk of each horn curves outward
+from the skull and then inward towards the point, in an almost true
+semicircle. They are more or less branched, but both the general shape
+of the whole horns and of the branches is such that when the head is
+thrown up and back they aid the animal's flight by presenting what may
+be called the point of a wedge towards the saplings and limbs and small
+forest growths through which the beast runs, parting and spreading every
+pair of obstacles to either side, and bending every single one out of
+the way of his flying body. The caribou of North America is the reindeer
+of Greenland; the differences between the two are very slight. The
+animal's home is the arctic circle, but in America it feeds and roams
+farther south than in Europe and Asia. It is a large and clumsy-looking
+beast, with thick and rather short legs and bulky body, and, seen in
+repose, gives no hint of its capacity for flight. Yet the caribou can
+run "like a streak of wind," and makes its way through leaves and brush
+and brittle, sapless vegetation with a modicum of noise so slight as to
+seem inexplicable. Nature has ingeniously added to its armament, always
+one, and usually two, palmated spurs at the root of its horns, and
+these grow at an obtuse angle with the head, upward and outward
+towar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>ds the nose. With these spurs&mdash;like shovels used sideways&mdash;the
+caribou roots up the snow, or breaks its crust and disperses it, to get
+at his food on the ground. The caribou are very large deer, and their
+strength is attested by the weight of their horns. I have handled
+caribou horns in Canada that I could not hold out with both hands when
+seated in a chair. It seemed hard to believe that an animal of the size
+of a caribou could carry a burden apparently so disproportioned to his
+head and neck. But it is still more difficult to believe, as all the
+woodsmen say, that these horns are dropped and new ones grown every
+year.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the especial beauty of Frederic Remington's drawings and
+paintings that they are absolutely accurate in every detail, but it is
+one of their beauties, and gives them especial value apart from their
+artistic excellence. He draws what he knows, and he knows what he draws.
+This scene of the electrically exquisite moment in a hunter's life, when
+great game is before him, and the instant has come for claiming it as
+his own with a steadily held and wisely chosen aim, will give the reader
+a perfect knowledge of how the Indians and hunters dress and equip
+themselves beyond the Canadian border. The scene is in the wilderness
+north of the Great Lakes. The Indian is of one of those tribes that are
+offshoots of the great Algonquin nation. He carries in that load he
+bears that which the plainsmen call "the grub stake," or quota of
+provisions for himself and his employer, as well as blankets to sleep
+in, pots, pans, sugar, the inevitable tea of those latitudes, and much
+else besides. T<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>hose Indians are not as lazy or as physically degenerate
+as many of the tribes in our country. They turn themselves into
+wonderful beasts of burden, and go forever equipped with a long, broad
+strap that they call a "tomp line," and which they pass around their
+foreheads and around their packs, the latter resting high up on their
+backs. It seems incredible, but they can carry one hundred to one
+hundred and fifty pounds of necessaries all day long in the roughest
+regions. The Hudson Bay Company made their ancestors its wards and
+dependents two centuries ago, and taught them to work and to earn their
+livelihood.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_FIVE" id="CHAPTER_FIVE"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>BIG FISHING</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n October every year there are apt to be more fish upon the land in the
+Nepigon country than one would suppose could find life in the waters.
+Most families have laid in their full winter supply, the main exceptions
+being those semi-savage families which leave their fish out&mdash;in
+preference to laying them in&mdash;upon racks whereon they are to be seen in
+rows and by the thousands.</p>
+
+<p>Nepigon, the old Hudson Bay post which is the outfitting place for this
+region, is 928 miles west of Montreal, on the Canadian Pacific Railway,
+and on an arm of Lake Superior. The Nepigon River, which connects the
+greatest of lakes with Lake Nepigon, is the only roadway in all that
+country, and therefore its mouth, in an arm of the great lake, is the
+front door to that wonderful region. In travelling through British
+Columbia I found one district that is going to prove of greater interest
+to gentlemen sportsmen with the rod, but I know of no greater fishing
+country than the Nepigon. No single waterway or system of navigable
+inland waters in North America is likely to wrest the palm from this
+Nepigon district as the haunt of fish in the greatest plenty, unless we
+term the salmon a fresh-water fish, and thus call the Fraser, Columbia,
+and Skeena rivers into the rivalry. There is incessant fishing in this
+wilderness north <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>of Lake Superior from New-year's Day, when the ice has
+to be cut to get at the water, all through the succeeding seasons, until
+again the ice fails to protect the game. And there is every sort of
+fishing between that which engages a navy of sailing vessels and men,
+down through all the methods of fish-taking&mdash;by nets, by spearing, still
+fishing, and fly-fishing. A half a dozen sorts of finny game succumb to
+these methods, and though the region has been famous and therefore much
+visited for nearly a dozen years, the field is so extensive, so well
+stocked, and so difficult of access except to persons of means, that
+even to-day almost the very largest known specimens of each class of
+fish are to be had there.</p>
+
+<p>If we could put on wings early in October, and could fly down from
+James's Bay over the dense forests and countless lakes and streams of
+western Ontario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunter in a
+canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small houses forming a Hudson
+Bay post, and at even greater distances apart small bunches of the
+cotton or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway bands.
+But with the first glance at the majestic expanse of Lake Superior there
+would burst upon the view scores upon scores of white sails upon the
+water, and near by, upon the shore, a tent for nearly every sail. That
+is the time for the annual gathering for catching the big, chunky,
+red-fleshed fish they call the salmon-trout. They catch those that weigh
+from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty pounds, and at this time of the
+year their flesh is comparatively hard.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Engaged in making this great catch are the boats of the Indians from far
+up the Nepigon and the neighboring streams; of the chance white men of
+the region, who depend upon nature for their sustenance; and of Finns,
+Norwegians, Swedes, and others who come from the United States side, or
+southern shore, to fish for their home markets. These fish come at this
+season to spawn, seeking the reefs, which are plentiful off the shore in
+this part of the lake. Gill nets are used to catch them, and are set
+within five fathoms of the surface by setting the inner buoy in water of
+that depth, and then paying the net out into deeper water and anchoring
+it. The run and the fishing continue throughout October. As a rule,
+among the Canadians and Canada Indians a family goes with each boat&mdash;the
+boats being sloops of twenty-seven to thirty feet in length, and capable
+of carrying fifteen pork barrels, which are at the outset filled with
+rock-salt. Sometimes the heads of two families are partners in the
+ownership of one of these sloops, but, however that may be, the custom
+is for the women and children to camp in tents along-shore, while the
+men (usually two men and a boy for each boat) work the nets. It is a
+stormy season of the year, and the work is rough and hazardous,
+especially for the nets, which are frequently lost.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a haul is made the fish are split down the back and cleaned.
+Then they are washed, rolled in salt, and packed in the barrels. Three
+days later, when the bodies of the fish have thoroughly purged
+themselves,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> they are taken out, washed again, and are once more rolled
+in fresh salt and put back in the barrels, which are then filled to the
+top with water. The Indians subsist all winter upon this October catch,
+and, in addition, manage to exchange a few barrels for other provisions
+and for clothing. They demand an equivalent of six dollars a barrel in
+whatever they get in exchange, but do not sell for money, because, as I
+understand it, they are not obliged to pay the provincial license fee as
+fishermen, and therefore may not fish for the market. Even sportsmen who
+throw a fly for one day in the Nepigon country must pay the Government
+for the privilege. The Indians told me that eight barrels of these fish
+will last a family of six persons an entire winter. Such a demonstration
+of prudence and fore-thought as this, of a month's fishing at the
+threshold of winter, amounts to is a rare one for an Indian to make, and
+I imagine there is a strong admixture of white blood in most of those
+who make it. The full-bloods will not take the trouble. They trust to
+their guns and their traps against the coming of that wolf which they
+are not unused to facing.</p>
+
+<p>Up along the shores of Lake Nepigon, which is thirty miles by an air
+line north of Lake Superior, many of the Indians lay up white-fish for
+winter. They catch them in nets and cure them by frost. They do not
+clean them. They simply make a hole in the tail end of each fish, and
+string them, as if they were beads, upon sticks, which they set up into
+racks. They usually hang the fishes in rows of ten, and frequently
+store up thousands while they are at it. Th<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>e Reverend Mr. Renison, who
+has had much to do with bettering the condition of these Indians, told
+me that he had caught 1020 pounds of white-fish in two nights with two
+gill nets in Lake Nepigon. It is unnecessary to add that he cleaned his.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG119" id="ILLO_PG119"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0135.jpg" width="374" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIANS HAULING NETS ON LAKE NEPIGON</h4>
+
+<p>Lake Nepigon is about seventy miles in length, and two-thirds as wide,
+at the points of its greatest measurement, and is a picturesque body of
+water, surrounded by forests and dotted with islands. It is a famous
+haunt for trout, and those fishermen who are lucky may at t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>imes see
+scores of great beauties lying upon the bottom; or, with a good guide
+and at the right season, may be taken to places where the water is
+fairly astir with them. Fishermen who are not lucky may get their
+customary experience without travelling so far, for the route is by
+canoe, on top of nearly a thousand miles of railroading; and one mode of
+locomotion consumes nearly as much time as the other, despite the
+difference between the respective distances travelled. The speckled
+trout in the lake are locally reported to weigh from three to nine
+pounds, but the average stranger will lift in more of three pounds'
+weight than he will of nine. Yet whatever they average, the catching of
+them is prime sport as you float upon the water in your picturesque
+birch-bark canoe, with your guide paddling you noiselessly along, and
+your spoon or artificial minnow rippling through the water or glinting
+in the sunlight. You need a stout bait-rod, for the gluttonous fish are
+game, and make a good fight every time. The local fishermen catch the
+speckled beauties with an unpoetic lump of pork.</p>
+
+<p>A lively French Canadian whom I met on the cars on my way to Nepigon
+described that region as "de mos' tareeble place for de fish in all over
+de worl'." And he added another remark which had at least the same
+amount of truth at the bottom of it. Said he: "You weel find dere dose
+Mees Nancy feeshermans from der Unite State, which got dose
+hunderd-dollar poles and dose leetle humbug flies, vhich dey t'row
+around and pull 'em back again, like dey was afraid some feesh would
+bite it. Dat is all one grand stupee<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>dity. Dose man vhich belong dere put
+on de hook some pork, and catch one tareeble pile of fish. Dey don't
+give a &mdash;&mdash; about style, only to catch dose feesh."</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself on the distance he can
+cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that
+French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific
+angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while
+his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question
+"science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout
+(the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible
+that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the
+trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if
+possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of
+bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the
+Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they
+make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is
+going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal
+quantities, at the other.</p>
+
+<p>The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The
+natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece
+of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give
+them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle,
+leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the
+struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it
+is manage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>d peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water,
+making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they
+lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along
+the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the
+resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that
+it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck
+the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then
+measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above
+soundings&mdash;that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and
+their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep
+jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent
+intervals.</p>
+
+<p>The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon jack-fish, or pike. They
+haunt the grassy places in little bogs and coves, and are caught by
+trolling. A jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the famous
+guide in that country, tells of those fish of such size that when a man
+of ordinary height held the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of
+the fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsible for the further
+assertion that he saw an Indian squaw drag a net, with meshes seven
+inches square, and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more than
+fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another local historian told of a
+surveyor who caught a big jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and
+could only be dragged until its head came to the surface, when he shot
+it and it broke away&mdash;that narrative I will leave for the next New
+Yorker who goes to Nepigon. And yet it seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>s to me that such stories
+distinguish a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually caught
+there. Men would not dare to romance like that at many places I have
+fished in, where the trout are scheduled and numbered, and where you
+have got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the month to catch
+one.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack-fish. At night they use
+a bark torch, and slaughter the big fish with comparative ease; but
+their great skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when the pike
+are sunning themselves in the grass and weeds along-shore. But when I
+made my trip up the river, I saw them using so many nets as to threaten
+the early reduction of the stream to the plane of the ordinary resort.
+The water was so clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see each
+one's catch&mdash;here a half-dozen suckers, there a jack-fish, and next a
+couple of beautiful trout. Finding a squaw attending to her net, we
+bought a trout from her before we had cast a line. The habit of buying
+fish under such circumstances becomes second nature to a New Yorker. We
+are a peculiar people. Our fishermen are modest away from the city, but
+at home they assume the confident tone which comes of knowing the way to
+Fulton fish-market.</p>
+
+<p>The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and
+saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are
+records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may
+actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>urself
+seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the
+Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and
+from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay
+post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles&mdash;an old York
+boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that
+Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted
+them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you
+will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the
+Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness,
+capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are
+built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the
+bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are
+very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic
+Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into
+eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.</p>
+
+<p>There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the
+bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario
+and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the
+ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions
+were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted
+upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried
+salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to
+deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The
+open-air life, the const<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>ant and tremendous exercise of hunting or
+chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the
+camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he
+ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa
+in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At
+night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted
+ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp
+that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking
+his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I
+ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the
+artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips,
+that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's
+ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the
+same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and
+baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the <i>pi&egrave;ce de
+r&eacute;sistance</i> at every meal. I know now&mdash;though I would not have confessed
+it at the time&mdash;that mixed with admiration of salt pork was a growing
+dread that in time, if no change offered itself, I should tire of that
+diet. I began to feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the Sea
+than a brother. The woodland atmosphere began to taste of it. When I
+came in-doors it seemed to me that the log shanty was gradually turning
+into fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it felt to eat
+quail a day for thirty days. One man cannot know everything. But I felt
+that I was learning.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, and started out of
+the shanty door with an unwonted air of business.</p>
+
+<p>"Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. "Good job if get trout."</p>
+
+<p>A good job? Why the thought was like a floating spar to a sailor
+overboard! I went with him. It was a cold day, but I was dressed in
+Canadian style&mdash;the style of a country where every one puts on
+everything he owns: all his stockings at once, all his flannel shirts
+and drawers, all his coats on top of one another, and when there is
+nothing else left, draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of
+moccasins, a tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be able
+to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling with so many clothes on.
+They seem to separate you from yourself, and the person you feel inside
+your clothing might easily be mistaken for another individual. But you
+are warm, and that's the main thing.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG127" id="ILLO_PG127"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0143.jpg" width="538" height="347" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>TROUT-FISHING THROUGH THE ICE</h4>
+
+<p>I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through the deathly
+stillness of the snow-choked forest, and presently, from a knoll and
+through an opening, we saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its
+unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with balsam, and pine and
+other evergreens, it looked as though some mighty hand had squeezed a
+colossal tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. Never had I
+seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so exquisitely pure and peaceful, so
+irresistibly beautiful. I think I should have hesitated to print my
+ham-like moccasin upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>that virgin sheet had I been the guide, but
+"Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, making the powdery flakes fly before
+and behind him, and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly faded
+from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed the signs of a fox and a
+deer that had crossed during the night, so that our profanation of the
+scene was neither serious nor exclusive.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian walked to an island near the farther shore, and using his axe
+with the light, easy freedom that a white man sometimes attains with a
+penknife, he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six yards of
+fish-line in two in the middle of the piece, and tied one end of each
+part to one end of each stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a
+fastening would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to each
+fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little cube of pork fat which
+had gathered an envelope of granulated smoking-tobacco while at rest in
+his pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was a foot thick,
+and over these we stood, sticks in hand, with the lines dangling through
+the holes. Hardly had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened
+around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked to one side,
+and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It was a speckled trout. This
+surprised me, for I had no idea of catching anything but lake or gray
+trout in that water. I caught a gray trout next&mdash;a smaller one than the
+first&mdash;and in another minute I had landed another three-pound speckled
+beauty. My pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to
+fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork remained on those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> two
+hooks a week, and caught us many a mess of trout.</p>
+
+<p>There came a lull, which gave us time to philosophize on the contrast
+between this sort of fishing and the fashionable sport of using the most
+costly and delicate rods&mdash;like pieces of jewelry&mdash;and of calculating to
+a nicety what sort of flies to use in matching the changing weather of
+the varying tastes of trout in waters where even all these calculations
+and provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a day. Here I
+was, armed like an urchin beside a minnow brook, and catching bigger
+trout than I ever saw outside Fulton Market&mdash;trout of the choicest
+variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew impatient, and cut himself
+a new hole out over deep water. He caught a couple of
+two-and-a-half-pound brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was
+as well rewarded. But he was still discontented, and moved to a strait
+opening into a little bay, where he cut two more holes. "Eas' wind,"
+said he, "fish no bite."</p>
+
+<p>I found on that occasion that no quantity of clothing will keep a man
+warm in that almost arctic climate. First my hands became cold, and then
+my feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up the fishing
+holes if the water was not constantly disturbed. The thermometer must
+have registered ten or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became
+quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice that formed upon
+them. When they coiled for an instant upon the ice at the edge of a
+hole, they stuck to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting my
+free hand in my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>pocket as fast as I shifted my pole from one hand to the
+other, I managed to persist in fishing. I noticed many interesting
+things as I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless
+wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not cold, though not half so
+warmly dressed as I. The circulation or vitality of those scions of
+nature must be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed to trouble
+them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found
+and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air,
+or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log
+fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did
+not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time.
+Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill,
+bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest
+quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised
+his head to listen. "Dat squirrel," he would say, when I asked him. Or,
+"Woodcock, him calling rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very
+queer, distant, muffled sound was. "You hear dat when you walk. Keep
+still, no hear dat," he said. It was the noise the ice made when I
+moved.</p>
+
+<p>As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log jutting out over the
+edge of the lake, and looked me over. A white weasel ran about in the
+bushes so close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut shell.
+That morning some partridge had been seen feeding in the bush close to
+members of our party. It was a country where small game is not hunted,
+and does not always h<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>ide at a man's approach. We had left our fish lying
+on the ice near the various holes from which we pulled them, and I
+thought of them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying out in
+their hoarse tones. They were sure to see the fish dotting the snow like
+raisins in a bowl of rice.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't they steal the fish?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"T'ink not," said the Indian.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything about ravens," I said, "but if they are even
+distantly related to a crow, they will steal whatever they can lift."</p>
+
+<p>We could not see our fish around the bend of the lake, so the Indian
+dropped his rod and walked stolidly after the birds. As soon as he
+passed out of sight I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were
+unruly children.</p>
+
+<p>"'Way, there!" he cried&mdash;"'way! Leave dat fish, you. What you do dere,
+you t'ief?"</p>
+
+<p>It was an outcropping of the French blood in his veins that made it
+possible for him to do such violence to Indian reticence. The birds had
+seen our fish, and were about to seize them. Only the foolish bird
+tradition that renders it necessary for everything with wings to circle
+precisely so many times over its prey before taking it saved us our game
+and lost them their dinner. They had not completed half their quota of
+circles when Brossy began to yell at them. When he returned his brain
+had awakened, and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. He said
+that the lumbermen in that country pack their dinners in canvas sacks
+and hide them in the snow. Often the ra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>vens come, and, searching out
+this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. I bade good-bye
+to pork three times a day after that. At least twice a day we feasted
+upon trout.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_SIX" id="CHAPTER_SIX"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>"A SKIN FOR A SKIN"</h3>
+
+<h4>The motto of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>hose who go to the newer parts of Canada to-day will find that several
+of those places which their school geographies displayed as Hudson Bay
+posts a few years ago are now towns and cities. In them they will find
+the trading stations of old now transformed into general stores.
+Alongside of the Canadian headquarters of the great corporation, where
+used to stand the walls of Fort Garry, they will see the principal store
+of the city of Winnipeg, an institution worthy of any city, and more
+nearly to be likened to Whiteley's Necessary Store in London than to any
+shopping-place in New York. As in Whiteley's you may buy a house, or
+anything belonging in or around a house, so you may in this great
+Manitoban establishment. The great retail emporium of Victoria, the
+capital of British Columbia, is the Hudson Bay store; and in Calgary,
+the metropolis of Alberta and the Canadian plains, the principal
+shopping-place in a territory beside which Texas dwindles to the
+proportions of a park is the Hudson Bay store.</p>
+
+<p>These and many other shops indicate a new development of the business of
+the last of England's great chartered monopolies, but instead of marking
+the manner in which civilization has forced it to abandon its original
+function, this merely demonstrates that the proprietors h<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>ave taken
+advantage of new conditions while still pursuing their original trade.
+It is true that the huge corporation is becoming a great retail
+shop-keeping company. It is also true that by the surrender of its
+monopolistic privileges it got a consolation prize of money and of
+twenty millions of dollars' worth of land, so that its chief business
+may yet become that of developing and selling real estate. But to-day it
+is still, as it was two centuries ago, the greatest of fur-trading
+corporations, and fur-trading is to-day a principal source of its
+profits.</p>
+
+<p>Reminders of their old associations as forts still confront the visitor
+to the modern city shops of the company. The great shop in Victoria, for
+instance, which, as a fort, was the hub around which grew the wheel that
+is now the capital of the province, has its fur trade conducted in a
+sort of barn-like annex of the bazaar; but there it is, nevertheless,
+and busy among the great heaps of furs are men who can remember when the
+Hydahs and the T'linkets and the other neighboring tribes came down in
+their war canoes to trade their winter's catch of skins for guns and
+beads, vermilion, blankets, and the rest. Now this is the mere catch-all
+for the furs got at posts farther up the coast and in the interior. But
+upstairs, above the store, where the fashionable ladies are looking over
+laces and purchasing perfumes, you will see a collection of queer old
+guns of a pattern familiar to Daniel Boone. They are relics of the fur
+company's stock of those famous "trade-guns" which disappeared long
+before they had cleared the plains of buffalo, and which the Indians
+used to deck with brass nails and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>bright paint, and value as no man
+to-day values a watch. But close to the trade-guns of romantic memory is
+something yet more highly suggestive of the company's former position.
+This is a heap of unclaimed trunks, "left," the employ&eacute;s will tell you,
+"by travellers, hunters, and explorers who never came back to inquire
+for them."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG137" id="ILLO_PG137"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0153.jpg" width="697" height="405" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>RIVAL TRADERS RACING TO THE INDIAN CAMP</h4>
+
+<p>It was not long ago that conditions existed such as in that region
+rendered the disappearance of a traveller more than a possibility. The
+wretched, squat, bow-legged, dirty laborers of that coast, who now dress
+as we do, and earn good wages in the salmon-fishing and canning
+industries, were not long ago very numerous, and still more villanous.
+They were not to be compared with the plains Indians as warriors or as
+men, but they were more treacherous, and wanting in high qualities. In
+the interior to-day are some Indians such as they were who are accused
+of cannibalism, and who have necessitated warlike defences at distant
+trading-posts. Travellers who escaped Indian treachery risked
+starvation, and stood their chances of losing their reckoning, of
+freezing to death, of encounters with grizzlies, of snow-slides, of
+canoe accidents in rapids, and of all the other casualties of life in a
+territory which to-day is not half explored. Those are not the trunks of
+Hudson Bay men, for such would have been sent home to English and
+Scottish mourners; they are the luggage of chance men who happened
+along, and outfitted at the old post before going farther. But the
+company's men were there before them, had penetrated the region
+farther and earlier, and there they are to-day, carrying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> on the fur
+trade under conditions strongly resembling those their predecessors once
+encountered at posts that are now towns in farming regions, and where
+now the locomotive and the steamer are familiar vehicles. Moreover, the
+status of the company in British Columbia is its status all the way
+across the North from the Pacific to the Atlantic.</p>
+
+<p>To me the most interesting and picturesque life to be found in North
+America, at least north of Mexico, is that which is occasioned by this
+principal phase of the company's operations. In and around the fur trade
+is found the most notable relic of the white man's earliest life on this
+continent. Our wild life in this country is, happily, gone. The
+frontiersman is more difficult to find than the frontier, the cowboy has
+become a laborer almost like any other, our Indians are as the animals
+in our parks, and there is little of our country that is not threaded by
+railroads or wagon-ways. But in new or western Canada this is not so. A
+vast extent of it north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which hugs our
+border, has been explored only as to its waterways, its valleys, or its
+open plains, and where it has been traversed much of it remains as
+Nature and her near of kin, the red men, had it of old. On the streams
+canoes are the vehicles of travel and of commerce; in the forests
+"trails" lead from trading-post to trading-post, the people are Indians,
+half-breeds, and Esquimaux, who live by hunting and fishing as their
+forebears did; the Hudson Bay posts are the seats of white population;
+the post factors are the magistrates.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span></p>
+<p>All this is changing with a rapidity which history will liken to the
+sliding of scenes before the lens of a magic-lantern. Miners are
+crushing the foot-hills on either side of the Rocky Mountains, farmers
+and cattle-men have advanced far northward on the prairie and on the
+plains in narrow lines, and railroads are pushing hither and thither.
+Soon the limits of the inhospitable zone this side of the Arctic Sea,
+and of the marshy, weakly-wooded country on either side of Hudson Bay
+will circumscribe the fur-trader's field, except in so far as there may
+remain equally permanent hunting-grounds in Labrador and in the
+mountains of British Columbia. Therefore now, when the Hudson Bay
+Company is laying the foundations of widely different interests, is the
+time for halting the old original view that stood in the stereopticon
+for centuries, that we may see what it revealed, and will still show far
+longer than it takes for us to view it.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson Bay Company's agents were not the first hunters and
+fur-traders in British America, ancient as was their foundation. The
+French, from the Canadas, preceded them no one knows how many years,
+though it is said that it was as early as 1627 that Louis XIII.
+chartered a company of the same sort and for the same aims as the
+English company. Whatever came of that corporation I do not know, but by
+the time the Englishmen established themselves on Hudson Bay, individual
+Frenchmen and half-breeds had penetrated the country still farther west.
+They were of hardy, adventurous stock, and they loved the free roving
+life of the trapper and hunter. Fitted out by the merchants of Canada,
+they would pursue the w<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>aterways which there cut up the wilderness in
+every direction, their canoes laden with goods to tempt the savages, and
+their guns or traps forming part of their burden. They would be gone the
+greater part of a year, and always returned with a store of furs to be
+converted into money, which was, in turn, dissipated in the cities with
+devil-may-care jollity. These were the <i>coureurs du bois</i>, and theirs
+was the stock from which came the <i>voyageurs</i> of the next era, and the
+half-breeds, who joined the service of the rival fur companies, and who,
+by-the-way, reddened the history of the North-west territories with the
+little bloodshed that mars it.</p>
+
+<p>Charles II. of England was made to believe that wonders in the way of
+discovery and trade would result from a grant of the Hudson Bay
+territory to certain friends and petitioners. An experimental voyage was
+made with good results in 1668, and in 1670 the King granted the charter
+to what he styled "the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England
+trading into Hudson's Bay, one body corporate and politique, in deed and
+in name, really and fully forever, for Us, Our heirs, and Successors."
+It was indeed a royal and a wholesale charter, for the King declared,
+"We have given, granted, and confirmed unto said Governor and Company
+sole trade and commerce of those Seas, Streights, Bays, Rivers, Lakes,
+Creeks, and Sounds, in whatsoever latitude they shall be, that lie
+within the entrance of the Streights commonly called Hudson's, together
+with all the Lands, Countries, and Territories upon the coasts and
+confines of the Seas, etc., . . . not already actually possess<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>ed by or
+granted to any of our subjects, or possessed by the subjects of any
+other Christian Prince or State, with the fishing of all sorts of Fish,
+Whales, Sturgeons, and all other Royal Fishes, . . . . together with the
+Royalty of the Sea upon the Coasts within the limits aforesaid, and all
+Mines Royal, as well discovered as not discovered, of Gold, Silver,
+Gems, and Precious Stones, . . . . and that the said lands be henceforth
+reckoned and reputed as one of Our Plantations or Colonies in America
+called Rupert's Land." For this gift of an empire the corporation was to
+pay yearly to the king, his heirs and successors, two elks and two black
+beavers whenever and as often as he, his heirs, or his successors "shall
+happen to enter into the said countries." The company was empowered to
+man ships of war, to create an armed force for security and defence, to
+make peace or war with any people that were not Christians, and to seize
+any British or other subject who traded in their territory. The King
+named his cousin, Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, to be first
+governor, and it was in his honor that the new territory got its name of
+Rupert's Land.</p>
+
+<p>In the company were the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lords Arlington
+and Ashley, and several knights and baronets, Sir Philip Carteret among
+them. There were also five esquires, or gentlemen, and John Portman,
+"citizen and goldsmith." They adopted the witty sentence, "<i>Pro pelle
+cutem</i>" (A skin for a skin), as their motto, and established as their
+coat of arms a fox sejant as the crest, and a shield showing four
+beavers in the quarters, and the cross of St.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> George, the whole upheld
+by two stags.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG143" id="ILLO_PG143"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0159.jpg" width="390" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE BEAR TRAP</h4>
+
+<p>The "adventurers" quickly established forts on the shores of Hudson Bay,
+and began trading with the Indians, with such success that it was
+rumored they made from twenty-five to fifty per cent. profit every year.
+But they exhibited all of that timidity which capital is ever said to
+possess. They were nothing like as enterprising as the French <i>coureurs
+du bois</i>. In a hundred years they were no deeper in the country then at
+first, excepting as they extended their little system of f<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>orts or
+"factories" up and down and on either side of Hudson and James bays. In
+view of their profits, perhaps this lack of enterprise is not to be
+wondered at. On the other hand, their charter was given as a reward for
+the efforts they had made, and were to make, to find "the Northwest
+passage to the Southern seas." In this quest they made less of a trial
+than in the getting of furs; how much less we shall see. But the company
+had no lack of brave and hardy followers. At first many of the men at
+the factories were from the Orkney Islands, and those islands remained
+until recent times the recruiting-source for this service. This was
+because the Orkney men were inured to a rigorous climate, and to a diet
+largely composed of fish. They were subject to less of a change in the
+company's service than must have been endured by men from almost any
+part of England.</p>
+
+<p>I am going, later, to ask the reader to visit Rupert's Land when the
+company had shaken off its timidity, overcome its obstacles, and dotted
+all British America with its posts and forts. Then we shall see the
+interiors of the forts, view the strange yet not always hard or uncouth
+life of the company's factors and clerks, and glance along the trails
+and watercourses, mainly unchanged to-day, to note the work and
+surroundings of the Indians, the <i>voyageurs</i>, and the rest who inhabit
+that region. But, fortunately, I can first show, at least roughly, much
+that is interesting about the company's growth and methods a century and
+a half ago. The information is gotten from some English Parliamentary
+papers forming a report of a committee of the H<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>ouse of Commons in 1749.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur Dobbs and others petitioned Parliament to give them either the
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company or a similar charter. It seems that
+England had offered &pound;20,000 reward to whosoever should find the
+bothersome passage to the Southern seas <i>vi&acirc;</i> this northern route, and
+that these petitioners had sent out two ships for that purpose. They
+said that when others had done no more than this in Charles II.'s time,
+that monarch had given them "the greatest privileges as lords
+proprietors" of the Hudson Bay territory, and that those recipients of
+royal favor were bounden to attempt the discovery of the desired
+passage. Instead of this, they not only failed to search effectually or
+in earnest for the passage, but they had rather endeavored to conceal
+the same, and to obstruct the discovery thereof by others. They had not
+possessed or occupied any of the lands granted to them, or extended
+their trade, or made any plantations or settlements, or permitted other
+British subjects to plant, settle, or trade there. They had established
+only four factories and one small trading-house; yet they had connived
+at or allowed the French to encroach, settle, and trade within their
+limits, to the great detriment and loss of Great Britain. The
+petitioners argued that the Hudson Bay charter was monopolistic, and
+therefore void, and at any rate it had been forfeited "by non-user or
+abuser."</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the hearing upon both sides, the "voyages upon
+discovery," according to the company's own showing, were not undertaken
+until the corporation had been in exis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>tence nearly fifty years, and then
+the search had only been prosecuted during eighteen years, and with only
+ten expeditions. Two ships sent out from England never reached the bay,
+but those which succeeded, and were then ready for adventurous cruising,
+made exploratory voyages that lasted only between one month and ten
+weeks, so that, as we are accustomed to judge such expeditions, they
+seem farcical and mere pretences. Yet their largest ship was only of 190
+tons burden, and the others were a third smaller&mdash;vessels like our small
+coasting schooners. The most particular instructions to the captains
+were to trade with all natives, and persuade them to kill whales,
+sea-horses, and seals; and, subordinately and incidentally, "by God's
+permission," to find out the Strait of Annian, a fanciful sheet of
+water, with tales of which that irresponsible Greek sea-tramp, Juan de
+Fuca, had disturbed all Christendom, saying that it led between a great
+island in the Pacific (Vancouver) and the main-land into the inland
+lakes. To the factors at their forts the company sent such lukewarm
+messages as, "and if you can by any means find out any discovery or
+matter to the northward or elsewhere in the company's interest or
+advantage, do not fail to let us know every year."</p>
+
+<p>The attitude of the company towards discovery suggests a Dogberry at its
+head, bidding his servants to "comprehend" the North-west passage, but
+should they fail, to thank God they were rid of a villain. In truth,
+they were traders pure and simple, and were making great profits with
+little trouble and expense.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span></p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG147" id="ILLO_PG147"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0163.jpg" width="487" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>HUSKIE DOGS FIGHTING</h4>
+
+<p>They brought from England about &pound;4000 worth of powder, shot, guns,
+fire-steels, flints, gun-worms, powder-horns, pistols, hatchets, sword
+blades, awl blades, ice-chisels, files, kettles, fish-hooks, net-lines,
+burning-glasses, looking-glasses, tobacco, brandy, goggles, gloves,
+hats, lace, needles, thread, thimbles, breeches, vermilion, worsted
+sashes, blankets, flannels, red feathers, buttons, beads, and "shirts,
+shoes, and stockens." They spent, in keeping up their posts and ships,
+about &pound;15,000, and in return they brought to England castor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>um,
+whale-fins, whale-oil, deer-horns, goose-quills, bed-feathers, and
+skins&mdash;in all of a value of about &pound;26,000 per annum. I have taken the
+average for several years in that period of the company's history, and
+it is in our money as if they spent $90,000 and got back $130,000, and
+this is their own showing under such circumstances as to make it the
+course of wisdom not to boast of their profits. They had three times
+trebled their stock and otherwise increased it, so that having been
+10,500 shares at the outset, it was now 103,950 shares.</p>
+
+<p>And now that we have seen how natural it was that they should not then
+bother with exploration and discovery, in view of the remuneration that
+came for simply sitting in their forts and buying furs, let me pause to
+repeat what one of their wisest men said casually, between the whiffs of
+a meditative cigar, last summer: "The search for the north pole must
+soon be taken up in earnest," said he. "Man has paused in the
+undertaking because other fields where his needs were more pressing, and
+where effort was more certain to be rewarded with success, had been
+neglected. This is no longer the fact, and geographers and other
+students of the subject all agree that the north pole must next be
+sought and found. Speaking only on my own account and from my knowledge,
+I assert that whenever any government is in earnest in this desire, it
+will employ the men of this fur service, and they will find the pole.
+The company has posts far within the arctic circle, and they are manned
+by men peculiarly and exactly fitted for the adventure. They are hardy,
+acutely intelligent, self-reliant, accus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>tomed to the climate, and all
+that it engenders and demands. They are on the spot ready to start at
+the earliest moment in the season, and they have with them all that they
+will need on the expedition. They would do nothing hurriedly or rashly;
+they would know what they were about as no other white men would&mdash;and
+they would get there."</p>
+
+<p>I mention this not merely for the novelty of the suggestion and the
+interest it may excite, but because it contributes to the reader's
+understanding of the scope and character of the work of the company. It
+is not merely Western and among Indians, it is hyperborean and among
+Esquimaux. But would it not be passing strange if, beyond all that
+England has gained from the careless gift of an empire to a few
+favorites by Charles II., she should yet possess the honor and glory of
+a grand discovery due to the natural results of that action?</p>
+
+<p>To return to the Parliamentary inquiry into the company's affairs 140
+years ago. If it served no other purpose, it drew for us of this day an
+outline picture of the first forts and their inmates and customs. Being
+printed in the form our language took in that day, when a gun was a
+"musquet" and a stockade was a "palisadoe," we fancy we can see the
+bumptious governors&mdash;as they then called the factors or agents&mdash;swelling
+about in knee-breeches and cocked hats and colored waistcoats, and
+relying, through their fear of the savages, upon the little putty-pipe
+cannon that they speak of as "swivels." These were ostentatiously
+planted before their quarters, and in f<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>ront of these again were massive
+double doors, such as we still make of steel for our bank safes, but,
+when made of wood, use only for our refrigerators. The views we get of
+the company's "servants"&mdash;which is to say, mechanics and laborers&mdash;are
+all of trembling varlets, and the testimony is full of hints of petty
+sharp practice towards the red man, suggestive of the artful ways of our
+own Hollanders, who bought beaver-skins by the weight of their feet, and
+then pressed down upon the scales with all their might.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG151" id="ILLO_PG151"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0167.jpg" width="485" height="316" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>PAINTING THE ROBE</h4>
+
+<p>The witnesses had mainly been at one time in the employ of the company,
+and they made the point against it that it imported all its bread (<i>i.
+e.</i>, grain) from England, and neither encouraged planting nor cultivated
+the soil for itself. But there were several who said that even in August
+they found the soil still frozen at a depth of two and a half or three
+feet. Not a man in the service was allowed to trade with the natives
+outside the forts, or even to speak with them. One fellow was put in
+irons for going into an Indian's tent; and there was a witness who had
+"heard a Governor say he would whip a Man without Tryal; and that the
+severest Punishment is a Dozen of Lashes." Of course there was no
+instructing the savages in either English or the Christian religion; and
+we read that, though there were twenty-eight Europeans in one factory,
+"witness never heard Sermon or Prayers there, nor ever heard of any such
+Thing either before his Time or since." Hunters who offered their
+services got one-half what they shot or trapped, and the captains of
+vessels kept in the bay were al<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>lowed. "25 <i>l. per cent.</i>" for all the
+whalebone they got.</p>
+
+<p>One witness said: "The method of trade is by a standard set by the
+Governors. They never lower it, but often double it, so that where the
+Standard directs 1 Skin to be taken they generally take Two." Another
+said he "had been ordered to shorten the measure for Powder, which ought
+to be a Pound, and that within these 10 Years had been reduced an Ounce
+or Two." "The Indians made a Noise sometimes, and the Company gave them
+their Furs again." A book-keeper lately in the service said that the
+company's measures for powder were short, and yet even such measures
+were not filled above half full. Profits thus made were distinguished as
+"the overplus trade," and signified what skins were got more than were
+paid for, but he could not say whether such gains went to the company or
+to the governor. (As a matter of fact, the factors or governors shared
+in the company's profits, and were interested in swelling them in every
+way they could.)</p>
+
+<p>There was much news of how the French traders got the small furs of
+martens, foxes, and cats, by intercepting the Indians, and leaving them
+to carry only the coarse furs to the company's forts. A witness "had
+seen the Indians come down in fine <i>French</i> cloaths, with as much Lace
+as he ever saw upon any Cloaths whatsoever. He believed if the Company
+would give as much for the Furs as the <i>French</i>, the <i>Indians</i> would
+bring them down;" but the French asked only thirty marten-skins for a
+gun, whereas the company's standard was from thirty-six to forty such
+skins. Then,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> again, the company's plan (unchanged to-day) was to take
+the Indian's furs, and then, being possessed of them, to begin the
+barter.</p>
+
+<p>This shouldering the common grief upon the French was not merely the
+result of the chronic English antipathy to their ancient and their
+lively foes. The French were swarming all around the outer limits of the
+company's field, taking first choice of the furs, and even beginning to
+set up posts of their own. Canada was French soil, and peopled by as
+hardy and adventurous a class as inhabited any part of America. The
+<i>coureurs du bois</i> and the <i>bois-br&ucirc;l&eacute;s</i> (half-breeds), whose success
+afterwards led to the formation of rival companies, had begun a mosquito
+warfare, by canoeing the waters that led to Hudson Bay, and had
+penetrated 1000 miles farther west than the English. One Thomas Barnett,
+a smith, said that the French intercepted the Indians, forcing them to
+trade, "when they take what they please, giving them Toys in Exchange;
+and fright them into Compliance by Tricks of Sleight of Hand; from
+whence the <i>Indians</i> conclude them to be Conjurers; and if the <i>French</i>
+did not compel the <i>Indians</i> to trade, they would certainly bring all
+the Goods to the <i>English</i>."</p>
+
+<p>This must have seemed to the direct, practical English trading mind a
+wretched business, and worthy only of Johnny Crapeau, to worst the noble
+Briton by monkeyish acts of conjuring. It stirred the soul of one
+witness, who said that the way to meet it was "by sending some <i>English</i>
+with a little Brandy." A gallon to certain chiefs and a gallon and a
+half to others would c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>ertainly induce the natives to come down and
+trade, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>But while the testimony of the English was valuable as far as it went,
+which was mainly concerning trade, it was as nothing regarding the life
+of the natives compared with that of one Joseph La France, of
+Missili-Mackinack (Mackinaw), a traveller, hunter, and trader. He had
+been sent as a child to Quebec to learn French, and in later years had
+been from Lake Nipissing to Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes, the
+Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ouinipigue (Winnipeg) or Red River, and
+to Hudson Bay. He told his tales to Arthur Dobbs, who made a book of
+them, and part of that became an appendix to the committee's report. La
+France said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"That the high price on <i>European</i> Goods discourages the Natives
+so much, that if it were not that they are under a Necessity of
+having Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets, and other Iron Tools for
+their Hunting, and Tobacco, Brandy, and some Paint for Luxury,
+they would not go down to the Factory with what they now carry.
+They leave great numbers of Furs and Skins behind them. A good
+Hunter among the <i>Indians</i> can kill 600 Beavers in a season, and
+carry down but 100" (because their canoes were small); "the rest
+he uses at home, or hangs them upon Branches of Trees upon the
+Death of their Children, as an Offering to them; or use them for
+Bedding and Coverings: they sometimes burn off the Fur, and
+roast the Beavers, like Pigs, upon any Entertainments; and they
+often let them rot, having no further Use of them. The Beavers,
+he says, are of Three Colours&mdash;the Brown-reddish Colour, the
+Black, and the White. The Black is most valued by the Company,
+and in <i>England</i>; the White, though most valued in <i>Canada</i>, is
+blown upon by the Company's Factors at the Bay, they not
+allowing so much for these as for the others; and therefore the
+<i>Indians</i> use them at home, or burn off the Hair, when they
+roast the Beavers, like Pigs, at an Entertainment when they
+feast together. The Beavers are delicious Food, but the Tongue
+and Tail the most delicious Parts of the whole. They mu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>ltiply
+very fast, and if they can empty a Pond, and take the whole
+Lodge, they generally leave a Pair to breed, so that they are
+fully stocked again in Two or Three Years. The <i>American</i> Oxen,
+or Beeves, he says, have a large Bunch upon their backs, which
+is by far the most delicious Part of them for Food, it being all
+as sweet as Marrow, juicy and rich, and weighs several Pounds.</p>
+
+<p>"The Natives are so discouraged in their Trade with the Company
+that no Peltry is worth the Carriage; and the finest Furs are
+sold for very little. They gave but a Pound of Gunpowder for 4
+Beavers, a Fathom of Tobacco for 7 Beavers, a Pound of Shot for
+1, an Ell of coarse Cloth for 15, a Blanket for 12, Two
+Fish-hooks or Three Flints for 1; a Gun for 25, a Pistol for 10,
+a common Hat with white Lace, 7; an Ax, 4; a Billhook, 1; a
+Gallon of Brandy, 4; a chequer'd Shirt, 7; all of which are sold
+at a monstrous Profit, even to 2000 <i>per Cent</i>. Notwithstanding
+this discouragement, he computed that there were brought to the
+Factory in 1742, in all, 50,000 Beavers and above 9000 Martens.</p>
+
+<p>"The smaller Game, got by Traps or Snares, are generally the
+Employment of the Women and Children; such as the Martens,
+Squirrels, Cats, Ermines, &amp;c. The Elks, Stags, Rein-Deer, Bears,
+Tygers, wild Beeves, Wolves, Foxes, Beavers, Otters, Corcajeu,
+&amp;c., are the employment of the Men. The <i>Indians</i>, when they
+kill any Game for Food, leave it where they kill it, and send
+their wives next Day to carry it home. They go home in a direct
+Line, never missing their way, by observations they make of the
+Course they take upon their going out. The Trees all bend
+towards the South, and the Branches on that Side are larger and
+stronger than on the North Side; as also the Moss upon the
+Trees. To let their Wives know how to come at the killed Game,
+they from Place to Place break off Branches and lay them in the
+Road, pointing them the Way they should go, and sometimes Moss;
+so that they never miss finding it.</p>
+
+<p>"In Winter, when they go abroad, which they must do in all
+Weathers, before they dress, they rub themselves all over with
+Bears Greaze or Oil of Beavers, which does not freeze; and also
+rub all the Fur of their Beaver Coats, and then put them on;
+they have also a kind of Boots or Stockings of Beaver's Skin,
+well oiled, with the Fur inwards; and above them they have an
+oiled Skin laced about their Feet, which keeps out the Cold, and
+also Water; and by this means they never freeze, nor suffer
+anything by Cold. In Summer, also, when they go naked, they rub
+themselves with these Oils or Grease, and expose themselves to
+the Sun without being scorched, their Skins always being kept
+soft and supple by it; nor do a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>ny Flies, Bugs, or Musketoes, or
+any noxious Insect, ever molest them. When they want to get rid
+of it, they go into the Water, and rub themselves all over with
+Mud or Clay, and let it dry upon them, and then rub it off; but
+whenever they are free from the Oil, the Flies and Musketoes
+immediately attack them, and oblige them again to anoint
+themselves. They are much afraid of the wild Humble Bee, they
+going naked in Summer, that they avoid them as much as they can.
+They use no Milk from the time they are weaned, and they all
+hate to taste Cheese, having taken up an Opinion that it is made
+of Dead Men's Fat. They love Prunes and Raisins, and will give a
+Beaver-skin for Twelve of them, to carry to their Children; and
+also for a Trump or Jew's Harp. The Women have all fine Voices,
+but have never heard any Musical Instrument. They are very fond
+of all Kinds of Pictures or Prints, giving a Beaver for the
+least Print; and all Toys are like Jewels to them."</p></div>
+
+<p>He reported that "the <i>Indians</i> west of Hudson's Bay live an erratic
+Life, and can have no Benefit by tame Fowl or Cattle. They seldom stay
+above a Fortnight in a Place, unless they find Plenty of Game. After
+having built their Hut, they disperse to get Game for their Food, and
+meet again at Night after having killed enough to maintain them for that
+Day. When they find Scarcity of Game, they remove a League or Two
+farther; and thus they traverse through woody Countries and Bogs, scarce
+missing One Day, Winter or Summer, fair or foul, in the greatest Storms
+of Snow."</p>
+
+<p>It has been often said that the great Peace River, which rises in
+British Columbia and flows through a pass in the Rocky Mountains into
+the northern plains, was named "the Unchaga," or Peace, "because" (to
+quote Captain W. F. Butler) "of the stubborn resistance offered by the
+all-conquering Crees, which induced that warlike tribe to make peace on
+the banks of the river, and leave at rest the beaver-hunters"&mdash;that is,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+the Beaver tribe&mdash;upon the river's banks. There is a sentence in La
+France's story that intimates a more probable and lasting reason for the
+name. He says that some Indians in the southern centre of Canada sent
+frequently to the Indians along some river near the mountains "with
+presents, to confirm the peace with them." The story is shadowy, of
+course, and yet La France, in the same narrative, gave other information
+which proved to be correct, and none which proved ridiculous. We know
+that there were "all-conquering" Crees, but there were also inferior
+ones called the Swampies, and there were others of only intermediate
+valor. As for the Beavers, Captain Butler himself offers other proof of
+their mettle besides their "stubborn resistance." He says that on one
+occasion a young Beaver chief shot the dog of another brave in the
+Beaver camp. A hundred bows were instantly drawn, and ere night eighty
+of the best men of the tribe lay dead. There was a parley, and it was
+resolved that the chief who slew the dog should leave the tribe, and
+take his friends with him. A century later a Beaver Indian, travelling
+with a white man, heard his own tongue spoken by men among the Blackfeet
+near our border. They were the Sarcis, descendants of the exiled band of
+Beavers. They had become the must reckless and valorous members of the
+warlike Blackfeet confederacy.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG159" id="ILLO_PG159"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0175.jpg" width="316" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>COUREUR DU BOIS</h4>
+
+<p>La France said that the nations who "go up the river" with presents, to
+confirm the peace with certain Indians, were three months in going, and
+that the Indians in question live beyond a range of mountains beyond
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>Assiniboins (a plains tribe). Then he goes on to say that still
+farther beyond those Indians "are nations who have not the use of
+firearms, by which many of them are made slaves and sold"&mdash;to the
+Assiniboins and others. These are plainly the Pacific coast Indians. And
+even so long ago as that (about 1740), half a century before Mackenzie
+and Vancouver met on the Pacific coast, La France had told the story o<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>f
+an Indian who had gone at the head of a band of thirty braves and their
+families to make war on the Flatheads "on the Western Ocean of America."
+They were from autumn until the next April in making the journey, and
+they "saw many Black Fish spouting up in the sea." It was a case of what
+the Irish call "spoiling for a fight," for they had to journey 1500
+miles to meet "enemies" whom they never had seen, and who were peaceful,
+and inhabited more or less permanent villages. The plainsmen got more
+than they sought. They attacked a village, were outnumbered, and lost
+half their force, besides having several of their men wounded. On the
+way back all except the man who told the story died of fatigue and
+famine.</p>
+
+<p>The journeys which Indians made in their wildest period were tremendous.
+Far up in the wilderness of British America there are legends of visits
+by the Iroquois. The Blackfeet believe that their progenitors roamed as
+far south as Mexico for horses, and the Crees of the plains evinced a
+correct knowledge of the country that lay beyond the Rocky Mountains in
+their conversations with the first whites who traded with them. Yet
+those white men, the founders of an organized fur trade, clung to the
+scene of their first operations for more than one hundred years, while
+the bravest of their more enterprising rivals in the Northwest Company
+only reached the Pacific, with the aid of eight Iroquois braves, 120
+years after the English king chartered the senior company! The French
+were the true Yankees of that country. They and their half-breeds were
+always in the van as explorers and tra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>ders, and as early as 1731 M.
+Varennes de la Verandrye, licensed by the Canadian Government as a
+trader, penetrated the West as far as the Rockies, leading Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie to that extent by more than sixty years.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the first serious trouble the Hudson Bay Company met.
+The investigation of its affairs by Parliament produced nothing more
+than the picture I have presented. The committee reported that if the
+original charter bred a monopoly, it would not help matters to give the
+same privileges to others. As the questioned legality of the charter was
+not competently adjudicated upon, they would not allow another company
+to invade the premises of the older one.</p>
+
+<p>At this time the great company still hugged the shores of the bay,
+fearing the Indians, the half-breeds, and the French. Their posts were
+only six in all, and were mainly fortified with palisaded enclosures,
+with howitzers and swivels, and with men trained to the use of guns.
+Moose Fort and the East Main factory were on either side of James Bay,
+Forts Albany, York, and Prince of Wales followed up the west coast, and
+Henley was the southernmost and most inland of all, being on Moose
+River, a tributary of James Bay. The French at first traded beyond the
+field of Hudson Bay operations, and their castles were their canoes. But
+when their great profits and familiarity with the trade tempted the
+thrifty French capitalists and enterprising Scotch merchants of Montreal
+into the formation of the rival Northwest Trading Company in 1783,
+fixed trading-posts began to be establish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>ed all over the Prince Rupert's
+Land, and even beyond the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia. By 1818
+there were about forty Northwest posts as against about two dozen Hudson
+Bay factories. The new company not only disputed but ignored the
+chartered rights of the old company, holding that the charter had not
+been sanctioned by Parliament, and was in every way unconstitutional as
+creative of a monopoly. Their French partners and <i>engag&eacute;s</i> shared this
+feeling, especially as the French crown had been first in the field with
+a royal charter. Growing bolder and bolder, the Northwest Company
+resolved to drive the Hudson Bay Company to a legal test of their
+rights, and so in 1803-4 they established a Northwest fort under the
+eyes of the old company on the shores of Hudson Bay, and fitted out
+ships to trade with the natives in the strait. But the Englishmen did
+not accept the challenge; for the truth was they had their own doubts of
+the strength of their charter.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG163" id="ILLO_PG163"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0179.jpg" width="696" height="410" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A FUR-TRADER IN THE COUNCIL TEPEE</h4>
+
+<p>They pursued a different and for them an equally bold course. That
+hard-headed old nobleman the fifth Earl of Selkirk came uppermost in the
+company as the engineer of a plan of colonization. There was plenty of
+land, and some wholesale evictions of Highlanders in Sutherlandshire,
+Scotland, had rendered a great force of hardy men homeless. Selkirk saw
+in this situation a chance to play a long but certainly triumphant game
+with his rivals. His plan was to plant a colony which should produce
+grain and horses and men for the old company, saving the importation
+of all three, and building up not only a nursery for men to match th<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>e
+<i>coureurs du bois</i>, but a stronghold and a seat of a future government
+in the Hudson Bay interest. Thus was ushered in a new and important era
+in Canadian history. It was the opening of that part of Canada; by a
+loop-hole rather than a door, to be sure.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Selkirk's was a practical soul. On one occasion in animadverting
+against the Northwest Company he spoke of them contemptuously as
+fur-traders, yet he was the chief of all fur-traders, and had been known
+to barter with an Indian himself at one of the forts for a fur. He held
+up the opposition to the scorn of the world as profiting upon the
+weakness of the Indians by giving them alcohol, yet he ordered
+distilleries set up in his colony afterwards, saying, "We grant the
+trade is iniquitous, but if we don't carry it on others will; so we may
+as well put the guineas in our own pockets." But he was the man of the
+moment, if not for it. His scheme of colonization was born of
+desperation on one side and distress on the other. It was pursued amid
+terrible hardship, and against incessant violence. It was consummated
+through bloodshed. The story is as interesting as it is important. The
+facts are obtained mainly from "Papers relating to the Red River
+Settlement, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, July 12,
+1819." Lord Selkirk owned 40,000 of the &pound;105,000 (or shares) of the
+Hudson Bay Company; therefore, since 25,000 were held by women and
+children, he held half of all that carried votes. He got from the
+company a grant of a large tract around what is now Winnipeg, to form
+an agricultural se<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>ttlement for supplying the company's posts with
+provisions. We have seen how little disposed its officers were to open
+the land to settlers, or to test its agricultural capacities. No one,
+therefore, will wonder that when this grant was made several members of
+the governing committee resigned. But a queer development of the moment
+was a strong opposition from holders of Hudson Bay stock who were also
+owners in that company's great rival, the Northwest Company. Since the
+enemy persisted in prospering at the expense of the old company, the
+moneyed men of the senior corporation had taken stock of their rivals.
+These doubly interested persons were also in London, so that the
+Northwest Company was no longer purely Canadian. The opponents within
+the Hudson Bay Company declared civilization to be at all times
+unfavorable to the fur trade, and the Northwest people argued that the
+colony would form a nursery for servants of the Bay Company, enabling
+them to oppose the Northwest Company more effectually, as well as
+affording such facilities for new-comers as must destroy their own
+monopoly. The Northwest Company denied the legality of the charter
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company because Parliament had not confirmed
+Charles II.'s charter.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG167" id="ILLO_PG167"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0183.jpg" width="614" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>BUFFALO MEAT FOR THE POST</h4>
+
+<p>The colonists came, and were met by Miles McDonnell, an ex-captain of
+Canadian volunteers, as Lord Selkirk's agent. The immigrants landed on
+the shore of Hudson Bay, and passed a forlorn winter. They met some of
+the Northwest Company's people under Alexander McDonnell, a cousin
+and brother-in-law to Miles Mc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>Donnell. Although Captain Miles read the
+grant to Selkirk in token of his sole right to the land, the settlers
+were hospitably received and well treated by the Northwest people. The
+settlers reached the place of colonization in August, 1812. This place
+is what was known as Fort Garry until Winnipeg was built. It was at
+first called "the Forks of the Red River," because the Assiniboin there
+joined the Red. Lord Selkirk outlined his policy at the time in a letter
+in which he bade Miles McDonnell give the Northwest people solemn
+warning that the lands were Hudson Bay property, and they must remove
+from them; that they must not fish, and that if they did their nets were
+to be seized, their buildings were to be destroyed, and they were to be
+treated "as you would poachers in England."</p>
+
+<p>The trouble began at once. Miles accused Alexander of trying to inveigle
+colonists away from him. He trained his men in the use of guns, and
+uniformed a number of them. He forbade the exportation of any supplies
+from the country, and when some Northwest men came to get buffalo meat
+they had hung on racks in the open air, according to the custom of the
+country, he sent armed men to send the others away. He intercepted a
+band of Northwest canoe-men, stationing men with guns and with two
+field-pieces on the river; and he sent to a Northwest post lower down
+the river demanding the provisions stored there, which, when they were
+refused, were taken by force, the door being smashed in. For this a
+Hudson Bay clerk was arrested, and Captain Miles's men went <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>to the
+rescue. Two armed forces met, but happily slaughter was averted. Miles
+McDonnell justified his course on the ground that the colonists were
+distressed by need of food. It transpired at the time that one of his
+men while making cartridges for a cannon remarked that he was making
+them "for those &mdash;&mdash; Northwest rascals. They have run too long, and
+shall run no longer." After this Captain Miles ordered the stoppage of
+all buffalo-hunting on horseback, as the practice kept the buffalo at a
+distance, and drove them into the Sioux country, where the local Indians
+dared not go.</p>
+
+<p>But though Captain McDonnell was aggressive and vexatious, the Northwest
+Company's people, who had begun the mischief, even in London, were not
+now passive. They relied on setting the half-breeds and Indians against
+the colonists. They urged that the colonists had stolen Indian real
+estate in settling on the land, and that in time every Indian would
+starve as a consequence. At the forty-fifth annual meeting of the
+Northwest Company's officers, August, 1814, Alexander McDonnell said,
+"Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some, by
+fair or foul means&mdash;a most desirable object, if it can be accomplished;
+so here is at it with all my heart and energy." In October, 1814,
+Captain McDonnell ordered the Northwest Company to remove from the
+territory within six months.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG171" id="ILLO_PG171"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0187.jpg" width="203" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE INDIAN HUNTER OF 1750</h4>
+
+<p>The Indians, first and last, were the friends of the colonists. They
+were befriended by the whites, and in turn they gave them succor when
+famine fell upon them. Many of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> Captain Miles McDonnell's orders were in
+their interest, and they knew it. Katawabetay, a chief, was tempted with
+a big prize to destroy the settlement. He refused. On the opening of
+navigation in 1815 chiefs were bidden from the country around to visit
+the Northwest factors, and were by them asked to destroy the colony. Not
+only did they decline, but they hastened to Captain Miles McDonnell to
+acquaint him with the plot. Duncan Cameron now appears foremost among
+the Northwest Company's agents, being in charge of that company's post
+on the Red River, in the Selkirk grant. He told the chiefs that if they
+took the part of the colonists "their c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>amp-fires should be totally
+extinguished." When Cameron caught one of his own servants doing a
+trifling service for Captain Miles McDonnell, he sent him upon a journey
+for which every <i>engag&eacute;</i> of the Northwest Company bound himself liable
+in joining the company; that was to make the trip to Montreal, a voyage
+held <i>in terrorem</i> over every servant of the corporation. More than
+that, he confiscated four horses and a wagon belonging to this man, and
+charged him on the company's books with the sum of 800 livres for an
+Indian squaw, whom the man had been told he was to have as his slave for
+a present.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG173" id="ILLO_PG173"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0189.jpg" width="253" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIAN HUNTER HANGING DEER OUT OF THE REACH OF WOLVES</h4>
+
+<p>But though the Indians held aloof from the great and cruel conspiracy,
+the half-breeds readily joined in it. They treated Captain McDonnell's
+orders with contempt, and arrested one of the Hudson Bay men as a spy
+upon their hunting with horses. There lived along the Red River, near
+the colony, about thirty Canadians and seventy half-breeds, born of
+Indian squaws and the servants or officers of the Northwest Company.
+One-quarter of the number of "breeds" could read and write, and were fit
+to serve as clerks; the rest were literally half savage, and were
+employed as hunters, canoe-men, "packers" (freighters), and guides. They
+were naturally inclined to side with the Northwest Company, and in time
+that corporation sowed dissension among the colonists themselves,
+picturing to them exaggerated danger from the Indians, and offering them
+free passage to Canada. They paid at least one of the leading
+colonists &pound;100 for furthering discontent in the settlement, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>nd four
+deserters from the colony stole all the Hudson Bay field-pieces, iron
+swivels, and the howitzer. There was constant irritation and friction
+between the factions. In an affray far up at Isle-&agrave;-la-Crosse a man was
+killed on either side. Half-breeds came past the colony singing
+war-songs, and notices were posted around Fort Garry reading, "Peace
+with all the world except in Red River." The Northwest people demanded
+the surrender of Captain McDonnell that he might be tried on their
+charges, and on June 11, 1815, a band of men fired on the colonial
+buildings. The captain afterwards surrendered himself, and the remnant
+of the colony, thirteen families, went to the head of Lake Winnipeg. The
+half-breeds burned the buildings, and divided the horses and effects.</p>
+
+<p>But in the autumn all came back with Colin Robertson, of the Bay
+Company, and twenty clerks and servants. These were joined by Governor
+Robert Semple, who brought 160 settlers from Scotland. Semple was a man
+of consequence at home, a great traveller, and the author of a book on
+travels in Spain.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> But he came in no conciliatory mood, and the foment
+was kept up. The Northwest Company tried to starve the colonists, and
+Governor Semple destroyed the enem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>y's fort below Fort Garry. Then came
+the end&mdash;a decisive battle and massacre.</p>
+
+<p>Sixty-five men on horses, and with some carts, were sent by Alexander
+McDonnell, of the Northwest Company, up the river towards the colony.
+They were led by Cuthbert Grant, and included six Canadians, four
+Indians, and fifty-four half-breeds. It was afterwards said they went on
+innocent business, but every man was armed, and the "breeds" were naked,
+and painted all over to look like Indians. They got their paint of the
+Northwest officers. Moreover, there had been rumors that the colonists
+were to be driven away, and that "the land was to be drenched with
+blood." It was on June 19, 1816, that runners notified the colony that
+the others were coming. Semple was at Fort Douglas, near Fort Garry.
+When apprised of the close approach of his assailants, the Governor
+seems not to have appreciated his danger, for he said, "We must go and
+meet those people; let twenty men follow me." He put on his cocked hat
+and sash, his pistols, and shouldered his double-barrelled
+fowling-piece. The others carried a wretched lot of guns&mdash;some with the
+locks gone, and many that were useless. It was marshy ground, and they
+straggled on in loose order. They met an old soldier who had served in
+the army at home, and who said the enemy was very numerous, and that the
+Governor had better bring along his two field-pieces.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said the Governor; "there is no occasion. I am only going to
+speak to them."</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>
+<p>Nevertheless, after a moment's reflection, he did send back for one of
+the great guns, saying it was well to have it in case of need. They
+halted a short time for the cannon, and then perceived the Northwest
+party pressing towards them on their horses. By a common impulse the
+Governor and his followers began a retreat, walking backwards, and at
+the same time spreading out a single line to present a longer front. The
+enemy continued to advance at a hand-gallop. From out among them rode a
+Canadian named Boucher, the rest forming a half-moon behind him. Waving
+his hand in an insolent way to the Governor, Boucher called out, "What
+do you want?"</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG177" id="ILLO_PG177"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0193.jpg" width="450" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>MAKING THE SNOW-SHOE</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span></p>
+<p>"What do <i>you</i> want?" said Governor Semple.</p>
+
+<p>"We want our fort," said Boucher, meaning the fort Semple had destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to your fort," said the Governor.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you destroy our fort, you rascal?" Boucher demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Scoundrel, do you tell me so?" the Governor replied, and ordered the
+man's arrest.</p>
+
+<p>Some say he caught at Boucher's gun. But Boucher slipped off his horse,
+and on the instant a gun was fired, and a Hudson Bay clerk fell dead.
+Another shot wounded Governor Semple, and he called to his followers.</p>
+
+<p>"Do what you can to take care of yourselves."</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a volley from the Northwest force, and with the clearing
+of the smoke it looked as though all the Governor's party were killed or
+wounded. Instead of taking care of themselves, they had rallied around
+their wounded leader. Captain Rogers, of the Governor's party, who had
+fallen, rose to his feet, and ran towards the enemy crying for mercy in
+English and broken French, when Thomas McKay, a "breed" and Northwest
+clerk, shot him through the head, another cutting his body open with a
+knife.</p>
+
+<p>Cuthbert Grant (who, it was charged, had shot Governor Semple) now went
+to the Governor, while the others despatched the wounded.</p>
+
+<p>Semple said, "Are you not Mr. Grant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the other.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not mortally wounded," said the Governor, "and if you could get me
+conveyed to the fort, I think I should live."</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>
+<p>But when Grant left his side an Indian named Ma-chi-ca-taou shot him,
+some say through the breast, and some have it that he put a pistol to
+the Governor's head. Grant could not stop the savages. The bloodshed had
+crazed them. They slaughtered all the wounded, and, worse yet, they
+terribly maltreated the bodies. Twenty-two Hudson Bay men were killed,
+and one on the other side was wounded.</p>
+
+<p>There is a story that Alexander McDonnell shouted for joy when he heard
+the news of the massacre. One witness, who did not hear him shout,
+reports that he exclaimed to his friends: "<i>Sacr&eacute; nom de Dieu! Bonnes
+nouvelles; vingt-deux Anglais tu&eacute;s!</i>" (&mdash;&mdash;! Good news; twenty-two
+English slain!) It was afterwards alleged that the slaughter was
+approved by every officer of the Northwest Company whose comments were
+recorded.</p>
+
+<p>It is a saying up in that country that twenty-six out of the sixty-five
+in the attacking party died violent deaths. The record is only valuable
+as indicating the nature and perils of the lives the hunters and
+half-breeds led. First, a Frenchman dropped dead while crossing the ice
+on the river, his son was stabbed by a comrade, his wife was shot, and
+his children were burned; "Big Head," his brother, was shot by an
+Indian; Coutonohais dropped dead at a dance; Battosh was mysteriously
+shot; Lavigne was drowned; Fraser was run through the body by a
+Frenchman in Paris; Baptiste Morall&eacute;, while drunk, was thrown into a
+fire by inebriated companions and burned to death; another died drunk on
+a roadway; another was wounded by the bursting of his gun; small-pox
+took the eleventh; Duplicis was empaled upon a hay-fork, o<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>n which he
+jumped from a hay-stack; Parisien was shot, by a person unknown, in a
+buffalo-hunt; another lost his arm by carelessness; Gardapie, "the
+brave," was scalped and shot by the Sioux; so was Vall&eacute;e;
+Ka-te-tee-goose was scalped and cut in pieces by the Gros-Ventres;
+Pe-me-can-toss was thrown in a hole by his people; and another Indian
+and his wife and children were killed by lightning. Yet another was
+gored to death by a buffalo. The rest of the twenty-six died by being
+frozen, by drowning, by drunkenness, or by shameful disease.</p>
+
+<p>It is when things are at their worst that they begin to mend, says a
+silly old proverb; but when history is studied these desperate
+situations often seem part of the mending, not of themselves, but of the
+broken cause of progress. There was a little halt here in Canada, as we
+shall see, but the seed of settlement had been planted, and thenceforth
+continued to grow. Lord Selkirk came with all speed, reaching Canada in
+1817. It was now an English colony, and when he asked for a body-guard,
+the Government gave him two sergeants and twelve soldiers of the
+R&eacute;giment de Meuron. He made these the nucleus of a considerable force of
+Swiss and Germans who had formerly served in that regiment, and he
+pursued a triumphal progress to what he called his territory of
+Assiniboin, capturing all the Northwest Company's forts on the route,
+imprisoning the officers, and sending to jail in Canada all the
+accessaries to the massacre, on charges of arson, murder, robbery, and
+"high misdemeanors." Such was the prejudice against the Hudson Bay
+Compa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>ny and the regard for the home corporation that nearly all were
+acquitted, and suits for very heavy damages were lodged against him.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG181" id="ILLO_PG181"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0197.jpg" width="326" height="397" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A HUDSON BAY MAN (QUARTER-BREED)</h4>
+
+<p>Selkirk sought to treat with the Indians for his land, which they said
+belonged to the Chippeways and the Crees. Five chiefs were found whose
+right to treat was acknowledged by all. On July 18, 1817, they deeded
+the territory to the King, "for the benefit of Lord Selkirk," giving him
+a strip two miles wide on either side of the Red River from Lake
+Winnipeg to Red Lake, north of the United States boundary, and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>long the
+Assiniboin from Fort Garry to the Muskrat River, as well as within two
+circles of six miles radius around Fort Garry and Pembina, now in
+Dakota. Indians do not know what miles are; they measure distance by the
+movement of the sun while on a journey. They determined two miles in
+this case to be "as far as you can see daylight under a horse's belly on
+the level prairie." On account of Selkirk's liberality they dubbed him
+"the silver chief." He agreed to give them for the land 200 pounds of
+tobacco a year. He named his settlement Kildonan, after that place in
+Helmsdale, Sutherlandshire, Scotland. He died in 1821, and in 1836 the
+Hudson Bay Company bought the land back from his heirs for &pound;84,000. The
+Swiss and Germans of his regiment remained, and many retired servants of
+the company bought and settled there, forming the aristocracy of the
+place&mdash;a queer aristocracy to our minds, for many of the women were
+Indian squaws, and the children were "breeds."</p>
+
+<p>Through the perseverance and tact of the Right Hon. Edward Ellice, to
+whom the Government had appealed, all differences between the two great
+fur-trading companies were adjusted, and in 1821 a coalition was formed.
+At Ellice's suggestion the giant combination then got from Parliament
+exclusive privileges beyond the waters that flow into Hudson Bay, over
+the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific, for a term of twenty years.
+These extra privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were renewed for
+twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so far as British Columbia
+(then New Caledonia) was concerned, in 185<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>8. That territory then became
+a crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which had taken on a
+colonial character at the time of the California gold fever (1849), were
+united in 1866. The extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore
+not again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of the Canadian
+union, whatever presumptive rights the Hudson Bay Company got under
+Charles II.'s charter were vacated in consideration of a payment by
+Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one-twentieth of all surveyed lands within
+the fertile belt, and 50,000 acres surrounding the company's posts. It
+is estimated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 of acres, worth
+$20,000,000, exclusive of all town sites.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we reach the present condition of the company, more than 220 years
+old, maintaining 200 central posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and
+trading in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Massett, on Queen Charlotte
+Island, in the Pacific; and deep within the Arctic Circle in the north.
+The company was newly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at
+&pound;20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it has paid back
+&pound;7 in every &pound;20, reducing its capital to &pound;1,300,000. The stock, however,
+is quoted at its original value. The supreme control of the company is
+vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five directors, elected by
+the stockholders in London. They delegate their powers to an executive
+resident in this country, who was until lately called the "Governor of
+Rupert's Land," but now is styled the chief commissioner, and is in
+absolute charge of the company and all its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>operations. His term of
+office is unlimited. The present head of the corporation, or governor,
+is Sir Donald A. Smith, one of the foremost spirits in Canada, who
+worked his way up from a clerkship in the company. The business of the
+company is managed on the outfit system, the most old-fogyish, yet by
+its officers declared to be the most perfect, plan in use by any
+corporation. The method is to charge against each post all the supplies
+that are sent to it between June 1st and June 1st each year, and then to
+set against this the product of each post in furs and in cash received.
+It used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a given year,
+but, owing to improved means of transportation, this is now done in two
+years.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG185" id="ILLO_PG185"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0201.jpg" width="653" height="402" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE COUREUR DU BOIS AND THE SAVAGE</h4>
+
+<p>Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts of the Hudson Bay
+territory you find at least one free-trader's shop set up in rivalry
+with the old company's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses for
+the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are partly, general country
+stores. There can be no doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to
+the fur trade from the stand-point of the future. The great company can
+afford to miss a dividend, and can lose at some points while gaining at
+others, but the free-traders must profit in every district. The
+consequence is such a reckless destruction of game that the plan adopted
+by us for our seal-fisheries&mdash;the leasehold system&mdash;is envied and
+advocated in Canada. A greater proportion of trapping and an utter
+unconcern for the destruction of the game at all ages are now
+ravaging the wilderness. Many districts return as man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>y furs as they ever
+yielded, but the quantity is kept up at fearful cost by the
+extermination of the game. On the other hand, the fortified wall of
+posts that opposed the development of Canada, and sent the surplus
+population of Europe to the United States, is rid of its palisades and
+field-pieces, and the main strongholds of the ancient company and its
+rivals have become cities. The old fort on Vancouver Island is now
+Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace
+River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side;
+Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the
+site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.</p>
+
+<p>But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as
+the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become
+cities is in no man's thought or ken. And the communication between the
+centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, more nearly like
+what it was in the old, old days than most of my readers would imagine.
+My Indian guides were battling with their paddles against the mad
+current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, one day last summer, and I
+was only a few hours away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great
+lake, when we came to a portage, and might have imagined from what we
+saw that time had pushed the hands back on the dial of eternity at least
+a century.</p>
+
+<p>Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the brigade that was being
+sent with supplies to a post far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A
+cumbrous, big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a sail,
+and a squ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>are-cut bateau had brought the men and goods to the "carry."
+The men were half-breeds as of old, and had brought along their women
+and children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we espied on a bluff
+close by; a typical camp, with the blankets hung on the bushes, the
+slatternly women and half-naked children squatting or running about, and
+smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive off mosquitoes and
+flies. The men were in groups below on the trail, at the water-side end
+of which were the boats' cargoes of shingles and flour and bacon and
+shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, in rawhide. They were
+dark-skinned, short, spare men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the
+crew, and with longish coarse black hair and straggling beards. Each man
+carried a tump-line, or long stout strap, which he tied in such a way
+around what he meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted over
+the crown of his head. Thus they "packed" the goods over the portage,
+their heads sustaining the loads, and their backs merely steadying them.
+When one had thrown his burden into place, he trotted off up the trail
+with springing feet, though the freight was packed so that 100 pounds
+should form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, and then all the
+others tried to pack as much, and most succeeded. All agreed that one,
+the smallest and least muscular-looking one among them, could pack 400
+pounds.</p>
+
+<p>As the men gathered around their "smudge" to talk with my party, it was
+seen that of all the parts of the picturesque costume of the <i>voyageur</i>
+or <i>bois-br&ucirc;l&eacute;</i> of ol<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>d&mdash;the capote, the striped shirt, the
+pipe-tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and moccasins&mdash;only the
+red worsted belt and the moccasins have been retained. These men could
+recall the day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, got no
+tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, lifting one package, and
+then throwing a second one atop of it without assistance. Now they carry
+only 100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food given to them.</p>
+
+<p>We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the York boat coming
+down from the north with last winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to
+lift the curtain from before the great fur country beyond them, to give
+a glimpse of the habits and conditions that prevail throughout a
+majestic territory where the rivers and lakes are the only roads, and
+canoes and dog-sleds are the only vehicles.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_SEVEN" id="CHAPTER_SEVEN"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>"TALKING MUSQUASH"</h3>
+
+<h4>Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a
+century among the Hudson Bay Company's employ&eacute;s was started the other
+day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading
+company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had
+gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a
+box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of
+changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared
+with the sense of instability to which this appearance of
+machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a
+wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its
+goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is
+precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to
+convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George
+Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord
+Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the
+board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at
+hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it
+contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual
+chirography such as had been received from many factories in the
+wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called
+"talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken
+by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to
+our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canvassers
+for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove
+that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any
+other&mdash;in those posts where life has hitherto been taken so gently that
+when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought
+and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the
+storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although
+it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long
+known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only
+reassuring note in the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the
+subject of candles is reached. The Governor and committee in London
+still pursue their deliberations by candlelight.</p>
+
+<p>But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of no avail for the
+old factors to make the point that Sir Donald found no greater trouble
+in reading their writing than they encountered when one of his missives
+had to be deciphered by them. The truth is that the tide of immigration
+which their ancient monopoly first shunted into the United States is
+now sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more than its
+fac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>e. Not only are the factors aware that the new rule confining them to
+share in the profits of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders
+far greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but a great many
+of them now find village life around their old forts, and railroads
+close at hand, and Law setting up its officers at their doors, so that
+in a great part of the territory the romance of the old life, and their
+authority as well, has fled.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG193" id="ILLO_PG193"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0209.jpg" width="301" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>TALKING MUSQUASH</h4>
+
+<p>Less than four years ago I had passed by Qu'Appelle without visiting it,
+but last summer I resolved not to make the mistake again, for it was the
+last stockaded fort that could be studied without a tiresome and costly
+journey into the far north. It is on the Fishing Lakes, just beyond
+Manitoba. But on my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had just
+taken down the stockade in the spring, and that he did not know of a
+remaining "palisadoe" in all the company's system except one, which,
+curiously enough, had just been ordered to be put up around Fort
+Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern British Columbia, where some
+turbulent Indians have been very troublesome, and where whatever
+civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer than our own. This one
+example of the survival of original conditions is far more eloquent of
+their endurance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. It is true
+that there has come a tremendous change in the status and spirit of the
+company. It is true that its officers are but newly bending to external
+authority, and that settlers have poured into the south with such
+demands for food, clothes, tools, and weapons as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>to create within the
+old corporation one of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to-day,
+as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company remains the greatest
+fur-trading association that exists.</p>
+
+<p>The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated reaches from ocean to ocean
+without suffering invasion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic
+Sea is a grand belt wherein time has made no impress since the first
+factory was put up there. There and around it is a region, nearly
+two-thirds the size of the United States, which is as if our country
+were meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average distance of five
+days apart, with no other means of communication than canoe or dog
+train, and with not above a thousand white men in it, and not as many
+pure-blooded white women as you will find registered at a first-class
+New York hotel on an ordinary day. The company employs between fifteen
+hundred and two thousand white men, and I am assuming that half of them
+are in the fur country.</p>
+
+<p>We know that for nearly a century the company clung to the shores of
+Hudson Bay. It will be interesting to peep into one of its forts as they
+were at that time; it will be amazing to see what a country that
+bay-shore territory was and is. There and over a vast territory three
+seasons come in four months&mdash;spring in June, summer in July and August,
+and autumn in September. During the long winter the earth is blanketed
+deep in snow, and the water is locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and
+smaller birds abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in
+America, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>they either give place to or share the summer with
+mosquitoes, black-flies, and "bull-dogs" (<i>tabanus</i>) without number,
+rest, or mercy. For the land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so
+wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated platforms around
+the buildings for the men to walk upon. Infrequent bunches of small
+pines and a litter of stunted swamp-willows dot the level waste, the
+only considerable timber being found upon the banks of the rivers. There
+is a wide belt called the Arctic Barrens all along the north, but below
+that, at some distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada
+bridge across the region north of the prairie and the plains, and cross
+the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox
+descends almost to meet the moose and deer, and on the near slope of the
+Rockies the wood-buffalo&mdash;larger, darker, and fiercer than the bison of
+the plains, but very like him&mdash;still roams as far south as where the
+buffalo ran highest in the days when he existed.</p>
+
+<p>Through all this northern country the cold in winter registers 40&deg;, and
+even 50&deg;, below zero, and the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in
+camp may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their winter's store
+of dried meat and frozen fish out-of-doors on racks all winter (and so
+they do down close to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only
+twice a year at the utmost; and when supplies have run out at the posts,
+we have heard of their boiling the parchment sheets they use instead of
+glass in their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of
+beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is so pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>cious that
+such recourse could only be had when the horses and dogs had been eaten.
+As to the value of the beaver, the reader who never has purchased any
+for his wife may judge what it must be by knowing that the company has
+long imported buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways around
+Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be tempted, as of old, to make
+thongs and moccasins of the beaver; for their deer are poor, with skins
+full of worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and fine.</p>
+
+<p>But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in fact, common to
+all the fur territory, winter is the delightful season for the traders;
+around the bay it is the only endurable season. The winged pests of
+which I have spoken are by no means confined to the tide-soaked region
+close to the great inland sea. The whole country is as wet as that
+orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on
+the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange
+with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the
+illustration is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all sizes,
+the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make
+waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a
+vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fishing and
+hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. The "bull-dog" is a
+terror reserved for especial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect
+world, as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but carrying a
+red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in human flesh, will ma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>ke the
+victim jump a foot from the ground, though there is no after-pain or
+itching or swelling from the thrust.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG198" id="ILLO_PG198"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0214.jpg" width="381" height="510" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP</h4>
+
+<p>Having seen the country, let us turn to the forts. Some of them really
+were forts, in so far as palisades and sentry towers and double doors
+and guns can make a fort, and one twenty miles below Winnipeg was a
+stone fort. It is still standing. When the company ruled the territory
+as its landlord, the defended posts were on the plains among the bad
+Indians, and on the Hudson Ba<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>y shore, where vessels of foreign nations
+might be expected. In the forests, on the lakes and rivers, the
+character and behavior of the fish-eating Indians did not warrant
+armament. The stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stockade was of
+timber, of about such a height that a man might look over it on tiptoe.
+It had towers at the corners, and York Fort had a great "lookout" tower
+within the enclosure. Within the barricade were the company's buildings,
+making altogether such a picture as New York presented when the Dutch
+founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except that we had a church and
+a stadt-house in our enclosure. The Hudson Bay buildings were sometimes
+arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in the shape of a letter H,
+with the factor's house connecting the two other parts of the character.
+The factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were many smaller
+ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunters, and other non-commissioned
+men. A long, low, whitewashed log-house was apt to be the clerks' house,
+and other large buildings were the stores where merchandise was kept,
+the fur-houses where the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the
+Indian trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. A
+powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a stable or a boat-house
+for canoes completed the post. All the houses had double doors and
+windows, and wherever the men lived there was a tremendous stove set up
+to battle with the cold.</p>
+
+<p>The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bachelors' quarters.
+Each man had a little bedroom containing his chest, a cha<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>ir, and a bed,
+with the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated papers or not,
+according to each man's taste. The big room or hall, where all met in
+the long nights and on off days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its
+whitewashed or timbered walls went, but the table in the middle was
+littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, and pens and ink, and all
+around stood (or rested on hooks overhead) guns, foils, and
+fishing-rods. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there was no work in at least
+one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine o'clock, dinner at one
+o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. The food varied in different places.
+All over the prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were kept, and
+men grew to like it very much, though it was nothing but dried buffalo
+beef pounded and mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmican they
+also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, and that was the greatest
+delicacy, except moose muffle (the nose of the moose), in all the
+territory. In the woods and lake country there were venison and moose as
+well as beaver&mdash;which is very good eating&mdash;and many sorts of birds, but
+in that region dried fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or
+white-fish nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows hunted and
+fished and smoked and drank and listened to the songs of the <i>voyageurs</i>
+and the yarns of the "breeds" and Indians. For the rest there was plenty
+of work to do.</p>
+
+<p>They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in that respect there has
+been a sad change, for all the people, white, red, and crossed, dressed
+picturesquely. You could alway<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>s distinguish a Hudson Bay man by his
+capote of light blue cloth with brass buttons. In winter they wore as
+much as a Quebec carter. They wore leather coats lined with flannel,
+edged with fur, and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went around
+their waists, their breeches were of smoked buckskin, reaching down to
+three pairs of blanket socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth
+leggins up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung from their
+necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped a shawl of Scotch plaid around
+their necks and shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap with
+ear-pieces.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG201" id="ILLO_PG201"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0217.jpg" width="371" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>SETTING A MINK-TRAP</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+<p>The French Canadians and "breeds," who were the <i>voyageurs</i> and hunters,
+made a gay appearance. They used to wear the company's regulation light
+blue capotes, or coats, in winter, with flannel shirts, either red or
+blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at the knee with bead-work. They
+all wore gaudy worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings&mdash;covered
+with gayly-fringed leggins&mdash;fancy moccasins, and tuques, or
+feather-decked hats or caps bound with tinsel bands. In mild weather
+their costume was formed of a blue striped cotton shirt, corduroys, blue
+cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the inevitable sash or worsted
+belt, and moccasins. Every hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his
+neck, and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also as a pipe. As
+late as 1862, Viscount Milton and W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book,
+<i>The North-west Passage by Land</i>, in the following graphic language:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay
+sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded
+garters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed)
+women were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly
+embroidered leggings and white moccasins of cariboo-skin
+beautifully worked with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and
+moose hair."</p></div>
+
+<p>The trading-room at an open post was&mdash;and is now&mdash;like a cross-roads
+store, having its shelves laden with every imaginable article that
+Indians like and hunters need&mdash;clothes, blankets, files, scalp-knives,
+gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, needles, scissors,
+knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, powder, and shot. An Indian who came
+in with furs threw them down, and when they were counted received the
+right n<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>umber of castors&mdash;little pieces of wood which served as
+money&mdash;with which, after the hours of reflection an Indian spends at
+such a time, he bought what he wanted.</p>
+
+<p>But there was a wide difference between such a trading-room and one in
+the plains country, or where there were dangerous Indians&mdash;such as some
+of the Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, Sioux,
+Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places the Indians were let in
+only one or two at a time, the goods were hidden so as not to excite
+their cupidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross of iron,
+whose spaces were only large enough to pass a blanket, what they wanted
+was given to them. That is all done away with now, except it be in
+northern British Columbia, where the Indians have been turbulent.</p>
+
+<p>Farther on we shall perhaps see a band of Indians on their way to trade
+at a post. Their custom is to wait until the first signs of spring, and
+then to pack up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of the
+last of the snow and ice for the journey. They hunt from November to
+May; but the trapping and shooting of bears go on until the 15th of
+June, for those animals do not come from their winter dens until May
+begins. They come to the posts in their best attire, and in the old days
+that formed as strong a contrast to their present dress as their leather
+tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Ballantyne, who wrote a
+book about his service with the great fur company, says merely that they
+were painted, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in Lewis
+and Clarke's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>journal we read description after description of the brave
+costuming of these color-and-ornament-loving people. Take the Sioux, for
+instance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft of hair, and
+feathers hung from that. Instead of the universal blanket of to-day,
+their main garment was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and
+the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with figures of beasts
+and queer designs, and fringed with porcupine quills. They wore the fur
+side out only in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a shirt of
+dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under which the ends of a
+breech-clout of cloth, blanket stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore
+leggins of dressed antelope hide with scalp-locks fringing the seams,
+and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. They had necklaces of the
+teeth or claws of wild beasts, and each carried a fire-bag, a quiver,
+and a brightly painted shield, giving up the quiver and shield when guns
+came into use.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians who came to trade were admitted to the store precisely as
+voters are to the polls under the Australian system&mdash;one by one. They
+had to leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, each Indian had
+to surrender his knife before he got his tin cup.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG205" id="ILLO_PG205"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0221.jpg" width="473" height="350" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>WOOD INDIANS COME TO TRADE</h4>
+
+<p>The company made great use of the Iroquois, and considered them the best
+boatmen in Canada. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company,
+employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific Ocean by way of the
+Peace and Fraser rivers, and when the greatest of Hudson Bay
+executives, Sir George Simps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>on, travelled, Iroquois always propelled
+him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian employ&eacute;s&mdash;a blue,
+gray, or blanket capote, very loose, and reaching below the knee, with a
+red worsted belt around the waist, a cotton shirt, no trousers, but
+artfully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, and moccasins over
+blanket socks. In winter they wore buckskin coats lined with flannel,
+and mittens were given to them. We have seen how the half-breeds were
+dressed. They were long employed at women's work in the forts, at making
+clothing and at mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer-skin
+coats, etc., were made by them. They were also the washer-women.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old days, or thought he did.
+He had a wife and servants and babies, and when a visitor came, which
+was not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, he entertained
+like a lord. At first the factors used to send to London, to the head
+office, for a wife, to be added to the annual consignment of goods, and
+there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys for the sweethearts
+they left there. But in time the rule came to be that they married
+Indian squaws. In doing this, not even the first among them acted
+blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent companions of the Northwest
+and X. Y. companies began the custom, and the French <i>voyageurs</i> and
+<i>coureurs du bois</i> had mated with Indian women before there was a Hudson
+Bay Company. These rough and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of
+half-breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early day to
+settle near<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> the trading-posts. Sometimes they established what might be
+called villages, but were really close imitations of Indian camps,
+composed of a cluster of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a swarm
+of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee was the fireplace, beneath
+the flue formed by the open top of the habitation, and around it were
+the beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable copper
+kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or moss bags, the women and
+dogs, the gun and paddle, and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging
+overhead in the smoke. This has not changed to-day; indeed, very little
+that I shall speak of has altered in the true or far fur country. The
+camps exist yet. They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more
+dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder to get; that is
+all.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG209" id="ILLO_PG209"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0225.jpg" width="235" height="478" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A VOYAGEUR OR CANOE-MAN OF GREAT SLAVE LAKE</h4>
+
+<p>The Europeans saw that these women were docile, or were kept in order
+easily by floggings with the tent poles; that they were faithful and
+industrious, as a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing&mdash;from
+their point of view, of course. Therefore it came to pass that these
+were the most frequent alliances in and out of the posts in all that
+country. The consequences of this custom were so peculiar and important
+that I must ask leave to pause and consider them. In Canada we see that
+the white man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother in the
+truest sense. The old <i>coureurs</i> of Norman and Breton stock, loving a
+wild, free life, and in complete sympathy with the Indian, bought or
+took the squaws to wife, learned the Indian dialects, and shared their
+food and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> adventures with the tribes. As more and more entered the
+wilderness, and at last came to be supported, in camps and at posts and
+as <i>voyageurs</i>, by the competing fur companies, there grew up a class of
+half-breeds who spoke English and French, married Indians, and were as
+much at home with the savages as with the whites. From this stock the
+Hudson Bay men have had a better choice of wives for more than a
+century. But when these "breeds" were turbulent and murderous&mdash;first in
+the attacks on Selkirk's colony, and next during the Riel rebellion&mdash;the
+Indians remained quiet. They defined their position when, in 1819, they
+were tempted with great bribes to massacre the Red River colonists.
+"No," said they; "the colonists are our friends." The men who sought to
+excite them to murder were the officers of the Northwest Company, who
+bought furs of them, to be sure, but the colonists had shared with the
+Indians in poverty and plenty, g<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>iving now and taking then. All were
+alike to the red men&mdash;friends, white men, and of the race that had taken
+so many of their women to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to
+tell them what was being planned against them, and not from that day to
+this has an Indian band taken the war-path against the Canadians. I have
+read General Custer's theory that the United States had to do with
+meat-eating Indians, whereas the Canadian tribes are largely
+fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 references to the better Indian
+policy of Canada; but I can see no difference in the two policies, and
+between the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that Canada had the
+Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other fierce tribes of buffalo-hunters. It
+is in the slow, close-growing acquaintance between the two races, and in
+the just policy of the Hudson Bay men towards the Indians, that I see
+the reason for Canada's enviable experience with her red men.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG211" id="ILLO_PG211"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0227.jpg" width="571" height="376" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>IN A STIFF CURRENT</h4>
+
+<p>But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble with the Indians in recent
+years, and one serious affair grew out of the relations between the
+company's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette even among
+savages, and this was ignored up at old Fort St. Johns, on the Peace
+River, with the result that the Indians slaughtered the people there and
+burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that region, and after
+they had massacred the men in charge, they met a boat-load of white men
+coming up the river with goods. To them they turned their guns also, and
+only four escaped. It was up in that country likewise&mdash;just this side
+of the Rocky Mountains, where the pl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>ains begin to be forested&mdash;that a
+silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and said to him,
+"Before you come back to this post again, your wife and child will be
+dead." He spoke hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose
+happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked into the fort the
+next spring and shot the clerk without a word.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the posts are little village-like collections of buildings,
+usually showing white against a green background in the prettiest way
+imaginable; for, as a rule, they cluster on the lower bank of a river,
+or the lower near shore of a lake. There are not clerks enough in most
+of them to render a clerks' house necessary, for at the little posts
+half-breeds are seen to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule,
+there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house and the factor's
+house, the canoe-house and the stable, with a barn where gardening is
+done, as is often the case when soil and climate permit. Often the
+fur-house and store are combined, the furs being laid in the upper story
+over the shop. There is always a flag-staff, of course. This and the
+flag, with the letters "H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunters'
+saying that the initials stood for "Here before Christ," because, no
+matter how far away from the frontier a man might go, in regions he
+fancied no white man had been, that flag and those letters stared him in
+the face. You will often find that the factor, rid of all the ancient
+timidity that called for "palisadoes and swivels," lives on the high
+upper bank above the store. The usual half-breed or Indian village is
+seldom farther t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>han a couple of miles away, on the same water. The
+factor is still, as he always has been, responsible only to himself for
+the discipline and management of his post, and therefore among the
+factories we will find all sorts of homes&mdash;homes where a piano and the
+magazines are prized, and daughters educated abroad shed the lustre of
+refinement upon their surroundings, homes where no woman rules, and
+homes of the French half-breed type, which we shall see is a very
+different mould from that of the two sorts of British half-breed that
+are numerous. There never was a rule by which to gauge a post. In one
+you found religion valued and missionaries welcomed, while in others
+there never was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum met the rum of
+the free-traders, and in others no rum was bartered away. To-day, in
+this latter respect, the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be given
+or sold to the red man.</p>
+
+<p>When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hidden away in forest,
+mountain chain, or plain, or arctic barren, seeing the same very few
+faces year in and year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine once
+a year when the winter's furs are brought in, and once a year when the
+mail-packet arrives&mdash;when one thinks of their isolation, and lack of
+most of those influences which we in our walks prize the highest, the
+reason for their choosing that company's service seems almost
+mysterious. Yet they will tell you there is a fascination in it. This
+could be understood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians were
+concerned, for they inherited the liking; and, after all, though m<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>ost of
+them are only laborers, no other laborers are so free, and none spice
+life with so much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men of
+ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy responsible positions,
+and at better salaries. However, from the outset the rule has been that
+they have become as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and
+sailors always have of theirs. They have usually retired from it
+reluctantly, and some, having gone home to Europe, have begged leave to
+return.</p>
+
+<p>The company has always been managed upon something like a military
+basis. Perhaps the original necessity for forts and men trained to the
+use of arms suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with the rest.
+The lowest rank in the service is that of the laborer, who may happen to
+fish or hunt at times, but is employed&mdash;or enlisted, as the fact is, for
+a term of years&mdash;to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a porter or gardener,
+and labor generally about the post. The interpreter was usually a
+promoted laborer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians and whites
+alike, met each other half-way in the matter of language. The highest
+non-commissioned rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large
+posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small outposts, and we read
+that they were "on terms of equality with gentlemen." To-day the service
+has lost these fine points, and the laborers and commissioned officers
+are sharply separated. The so-called "gentleman" begins as a prentice
+clerk, and after a few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to
+the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through the grades of chi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>ef
+trader, factor, and chief factor, to the office of chief commissioner,
+or resident American manager, chosen by the London board, and having
+full powers delegated to him. A clerk&mdash;or "clark," as the rank is
+called&mdash;may never touch a pen. He may be a trader. Then again he may be
+truly an accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, and that
+entitles him to a minimum guarantee, with a conditional extra income
+based on the profits of the fur trade. Men get promotions through the
+chief commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather than
+seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are salaried for a term of
+years, the original pension fund and system having been broken up.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the company, made his way
+to the highest post from the place of a prentice clerk. He came from
+Scotland as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to be sent
+to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as much out of both the world
+and contact with the heart of the company as it is possible to be. The
+military system was felt in that instance; but every man who accepts a
+commission engages to hold himself in readiness to go cheerfully to the
+north pole, or anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Charlotte
+Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's parts no obstacle is more
+than a temporary impediment. Though he stayed something like seventeen
+years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there was work to do, and
+in his own time he read and studied voraciously. When the Riel
+rebellion&mdash;the first one&mdash;disturbed the country's peace, he appeared on
+the scene as c<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>ommissioner for the Government. Next he became chief
+commissioner for the Hudson Bay Company. After a time he resigned that
+office to go on the board in London, and thence he stepped easily to the
+governorship. His parents, whose home was in Morayshire, Scotland, gave
+him at his birth, in 1821, not only a constitution of iron, but that
+shrewdness which is only Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable
+fore-sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex situations as to
+amaze his associates.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG217" id="ILLO_PG217"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0233.jpg" width="244" height="375" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE</h4>
+
+<p>Of course his career is almost as singular as his gifts, and the
+governorship can scarcely be said to be the goal of the general
+ambition, for it has been most apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary
+promotion in the company is very slow, and it follows that most men live
+out their existence between the rank of clerk and that of chief factor.
+There are 200 central posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the
+officers are continually travelling from one to another, some in thei<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>r
+districts, and the chief or supervising ones over vast reaches of
+country. In winter, when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a
+rule, and it has been nothing for a man to trudge 1000 miles in that way
+on a winter's journey. Roderick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the
+world up in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable explorer,
+and made most of his journeys on snow-shoes. He explored the Peel, the
+Liard, and the Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went far
+within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the most northerly post of
+the company. By the regular packet from Calgary, near our border, to the
+northernmost post is a 3000-mile journey. Macfarlane was fond of the
+study of ornithology, and classified and catalogued all the birds that
+reach the frozen regions.</p>
+
+<p>I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hudson Bay who reads his
+daily newspaper every morning with his coffee&mdash;but of course such an
+instance is a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set of the
+London <i>Times</i> sent to him by each winter's packet, and each morning the
+paper of that date in the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his
+servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the press, and spread
+by the factor's plate. Thus he gets for half an hour each day a taste of
+his old habit and life at home.</p>
+
+<p>There was another factor who developed artistic capacity, and spent his
+leisure at drawing and painting. He did so well that he ventured many
+sketches for the illustrated papers of London, some of which were
+publishe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>d.</p>
+
+<p>The half-breed has developed with the age and growth of Canada. There
+are now half-breeds and half-breeds, and some of them are titled, and
+others hold high official places. It occurred to an English lord not
+long ago, while he was being entertained in a Government house in one of
+the parts of newer Canada, to inquire of his host, "What are these
+half-breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one looks like." His
+host took the nobleman's breath away by his reply. "I am one," said he.
+There is no one who has travelled much in western Canada who has not now
+and then been entertained in homes where either the man or woman of the
+household was of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a high
+degree of refinement and the most polished manners. Usually one needs
+the information that such persons possess such blood. After that the
+peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the subject of such
+gossip attest the truthfulness of the assertion. There is no rule for
+measuring the character and quality of this plastic, receptive, and
+often very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one may say
+broadly that the social position and attainments of these people have
+been greatly influenced by the nationality of their fathers. For
+instance, the French <i>habitants</i> and woodsmen far, far too often sank to
+the level of their wives when they married Indian women. Light-hearted,
+careless, unambitious, and drifting to the wilderness because of the
+absence of restraint there; illiterate, of coarse origin, fond of
+whiskey and gambling&mdash;they threw off superiority to the Indian, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>nd
+evaded responsibility and concern in home management. Of course this is
+not a rule, but a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and English
+forced their wives up to their own standards. Their own home training,
+respect for more than the forms of religion, their love of home and of a
+permanent patch of ground of their own&mdash;all these had their effect, and
+that has been to rear half-breed children in proud and comfortable
+homes, to send them to mix with the children of cultivated persons in
+old communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition and cultivation
+for an equal start in the journey of life. Possessing such foundation
+for it, the equality has happily never been denied to them in Canada.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG221" id="ILLO_PG221"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0237.jpg" width="676" height="395" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>VOYAGEURS IN CAMP FOR THE NIGHT</h4>
+
+<p>To-day the service is very little more inviting than in the olden time.
+The loneliness and removal from the touch of civilization remain
+throughout a vast region; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe remain;
+the dangers of flood and frost are undiminished. Unfortunately, among
+the changes made by time, one is that which robs the present factor's
+surroundings of a great part of that which was most picturesque. Of all
+the prettinesses of the Indian costuming one sees now only a trace here
+and there in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and tepee, and in
+some only the moccasin, remain. The birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe
+are the main reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been
+impressed into parts of the service, and most of the descendants of the
+old-time <i>voyageur</i> preserve only his worsted belt, his knife, and his
+cap and moccasins at the utmost. In places the <i>engag&eacute;</i> has become a
+mere deck-hand. H<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>is scarlet paddle has rotted away; he no longer awakens
+the echoes of forest or ca&ntilde;on with <i>chansons</i> that died in the throats
+of a generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of intertribal war
+and of a precarious foothold among fierce and turbulent bands have
+nearly vanished; but there was a spice in them that added to the
+fascination of the service.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of the Hudson Bay
+outfit. One does not need to go very deep into western Canada to meet
+with them. As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on Lake
+Superior, the only roads into the north are the rivers and lakes,
+traversed by canoes in summer and sleds in winter. The dogs are of a
+peculiar breed, and are called "huskies"&mdash;undoubtedly a corruption of
+the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer resemblance to the wolf than
+any of our domesticated dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that
+scavenger of the wilderness in their nature as well as their looks.
+To-day their females, if tied and left in the forest, will often attest
+companionship with its denizens by bringing forth litters of wolfish
+progeny. Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with whom the
+experiment is tried, for the wolves will be apt to bring food to them as
+long as they are thus neglected by man. They are often as large as the
+ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are shorter, and even more
+hairy, and the hair along their necks, from their shoulders to their
+skulls, stands erect in a thick, bristling mass. They have the long
+snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves, and their cry <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>is a
+yelp rather than a bark. Like wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at
+sunrise and at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful animals,
+setting their own numbers against one, and they will kill cows, or even
+children, if they get the chance. They are disciplined only when at
+work, and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and industrious
+as to plainly show that though their nature is savage and wolfish, they
+could be reclaimed by domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them
+are. As it is, in their packs, their battles among themselves are
+terrible, and they are dangerous when loose. In some districts it is the
+custom to turn them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes,
+leaving them to hunger or feast according as the supply of dead fish
+thrown upon the shore is small or plentiful. When they are kept in dog
+quarters they are simply penned up and fed during the summer, so that
+the savage side of their nature gets full play during long periods. Fish
+is their principal diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their
+winter food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a wolf or an
+Indian, a "husky" gets along without food when there is not any, and
+will eat his own weight of it when it is plenty.</p>
+
+<p>A typical dog-sled is very like a toboggan. It is formed of two thin
+pieces of oak or birch lashed together with buckskin thongs and turned
+up high in front. It is usually about nine feet in length by sixteen
+inches wide. A leather cord is run along the outer edges for fastening
+whatever may be put upon the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are
+harnessed to such sleds,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> but the usual number is four. Traces, collars,
+and backbands form the harness, and the dogs are hitched one before the
+other. Very often the collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells,
+and sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with beads, tassels,
+fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore-goer, is always the best in the
+team. The dog next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is
+named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful animals are treated
+harshly, if not brutally. It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who
+cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three
+profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever
+has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself,
+as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian
+obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the
+driver, or mock-passenger, runs behind the dogs. The main function of
+the sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent-covers,
+blankets, food, and the like. The men run along with or behind the dogs,
+on snow-shoes, and when the dogs make better time than horses are able
+to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over daily distances of
+from 20 to 35 miles, according to the condition of the ice or snow, and
+that many a journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this way, and
+some of 2000 miles, the test of human endurance is as great as that of
+canine grit.</p>
+
+<p>Men travelling "light," with extra sleds for the freight, and men on
+short journeys often ride in the sleds, which in such cases are fitted
+up as "carioles" for the purpose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>. I have heard an unauthenticated
+account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove themselves, disciplining
+refractory or lazy dogs by simply pulling them in beside or over the
+dash-board, and holding them down by the neck while they thrashed them.
+A story is told of a worthy bishop who complained of the slow progress
+his sled was making, and was told that it was useless to complain, as
+the dogs would not work unless they were roundly and incessantly cursed.
+After a time the bishop gave his driver absolution for the profanity
+needed for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth sped over the
+snow at a gallop, every stroke of the half-breed's long and cruel whip
+being sent home with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times with
+peltings with sharp-edged bits of ice. Kane, the explorer, made an
+average of 57 miles a day behind these shaggy little brutes. Milton and
+Cheadle, in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 140 miles
+in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of Rupert's Land told me he had
+covered 20 miles in a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day,
+without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fatigue. The best time
+is made on hard snow and ice, of course, and when the conditions suit,
+the drivers whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs more
+easily. In view of what they do, it is no wonder that many of the
+Northern Indians, upon first seeing horses, named them simply "big dog."
+But to me the performances of the drivers are the more wonderful. It was
+a white youth, son of a factor, who ran behind the bishop's dogs in
+the spurt of 40 miles by daylig<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>ht that I mention. The men who do such
+work explain that the "lope" of the dogs is peculiarly suited to the
+dog-trot of a human being.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG227" id="ILLO_PG227"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0243.jpg" width="589" height="366" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>"HUSKIE" DOGS ON THE FROZEN HIGHWAY</h4>
+
+<p>A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or of a chief factor
+racing through a great district, will now be intelligible. If he is
+riding, he fancies that princes and lords would envy him could they see
+his luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of the best pattern&mdash;a
+little suggestive of a burial casket, to be sure, in its shape, but
+gaudily painted, and so full of soft warm furs that the man within is
+enveloped like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Perhaps there are Russian bells
+on the collars of the dogs, and their harness is "Frenchified" with
+bead-work and tassels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp and
+invigorating, and before him the lake or stream over which he rides is a
+sheet of virgin snow&mdash;not nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot
+love nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful ermine fringed and
+embroidered with dark evergreen, and that in turn flecked at every point
+with snow, as if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with his
+driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping
+over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle
+the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by
+the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If
+silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of
+foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer
+hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To
+him these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegraphers, and as
+imp<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>ortant as stock quotations to the pallid men of Wall Street.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. Time was that his
+predecessors would have stopped to discuss the situation and its
+dangers, for the sight of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and
+the question came, were these friendly or fierce? But now the sled
+hurries on. It is only an Indian or half-breed hunter minding his traps,
+of which he may have a sufficient number to give him a circuit of ten or
+more miles away from and back to his lodge or village. He is approached
+and hailed by the driver, and with some pretty name very often&mdash;one that
+may mean in English "hawk flying across the sky when the sun is
+setting," or "blazing sun," or whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a
+village is the next object of interest; not a village in our sense of
+the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peeping above the brush
+beside the water, the eye being led to them by the signs of slothful
+disorder close by&mdash;the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty
+tattered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam bath, such as
+Indians resort to when tired or sick or uncommonly dirty, the worn-out
+snow-shoes hung on a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat
+here and there. A dog rushes down to the water-side barking
+furiously&mdash;an Indian dog of the currish type of paupers' dogs the world
+around&mdash;and this stirs the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who
+are addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by some poetic names,
+albeit poetic license is sometimes strained to form names not at all
+pretty to polite senses, "All Stom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>ach" being that of one dusky princess,
+and serving to indicate the lengths to which poesy may lead the
+untrammelled mind.</p>
+
+<p>The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be journeying in the West and
+be a lover of nature, heaven send that his face be turned towards the
+sunset! Then, be the sky anything but completely storm-draped, he will
+see a sight so glorious that eloquence becomes a naked suppliant for
+alms beyond the gift of language when set to describe it. A few clouds
+are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on celestial dyes,
+and one sees, above the vanished sun, a blaze of golden yellow thinned
+into a tone that is luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and
+breasts of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards the zenith into a
+rose tone that has body at the base, but pales at top into a mere blush.
+This I have seen night after night on the lakes and the plains and on
+the mountains. But as the glory of it beckons the traveller ever towards
+itself, so the farther he follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be
+his reward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters are more and
+more enriched, until, at the Pacific, even San Francisco's shabby
+sand-hills stir poetry and reverence in the soul by their borrowed
+magnificence.</p>
+
+<p>The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, and while the "breed"
+falls to at the laborious but quick and simple work, the factor either
+helps or smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would have set his
+man to bobbing for jack-fish or lake trout, or would have stopped a
+while to bag a partridge, or might h<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>ave bought whatever of this sort the
+trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one, this meal would be
+of bacon and bread or dried meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as
+would bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem ethereal and
+delicious in the wilderness, particularly if made half an inch thick,
+saturated with grease, well browned, and eaten while at the temperature
+and consistency of molten lava.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG233" id="ILLO_PG233"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0249.jpg" width="479" height="382" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE FACTOR'S FANCY TOBOGGAN</h4>
+
+<p>The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is cleared for a fire,
+wood and brush are cut, and the deft laborer starts the flame in a
+tent-like pyramid of kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This
+tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has constructed and led up
+to a conflagration of logs as thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with
+a backlog and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the hottest part
+to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The dogs will have needed
+disciplining long before this, and if the driver be like many of his
+kind, and works himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one
+and send his teeth together through its hide after he has beaten it
+until he is tired. The point of order having thus been raised and
+carried, the shaggy, often handsome, animals will be minded to forget
+their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on their haunches, with
+their intelligent faces towards the fire, will watch the cooking
+intently. The pocket-knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to
+be the only table implement in use at the meal. Canada had reached the
+possession of seigniorial mansions of great character before any
+other knife was brought to table, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>though the ladies used costly blades
+set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the axe ranks the knife in
+the wilderness, but he who has a knife can make and furnish his own
+table&mdash;and his house also, for that matter.</p>
+
+<p>Supper over, and a glass of grog having been put down, with water from
+the hole in the ice whence the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten,
+the night's rest is begun. The method for this varies. As good men as
+ever walked have asked nothing more cosey than a snug warm trough in the
+snow and a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will call for a
+shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the furs out of the sled for his
+covering. If nicer yet, he may order a low hollow chamber of three sides
+of banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks and cross-poles,
+with canvas thrown over it. Every man to his quality, of course, and
+that of the servant calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as
+soundly as if he were Santa Claus and only stirred once a year. Then
+will fall upon what seems the whole world the mighty hush of the
+wilderness, broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the cry of a
+wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on the lake, or the snoring of
+the men and dogs. But if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The
+magic shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up over that
+North country, sending its shifting lights weaving across the firmament
+with a tremulous brilliancy and energy we in this country get but pale
+hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flashing and palpitating
+incessantly, the rose-tinted waves and luminous whit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>e bars leap across
+the sky or dart up and down it in manner so fantastic and so forceful,
+even despite their shadowy thinness, that travellers have fancied
+themselves deaf to some seraphic sound that they believed such commotion
+must produce.</p>
+
+<p>An incident of this typical journey I am describing would, at more than
+one season, be a meeting with some band of Indians going to a post with
+furs for barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their quarry in
+the spring and early summer, some may come at any time. The procession
+may be only that of a family or of the two or more families that live
+together or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one group, is certain
+to be stalking ahead, carrying nothing but his gun. Then come the women,
+laden like pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the furs and
+drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog may bear a balanced load on his
+back, but the squaw is certain to have a spine-warping burden of meat
+and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever personal property of
+any and every sort she and her liege lord own. Children who can walk
+have to do so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and a half or
+two years old is on her back, while a newborn infant, swaddled in
+blanket stuff, and bagged and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the
+load on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a band of these
+pauperized savages form it would be difficult to imagine. On the plains
+they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women
+and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two running loose, t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>he
+lordly men riding free, straggling curs a plenty, babies in arms, babies
+swaddled, and toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at its
+exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, distorted pots and
+pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, in all eloquently suggestive of an
+eviction in the slums of a great city.</p>
+
+<p>I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out of the necessity of
+truth-telling. The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the
+subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find
+him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race
+have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the
+continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is,
+as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and
+turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from
+freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make
+us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile; taught, aye, forced
+to beg, mocked at by a religion he cannot understand, from the mouths of
+men who apparently will not understand him; debauched with rum,
+despoiled by the lust of white men in every form that lust can take. Ah,
+it is a sickening story. Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern
+wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who have been in such
+pitiful stress for food and covering that the Hudson Bay Company has
+kept them alive with advances of provisions and blankets winter after
+winter. They are Indians who in their strength never gave the
+Government the concern it now fails to show fo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>r their weakness. The
+great fur company has thus added generosity to its long career of just
+dealing with these poor adult children; for it is a fact that though the
+company has made what profit it might, it has not, in a century at
+least, cheated the Indians, or made false representations to them, or
+lost their good-will and respect by any feature of its policy towards
+them. Its relation to them has been paternal, and they owe none of their
+degradation to it.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG239" id="ILLO_PG239"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0255.jpg" width="476" height="319" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>HALT OF A YORK BOAT BRIGADE FOR THE NIGHT</h4>
+
+<p>I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the posts. There are two
+other arrivals of great consequence&mdash;the coming of the supplies, and of
+the winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions and trade goods
+being put up in bales in the great mercantile storehouse of the company
+in Winnipeg&mdash;a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue ladies' bazaar
+and one of our wholesale grocers' shops&mdash;and I have seen such weights of
+canned vegetables and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other
+luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is good living on high
+days and holidays if not always. The stores are packed in parcels
+averaging sixty pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them
+convenient for handling on the portages&mdash;"for packing them over the
+carries," as our traders used to say. It is in following these supplies
+that we become most keenly sensible of the changes time has wrought in
+the methods of the company. The day was, away back in the era of the
+Northwest Company, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa
+from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy <i>voyageurs</i> in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>picturesque
+costumes, wielding scarlet paddles, and stirring the forests with their
+happy songs. The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the centre of
+the trade moved from old Fort William, close to where Port Arthur now is
+on Lake Superior, up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. Then
+the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, more picturesque than
+ever, and manning the great York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept
+in a long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, and thence by a
+marvellous water route all the way to the Rockies and the Arctic,
+sending off freight for side districts at fixed points along the course.
+The main factories on this line, maintained as such for more than a
+century, bear names whose very mention stirs the blood of one who knows
+the romantic, picturesque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old
+company when it was the landlord (in part, and in part monopolist) of a
+territory that cut into our Northwest and Alaska, and swept from
+Labrador to Vancouver Island. Northward and westward, by waters emptying
+into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats worked through a region
+embroidered with sheets and ways of water. The system that was next
+entered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends and bulges with
+lakes and straits like a ribbon all curved and knotted. Thus, at a great
+portage, the divide was reached and crossed; and so the waters flowing
+to the Arctic, and one&mdash;the Peace River&mdash;rising beyond the Rockies, were
+met and travelled. This was the way and the method until after the
+Canadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winnipeg route is of
+subordin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>ate importance, and feeds only the region near the west side of
+Hudson Bay. The Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in
+Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton railroad. From Edmonton the
+goods go by cart to Athabasca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat,
+which takes them northward until some rapids are met, and avoided by the
+use of a singular combination of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow
+progress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and thence they
+follow the Athabasca, through Athabasca Lake, and so on up to a second
+rapids, on the Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts carry
+them across a sixteen-mile portage to a screw steamer, which finishes
+the 3000-mile journey to the North. Of course the shorter branch routes,
+distributing the goods on either side of the main track, are still
+traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in the old way, but with shabby
+accessories of costume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come to a
+portage, produce their tomplines, and "pack" the goods to the next
+waterway. By means of these "lines" they carry great weights, resting on
+their backs, but supported from their skulls, over which the strong
+straps are passed.</p>
+
+<p>The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in the depth of the
+season, goes to all the posts by dog train. The letters and papers are
+packed in great boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind which
+the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes and pelting and cursing
+the dogs. A more direct course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has
+usually been followed b<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>y this packet; but it is thought that the route
+<i>via</i> Edmonton and Athabasca Landing will serve better yet, so that
+another change may be made. This is a small exhibition as compared with
+the brigade that takes the supplies, or those others that come plashing
+down the streams and across the country with the furs every year. But
+only fancy how eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for! It
+is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of all North America. It
+cuts a tiny trail, and here and there lesser black dots move off from it
+to cut still slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and
+lesser posts; but we may be sure that if human eyes could see so far,
+all those of the white men in all that vast tangled system of trading
+centres would be watching the little caravan, until at last each pair
+fell upon the expected missives from the throbbing world this side of
+the border.</p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_EIGHT" id="CHAPTER_EIGHT"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>CANADA'S EL DORADO</h3>
+
+
+<br /><br />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0260.jpg" width="114" height="386" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>here is on this continent a territory of imperial extent which is one
+of the Canadian sisterhood of States, and yet of which small account has
+been taken by those who discuss either the most advantageous relations
+of trade or that closer intimacy so often referred to as a possibility
+in the future of our country and its northern neighbor. Although British
+Columbia is advancing in rank among the provinces of the Dominion by
+reason of its abundant natural resources, it is not remarkable that we
+read and hear little concerning it. The people in it are few, and the
+knowledge of it is even less in proportion. It is but partially
+explored, and for what can be learned of it one must catch up
+information piecemeal from blue-books, the pamphlets of scientists, from
+tales of adventure, and from the less trustworthy literature composed to
+attract travellers and settlers.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p>
+<p>It would severely strain the slender facts to make a sizable pamphlet of
+the history of British Columbia. A wandering and imaginative Greek
+called Juan de Fuca told his people that he had discovered a passage
+from ocean to ocean between this continent and a great island in the
+Pacific. Sent there to seize and fortify it, he disappeared&mdash;at least
+from history. This was about 1592. In 1778 Captain Cook roughly surveyed
+the coast, and in 1792 Captain Vancouver, who as a boy had been with
+Cook on two voyages, examined the sound between the island and the
+main-land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the main water
+system of the interior. He gave to the strait at the entrance the
+nickname of the Greek, and in the following year received the transfer
+of authority over the country from the Spanish commissioner Bodega of
+Quadra, then established there. The two put aside false modesty, and
+named the great island "the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." At the time
+the English sailor was there it chanced that he met that hardy old
+homespun baronet Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross
+the continent, making the astonishing journey in a canoe manned by
+Iroquois Indians. The main-land became known as New Caledonia. It took
+its present name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, got its
+name from the ship <i>Columbia</i>, of Boston, Captain Gray, which entered
+its mouth in 1792, long after the Spaniards had known the stream and
+called it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The region passed into
+the hands of the fur-traders. Vancouver Island became a crown colony in
+1849, and British Columbia followed in 1858. They were united in 1866,
+and joine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>d the Canadian confederation in 1871. Three years later the
+province exceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in the value of
+its exports, and also showed an excess of exports over imports. It has a
+Lieutenant-governor and Legislative assembly, and is represented at
+Ottawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its people have been more
+closely related to ours in business than those of any other province,
+and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the
+larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as
+a holiday.</p>
+
+<p>British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the
+combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the
+Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is
+larger than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire joined
+together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to
+be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery
+halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this
+necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be,
+and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the
+popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its
+present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and
+yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies
+beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of latitude
+has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent
+civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American
+Desert," and fa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>r up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes
+despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of
+perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the
+same parallels of latitude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we
+shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two shores
+of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California
+from Massachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world
+we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as
+England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the
+interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New
+England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching
+claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.</p>
+
+<p>British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and averages 400 miles in
+width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast
+earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In
+fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges,
+the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the
+Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose
+upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the
+main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of
+the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our
+North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700
+miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the
+Kootenay, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>nd the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser
+agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral
+possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the
+case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the
+territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered
+marketable.</p>
+
+<p>The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies,
+but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth.
+Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors,"
+have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity.
+But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high
+plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow
+fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the
+Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following
+the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows
+less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by
+valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and
+watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing
+land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the
+north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts
+of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the
+Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of
+the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the Pacific,
+lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets,
+which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>ds, and receive the
+discharge of almost as many streams and rivers&mdash;a wondrously beautiful
+region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish
+exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of
+mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are
+parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have
+found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of
+metals, whose value industry has not yet established.</p>
+
+<p>It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white
+inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It
+is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field
+and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the
+miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the
+immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild,
+and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours
+the traveller sees, across the majestic ca&ntilde;on of the Fraser, the
+neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of
+the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony,
+for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the
+Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles
+away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian
+village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most
+part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys
+covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascade<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>s, turbulent streams,
+and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now
+he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an
+Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a
+canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily
+west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.</p>
+
+<p>But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power
+to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part,
+lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-grass valleys in the south he would
+see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man.
+A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country,
+where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been
+taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and
+there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash
+of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of
+an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale,
+and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of
+Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of
+larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near
+Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo
+(lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close
+together, he would see more than half the population of the province.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+<a name="ILLO_PG251" id="ILLO_PG251"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0267.jpg" width="483" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA</h4>
+
+<p>Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the
+territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay
+Company, where the endless forests and multitudinous lakes and streams
+are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost
+one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only
+true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the
+fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either
+washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that
+penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but
+companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then,
+hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else
+there is a can for between-times!</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>
+<p>A very strange sight that my supposititious traveller would pause long
+to look at would be the herds of wild horses that defy the Queen, her
+laws, and her subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands of
+them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin country, on either side
+of the Fraser, north of Washington State. They were originally of good
+stock, but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable grass, and
+spoil every horse turned out to graze. The newspapers aver that the
+Government must soon be called upon to devise means for ridding the
+valleys of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which promise
+well for future stock-raising and agricultural operations. There are
+plenty such. The Nicola Valley has been settled twenty years, and there
+are many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good land, but rather
+high for grain, and needs irrigation. The snowfall varies greatly in all
+these valleys, but in ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well
+with four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, a valley eight
+to ten miles wide, ranching began a quarter of a century ago, during the
+gold excitement. The "cow-men" raise grain for themselves there. This
+valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Valley is lower, and is only from
+two to five miles wide, but both are of similar character, of very great
+length, and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. The greater
+part of the Okanagon does not need irrigating. A beautiful country is
+the Kettle River region, along the boundary between the Columbia and the
+Okanagon. It is narrow, but flat and smooth on the bottom, and the land
+is very fine. Bunch-grass covers the hills around it for a distance of
+from four hundred to five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> hundred feet, and there timber begins. It is
+only in occasional years that the Kettle River Valley needs water. In
+the Spallumcheen Valley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer,
+and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use there. These are
+mere notes of a few among almost innumerable valleys that are clothed
+with bunch-grass, and that often possess the characteristics of
+beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, possibly in most of
+them. I have notes of the successful growth of peaches, and of the
+growth of almond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, both
+in the Okanagon country.</p>
+
+<p>The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to those who are fond of
+the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, prairie-chicken, and partridges abound
+in them. In all probability there is no similar extent of country that
+equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, in the winter of 1888,
+between six and eight tons of deer-skins were shipped by local traders,
+the result of legitimate hunting. But the forests and mountains are as
+they were when the white man first saw them, and though the beaver and
+sea-otter, the marten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the
+rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest of the game is
+most plentiful. On the Rockies and on the Coast Range the mountain-goat,
+most difficult of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant
+yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so common, but the
+hunting thereof is usually successful if good guides are obtained. The
+cougar, the grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and
+brown bears<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> are very numerous. Elk are going the way of the
+"big-horn"&mdash;are preceding that creature, in fact. Pheasants (imported),
+grouse, quail, and water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the
+river and lake fishing is such as is not approached in any other part of
+the Dominion. The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big
+game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone
+the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province
+is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth
+will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing
+eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances,
+their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere
+can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, king of all the beasts,
+which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest,
+and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom
+turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that
+gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the
+others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is
+the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.</p>
+
+<p>From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained
+the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station.
+It makes a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and is as
+follows: Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, badger, foxes (silver,
+cross, and red), fishers, martens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea
+or land), panther, raccoon, wolves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span> (black, gray, and coyote),
+black-tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of an ox, and
+found on the hills of Vancouver Island), caribou or reindeer, hares,
+mountain-goat, big-horn (or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies),
+wood-buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from the bison,
+but larger), geese, swans, and duck.</p>
+
+<p>The British Columbian Indians are of such unprepossessing appearance
+that one hears with comparative equanimity of their numbering only
+20,000 in all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing principally to the
+vices of their women. They are, for the most part, canoe Indians, in the
+interior as well as on the coast, and they are (as one might suppose a
+nation of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those limbs small
+and inclined to bow. On the other hand, their exercise with the paddle
+has given them a disproportionate development of their shoulders and
+chests, so that, being too large above and too small below, their
+appearance is very peculiar. They are fish-eaters the year around; and
+though some, like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike and
+turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in the interior. It was
+the meat-eating Indian who made war a vocation and self-torture a
+dissipation. The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These short
+squat British Columbian natives are very dark-skinned, and have
+physiognomies so different from those of the Indians east of the Rockies
+that the study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into
+extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a contention which I
+prefer to avoid. It is not guessing to say that thei<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>r high check-bones
+and flat faces make them resemble the Chinese. That is true to such a
+degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, and meeting alternate
+Chinamen and Siwash, it is not always easy to say which is which, unless
+one proceeds upon the assumption that if a man looks clean he is apt to
+be a Chinaman, whereas if he is dirty and ragged he is most likely to be
+a Siwash.</p>
+
+<p>You will find that seven in ten among the more intelligent British
+Columbians conclude these Indians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese
+current is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted Japanese junks
+to these shores. When the first traders visited the neighborhood of the
+mouth of the Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the vestiges
+of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of a junk was met with, and
+12,000 pounds of this wax was found on her. Whalers are said to have
+frequently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in the eastern
+Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 1834 remnants of a junk with
+three Japanese and a cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of
+Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should excuse even a
+rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a reflection upon the Japanese, for
+these Indians are so far from pretty that all who see them agree with
+Captain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that "if they are of the
+Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians change their type the better."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG257" id="ILLO_PG257"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0273.jpg" width="171" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE TSCHUMMUM, OR TOOL USED IN MAKING CANOES</h4>
+
+<p>The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their dugouts do not always
+come off second best in racing with the boats of white men. With a
+primitive yet ingeniously made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> tool, like an adze, in the construction
+of which a blade is tied fast to a bent handle of bone, these natives
+laboriously pick out the heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer
+sides into the form of a boat. When the log is properly hollowed, they
+fill it with water, and then drop in stones which they have heated in a
+fire. Thus they steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and fit
+in the crossbars which keep it strong and preserve its shape. These
+dugouts are sometimes sixty feet long, and are used for whaling and long
+voyages in rough seas. They are capable of carrying tons of the salmon
+or oolachan or herring, of which these people, who live as their fathers
+did, catch sufficient in a few days for their maintenance throughout a
+whole year. One gets an idea of the swarms of fish that infest those
+waters by the knowledge that before nets were used the herring and the
+oolachan, or candle-fish were swept into these boats by an implement
+formed by studding a ten-foot pole with spikes or nails. This was swept
+among the fish in the water, and the boats were speedily filled with the
+creatures that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea-otter, otter,
+beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou or moose) were and still are
+the chief resources of most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and
+the peltry to the Huds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>on Bay Company, and ate what parts or surplus they
+did not sell. Now they work in the canneries or fish for them in summer,
+and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, while they still
+fish and sell furs, and while some are yet as their fathers were, nearly
+all the coast Indians are semi-civilized. They have at least the white
+man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have churches; they live in
+houses; they work in canneries. What little there was that was
+picturesque about them has vanished only a few degrees faster than their
+own extinction as a pure race, and they are now a lot of longshoremen.
+What Mr. Duncan did for them in Metlakahtla&mdash;especially in housing the
+families separately&mdash;has not been arrived at even in the reservation at
+Victoria, where one may still see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses
+they prefer, ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight
+families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for which no one can
+hold the white man responsible.</p>
+
+<p>They are a tractable people, and take as kindly to the rudiments of
+civilization, to work, and to co-operation with the whites as the plains
+Indian does to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically but not
+mentally inferior to the plainsman. They carve bowls and spoons of stone
+and bone, and their heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however
+grotesque they may be. They still make them, but they oftener carve
+little ones for white people, just as they make more silver bracelets
+for sale than for wear. They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar
+bark into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In a word,
+they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> were more prone to work at the outset than most Indians, so that
+the present longshore career of most of them is not greatly to be
+wondered at.</p>
+
+<p>To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or
+journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the
+mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes
+impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the
+majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded
+food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not
+well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since
+then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them
+terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scenery which all
+travellers in the province remember. From the railroad they may be seen
+along the Fraser, each grave apparently having a shed built over it, and
+a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. They had various burial
+customs, but a majority buried their dead in this way, with
+queerly-carved or painted sticks above them, where the cross now
+testifies to the work at the "missions." Some Indians marked a man's
+burial-place with his canoe and his gun; some still box their dead and
+leave the boxes on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. Among
+the southern tribes a man's horse was often killed, and its skin decked
+the man's grave; while in the far north it was the custom among the
+Stickeens to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when he died.
+The Indians along the Skeena River cremated their dead, and sometimes
+hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> pole. The Hydahs, the fierce
+natives of certain of the islands, have given up cremation, but they
+used to believe that if they did not burn a man's body their enemies
+would make charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, and
+monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was due to the difference in
+the worldly wealth of the Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and
+the woodsmen could only afford one apiece.</p>
+
+<p>To return to their canoes, which most distinguish them. When a dugout is
+hollowed and steamed, a prow and stern are added of separate wood. The
+prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies the boat. It is in
+form like the breast, neck, and bill of a bird, but the head is intended
+to represent that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth is cut
+into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are painted on the sides; bands
+of gay paint are put upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat
+is then painted red or black, with an ornamental line of another color
+along the edge or gunwale. The sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat,
+and propel it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, with
+their fierce heads uplifted before their long, slender bodies, appear
+like great serpents or nondescript marine monsters, yet they are pretty
+and graceful withal. While still holding aloof from the ethnologists'
+contention, I yet may add that a bookseller in Victoria came into the
+possession of a packet of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in
+the interior of China, and on my first visit to the province, nearly
+four years ago, I found, in looking through these views, seve<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>ral Chinese
+boats which were strangely and remarkably like the dugouts of the
+provincial Indians. They were too small in the pictures for it to be
+possible to decide whether they were built up or dug out, but in general
+they were of the same external appearance, and each one bore the
+upraised animal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I could see one
+block away from the bookseller's shop in Victoria. But such are not the
+canoes used by the Indians of the interior. From the Kootenay near our
+border to the Cassiar in the far north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be
+the general native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a sort of
+scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dugouts made of co<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>tton-wood logs.
+They are narrower than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the
+birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, and fit for the
+most dangerous and deft work in threading the rapids which everywhere
+cut up the navigation of the streams of the province into separated
+reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes upon a journey in this
+province, likens these canoes to horse-troughs, but those I saw in the
+Kootenay country were of the shape of those cigars that are pointed at
+both ends.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG261" id="ILLO_PG261"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0277.jpg" width="284" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE FIRST OF THE SALMON RUN, FRASER RIVER</h4>
+
+<p>Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or China or Japan, I do not
+know. My only quest for special information of that character proved
+disappointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is said to have
+studied such matters more deeply and to more purpose than all the
+others, but those who referred me to him cautioned me that he was
+eccentric.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know where these Indians came from, eh?" the <i>savant</i> replied
+to my first question. "Do you know how oyster-shells got on top of the
+Rocky Mountains? You don't, eh? Well, I know a woman who went to a
+dentist's yesterday to have eighteen teeth pulled. Do you know why women
+prefer artificial teeth to those which God has given them? You don't,
+eh? Why, man, you don't know anything."</p>
+
+<p>While we were&mdash;or he was&mdash;conversing, a laboring-man who carried a
+sickle came to the open door, and was asked what he wanted.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p>
+<p>"I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Thistles?" said the <i>savant</i>, disturbed at the interruption. "&mdash;&mdash; the
+thistles! We are talking about Indians."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had left the subject of
+thistles uppermost in the <i>savant's</i> mind, and the conversation took so
+erratic a turn that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard into
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"About thistles," said the <i>savant</i>, laying a gentle hand upon my knee.
+"Do you know that they are the Scotchmen's totems? Many years ago a
+Scotchman, sundered from his native land, must needs set up his totem, a
+thistle, here in this country; and now, sir, the thistle is such a curse
+that I am haled up twice a year and fined for having them in my yard."</p>
+
+<p>But nearly enough has been here said of the native population. Though
+the Indians boast dozens of tribal names, and almost every island on the
+coast and village in the interior seems the home of a separate tribe,
+they will be found much alike&mdash;dirty, greasy, sore-eyed, short-legged,
+and with their unkempt hair cut squarely off, as if a pot had been
+upturned over it to guide the operation. The British Columbians do not
+bother about their tribal divisions, but use the old traders' Chinook
+terms, and call every male a "siwash" and every woman a "klootchman."</p>
+
+<p>Since the highest Canadian authority upon the subject predicts that the
+northern half of the Cordilleran ranges will admit of as high a
+metalliferous development as that of the southern half in our Pacific
+States, it is important to review what has been done in mining, and w<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>hat
+is thought of the future of that industry in the province. It may almost
+be said that the history of gold-mining there is the history of British
+Columbia. Victoria, the capital, was a Hudson Bay post established in
+1843, and Vancouver, Queen Charlotte's, and the other islands, as well
+as the main-land, were of interest to only a few white men as parts of a
+great fur-trading field with a small Indian population. The first nugget
+of gold was found at what is now called Gold Harbor, on the west coast
+of the Queen Charlotte Islands, by an Indian woman, in 1851. A part of
+it, weighing four or five ounces, was taken by the Indians to Fort
+Simpson and sold. The Hudson Bay Company, which has done a little in
+every line of business in its day, sent a brigantine to the spot, and
+found a quartz vein traceable eighty feet, and yielding a high
+percentage of gold. Blasting was begun, and the vessel was loaded with
+ore; but she was lost on the return voyage. An American vessel, ashore
+at Esquimault, near Victoria, was purchased, renamed the <i>Recovery</i>, and
+sent to Gold Harbor with thirty miners, who worked the vein until the
+vessel was loaded and sent to England. News of the mine travelled, and
+in another year a small fleet of vessels came up from San Francisco; but
+the supply was seen to be very limited, and after $20,000 in all had
+been taken out, the field was abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>In 1855 gold was found by a Hudson Bay Company's employ&eacute; at Fort
+Colville, now in Washington State, near the boundary. Some Thompson
+River (B. C.) Indians who went to Walla Walla spread a report there
+that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>gold, like that discovered at Colville, was to be found in the
+valley of the Thompson. A party of Canadians and half-breeds went to the
+region referred to, and found placers nine miles above the mouth of the
+river. By 1858 the news and the authentication of it stirred the miners
+of California, and an astonishing invasion of the virgin province began.
+It is said that in the spring of 1858 more than twenty thousand persons
+reached Victoria from San Francisco by sea, distending the little
+fur-trading post of a few hundred inhabitants into what would even now
+be called a considerable city; a city of canvas, however. Simultaneously
+a third as many miners made their way to the new province on land. But
+the land was covered with mountains and dense forests, the only route to
+its interior for them was the violent, almost boiling, Fraser River, and
+there was nothing on which the lives of this horde of men could be
+sustained. By the end of the year out of nearly thirty thousand
+adventurers only a tenth part remained. Those who did stay worked the
+river bars of the lower Fraser until in five months they had shipped
+from Victoria more than half a million dollars' worth of gold. From a
+historical point of view it is a peculiar coincidence that in 1859, when
+the attention of the world was thus first attracted to this new country,
+the charter of the Hudson Bay Company expired, and the territory passed
+from its control to become like any other crown colony.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG266" id="ILLO_PG266"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0282.jpg" width="317" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>INDIAN SALMON-FISHING IN THE THRASHER</h4>
+
+<p>In 1860 the gold-miners, seeking the source of the "flour" gold they
+found in such abundance in the bed of the river, pursued their search
+into the heart and almost the cent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>re of that forbidding and unbroken
+territory. The Quesnel River became the seat of their operations. Two
+years later came another extraordinary immigration. This was not
+surprising, for 1500 miners had in one year (1861) taken out $2,000,000
+in gold-dust from certain creeks in what is called the Cariboo District<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>,
+and one can imagine (if one does not remember) what fabulous tales were
+based upon this fact. The second stampede was of persons from all over
+the world, but chiefly from England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
+After that there were new "finds" almost every year, and the miners
+worked gradually northward until, about 1874, they had travelled through
+the province, in at one end and out at the other, and were working the
+tributaries of the Yukon River in the north, beyond the 60th parallel.
+Mr. Dawson estimates that the total yield of gold between 1858 and 1888
+was $54,108,804; the average number of miners employed each year was
+2775, and the average earnings per man per year were $622.</p>
+
+<p>In his report, published by order of Parliament, Mr. Dawson says that
+while gold is so generally distributed over the province that scarcely a
+stream of any importance fails to show at least "colors" of the metal,
+the principal discoveries clearly indicate that the most important
+mining districts are in the systems of mountains and high plateaus lying
+to the south-west of the Rocky Mountains and parallel in direction with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>This mountain system next to and south-west of the Rockies is called,
+for convenience, the Gold Range, but it comprises a complex belt "of
+several more or less distinct and partly overlapping ranges"&mdash;the
+Purcell, Selkirk, and Columbia ranges in the south, and in the north the
+Cariboo, Omenica, and Cassiar ranges. "This series or system
+constitutes the most important metalliferous belt of the province. The
+richest gol<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>d fields are closely related to it, and discoveries of
+metalliferous lodes are reported in abundance from all parts of it which
+have been explored. The deposits already made known are very varied in
+character, including highly argentiferous galenas and other silver ores
+and auriferous quartz veins." This same authority asserts that the Gold
+Range is continued by the Cabinet, Coeur d'Alene, and Bitter Root
+mountains in our country. While there is no single well-developed gold
+field as in California, the extent of territory of a character to
+occasion a hopeful search for gold is greater in the province than in
+California. The average man of business to whom visitors speak of the
+mining prospects of the province is apt to declare that all that has
+been lacking is the discovery of one grand mine and the enlistment of
+capital (from the United States, they generally say) to work it. Mr.
+Dawson speaks to the same point, and incidentally accounts for the
+retarded development in his statement that one noteworthy difference
+between practically the entire area of the province and that of the
+Pacific States has been occasioned by the spread and movement of ice
+over the province during the glacial period. This produced changes in
+the distribution of surface materials and directions of drainage,
+concealed beneath "drifts" the indications to which prospectors farther
+south are used to trust, and by other means obscured the outcrops of
+veins which would otherwise be well marked. The dense woods, the broken
+navigation of the rivers, in detached reaches, the distance from the
+coast of the richest districts, and the cost of labor supplies and
+machinery&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>ll these are additional and weighty reasons for the slowness
+of development. But this was true of the past and is not of the present,
+at least so far as southern British Columbia is concerned. Railroads are
+reaching up into it from our country and down from the transcontinental
+Canadian Railway, and capital, both Canadian and American, is rapidly
+swelling an already heavy investment in many new and promising mines.
+Here it is silver-mining that is achieving importance.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG269" id="ILLO_PG269"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0285.jpg" width="679" height="378" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>GOING TO THE POTLATCH&mdash;BIG CANOE, NORTH-WEST COAST</h4>
+
+<p>Other ores are found in the province. The iron which has been located or
+worked is principally on the islands&mdash;Queen Charlotte, Vancouver,
+Texada, and the Walker group. Most of the ores are magnetites, and that
+which alone has been worked&mdash;on Texada Island&mdash;is of excellent quality.
+The output of copper from the province is likely soon to become
+considerable. Masses of it have been found from time to time in various
+parts of the province&mdash;in the Vancouver series of islands, on the
+main-land coast, and in the interior. Its constant and rich association
+with silver shows lead to be abundant in the country, but it needs the
+development of transport facilities to give it value. Platinum is more
+likely to attain importance as a product in this than in any other part
+of North America. On the coast the granites are of such quality and
+occur in such abundance as to lead to the belief that their quarrying
+will one day be an important source of income, and there are marbles,
+sandstones, and ornamental stones of which the same may be said.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span></p>
+<p>One of the most valuable products of the province is coal, the essential
+in which our Pacific coast States are the poorest. The white man's
+attention was first attracted to this coal in 1835 by some Indians who
+brought lumps of it from Vancouver Island to the Hudson Bay post on the
+main-land, at Milbank Sound. The <i>Beaver</i>, the first steamship that
+stirred the waters of the Pacific, reached the province in 1836, and
+used coal that was found in outcroppings on the island beach. Thirteen
+years later the great trading company brought out a Scotch coal-miner to
+look into the character and extent of the coal find, and he was followed
+by other miners and the necessary apparatus for prosecuting the inquiry.
+In the mean time the present chief source of supply at Nanaimo, seventy
+miles from Victoria and about opposite Vancouver, was discovered, and in
+1852 mining was begun in earnest. From the very outset the chief market
+for the coal was found to be San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>The original mines are now owned by the Vancouver Coal-mining and Land
+Company. Near them are the Wellington Mines, which began to be worked in
+1871. Both have continued in active operation from their foundation, and
+with a constantly and rapidly growing output. A third source of supply
+has very recently been established with local and American capital in
+what is called the Comox District, back of Baynes Sound, farther north
+than Nanaimo, on the eastern side of Vancouver Island. These new works
+are called the Union Mines, and, if the predictions of my informants
+prove true, will produce an output equal to that of the older Nanaimo
+collieries combined. In 1884 the coal shipped from Nanaimo amounted t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>o
+1000 tons for every day of the year, and in 1889 the total shipment had
+reached 500,000 tons. As to the character of the coal, I quote again
+from Mr. Dawson's report on the minerals of British Columbia, published
+by the Dominion Government:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Rocks of cretaceous age are developed over a considerable area
+in British Columbia, often in very great thickness, and fuels
+occur in them in important quantity in at least two distinct
+stages, of which the lower and older includes the coal measures
+of the Queen Charlotte Islands and those of Quatsino Sound on
+Vancouver Island, with those of Crow Nest Pass in the Rocky
+Mountains; the upper, the coal measures of Nanaimo and Comox,
+and probably also those of Suquash and other localities. The
+lower rocks hold both anthracite and bituminous coal in the
+Queen Charlotte Islands, but elsewhere contain bituminous coal
+only. The upper have so far been found to yield bituminous coal
+only. The fuels of the tertiary rocks are, generally speaking,
+lignites, but include also various fuels intermediate between
+these and true coals, which in a few places become true
+bituminous coals."</p></div>
+
+<p>It is thought to be more than likely that the Comox District may prove
+far more productive than the Nanaimo region. It is estimated that
+productive measures underlie at least 300 square miles in the Comox
+District, exclusive of what may extend beyond the shore. The Nanaimo
+area is estimated at 200 square miles, and the product is no better
+than, if it equals, that of the Comox District.</p>
+
+<p>Specimens of good coal have been found on the main-land in the region of
+the upper Skeena River, on the British Columbia water-shed of the
+Rockies near Crow Nest Pass, and in the country adjacent to the Peace
+River in the eastern part of the province. Anthracite which compares
+favorably with that of Pennsylvania has be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>en found at Cowgitz, Queen
+Charlotte Islands. In 1871 a mining company began work upon this coal,
+but abandoned it, owing to difficulties that were encountered. It is now
+believed that these miners did not prove the product to be of an
+unprofitable character, and that farther exploration is fully justified
+by what is known of the field. Of inferior forms of coal there is every
+indication of an abundance on the main-land of the province. "The
+tertiary or Laramie coal measures of Puget Sound and Bellingham Bay" (in
+the United States) "are continuous north of the international boundary,
+and must underlie nearly 18,000 square miles of the low country about
+the estuary of the Fraser and in the lower part of its valley." It is
+quite possible, since the better coals of Nanaimo and Comox are in
+demand in the San Francisco market, even at their high price and with
+the duty added, that these lignite fields may be worked for local
+consumption.</p>
+
+<p>Already the value of the fish caught in the British Columbian waters is
+estimated at $5,000,000 a year, and yet the industry is rather at its
+birth than in its infancy. All the waters in and near the province
+fairly swarm with fish. The rivers teem with them, the straits and
+fiords and gulfs abound with them, the ocean beyond is freighted with an
+incalculable weight of living food, which must soon be distributed among
+the homes of the civilized world. The principal varieties of fish are
+the salmon, cod, shad, white-fish, bass, flounder, skate, sole, halibut,
+sturgeon, oolachan, herring, trout, haddock, smelts, anchovies,
+dog-fish, perch, sardines, oysters, crayfish shrimps, crabs, an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>d
+mussels. Of other denizens of the water, the whale, sea-otter, and seal
+prove rich prey for those who search for them.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG275" id="ILLO_PG275"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0291.jpg" width="386" height="378" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE SALMON CACHE</h4>
+
+<p>The main salmon rivers are the Fraser, Skeena, and Nasse rivers, but the
+fish also swarm in the inlets into which smaller streams empty. The
+Nimkish, on Vancouver Island, is also a salmon stream. Setting aside
+the stor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>ies of water so thick with salmon that a man might walk upon
+their backs, as well as that tale of the stage-coach which was upset by
+salmon banking themselves against it when it was crossing a
+fording-place, there still exist absolutely trustworthy accounts of
+swarms which at their height cause the largest rivers to seem alive with
+these fish. In such cases the ripple of their back fins frets the entire
+surface of the stream. I have seen photographs that show the fish in
+incredible numbers, side by side, like logs in a raft, and I have the
+word of a responsible man for the statement that he has gotten all the
+salmon needed for a small camp, day after day, by walking to the edge of
+a river and jerking the fish out with a common poker.</p>
+
+<p>There are about sixteen canneries on the Fraser, six on the Skeena,
+three on the Nasse, and three scattered in other waters&mdash;River Inlet and
+Alert Bay. The total canning in 1889 was 414,294 cases, each of 48
+one-pound tins. The fish are sold to Europe, Australia, and eastern
+Canada. The American market takes the Columbia River Salmon. Around
+$1,000,000 is invested in the vessels, nets, trawls, canneries,
+oil-factories, and freezing and salting stations used in this industry
+in British Columbia, and about 5500 men are employed. "There is no
+difficulty in catching the fish," says a local historian, "for in some
+streams they are so crowded that they can readily be picked out of the
+water by hand." However, gill-nets are found to be preferable, and the
+fish are caught in these, which are stretched across the streams, and
+handled by men in flat-bottomed boats. The fish are loaded into scows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+and transported to the canneries, usually frame structures built upon
+piles close to the shores of the rivers. In the canneries the tins are
+made, and, as a rule, saw-mills near by produce the wood for the
+manufacture of the packing-cases. The fish are cleaned, rid of their
+heads and tails, and then chopped up and loaded into the tins by
+Chinamen and Indian women. The tins are then boiled, soldered, tested,
+packed, and shipped away. The industry is rapidly extending, and fresh
+salmon are now being shipped, frozen, to the markets of eastern America
+and England. My figures for 1889 (obtained from the Victoria <i>Times</i>)
+are in all likelihood under the mark for the season of 1890. The coast
+is made ragged by inlets, and into nearly every one a watercourse
+empties. All the larger streams are the haven of salmon in the spawning
+season, and in time the principal ones will be the bases of canning
+operations.</p>
+
+<p>The Dominion Government has founded a salmon hatchery on the Fraser,
+above New Westminster. It is under the supervision of Thomas Mowat,
+Inspector of Fisheries, and millions of small fry are now annually
+turned into the great river. Whether the unexampled run of 1889 was in
+any part due to this process cannot be said, but certainly the salmon
+are not diminishing in numbers. It was feared that the refuse from the
+canneries would injure the "runs" of live fish, but it is now believed
+that there is a profit to be derived from treating the refuse for oil
+and guano, so that it is more likely to be saved than thrown back into
+the streams in the near future.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span></p>
+<p>The oolachan, or candle-fish, is a valuable product of these waters,
+chiefly of the Fraser and Nasse rivers. They are said to be delicious
+when fresh, smoked, or salted, and I have it on the authority of the
+little pamphlet "British Columbia," handed me by a government official,
+that "their oil is considered superior to cod-liver oil, or any other
+fish-oil known." It is said that this oil is whitish, and of the
+consistency of thin lard. It is used as food by the natives, and is an
+article of barter between the coast Indians and the tribes of the
+interior. There is so much of it in a candle-fish of ordinary size that
+when one of them is dried, it will burn like a candle. It is the custom
+of the natives on the coast to catch the fish in immense numbers in
+purse-nets. They then boil them in iron-bottomed bins, straining the
+product in willow baskets, and running the oil into cedar boxes holding
+fifteen gallons each. The Nasse River candle-fish are the best. They
+begin running in March, and continue to come by the million for a period
+of several weeks.</p>
+
+<p>Codfish are supposed to be very plentiful, and to frequent extensive
+banks at sea, but these shoals have not been explored or charted by the
+Government, and private enterprise will not attempt the work. Similar
+banks off the Alaska coast are already the resorts of California
+fishermen, who drive a prosperous trade in salting large catches there.
+The skil, or black cod, formerly known as the "coal-fish," is a splendid
+deep-water product. These cod weigh from eight to twenty pounds, and
+used to be caught by the Indians with hook and line. Already white men
+are driving the Indians out by superior methods. Trawls of 300 hooks a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>re
+used, and the fish are found to be plentiful, especially off the west
+coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The fish is described as superior
+to the cod of Newfoundland in both oil and meat. The general market is
+not yet accustomed to it, but such a ready sale is found for what are
+caught that the number of vessels engaged in this fishing increases year
+by year. It is evident that the catch of skil will soon be an important
+source of revenue to the province.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG279" id="ILLO_PG279"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0295.jpg" width="807" height="314" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>AN IDEAL OF THE COAST</h4>
+
+<p>Herring are said to be plentiful, but no fleet is yet fitted out for
+them. Halibut are numerous and common. They are often of very great
+size. Sturgeon are found in the Fraser, whither they chase the salmon.
+One weighing 1400 pounds was exhibited in Victoria a few years ago, and
+those that weigh more than half as much are not unfrequently captured.
+The following is a report of the yield and value of the fisheries of the
+province for 1889:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox">
+<table summary="Fish" width="70%">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Kind of Fish.</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">Quantity.</td>
+<td class="tdr">Value.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Salmon in cans</td>
+<td class="tdr">lbs.</td>
+<td class="tdr">20,122,128</td>
+<td class="tdr">$2,414,655 36</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr">lbs.</td>
+<td class="tdr">2,187,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">218,700 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;salted</td>
+<td class="tdr">bbls.</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,749</td>
+<td class="tdr">37,460 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;smoked</td>
+<td class="tdr">lbs.</td>
+<td class="tdr">12,900</td>
+<td class="tdr">2,580 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Sturgeon, fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">318,600</td>
+<td class="tdr">15,930 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Halibut,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">605,050</td>
+<td class="tdr">30,152 50</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Herring,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">190,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">9,500 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;smoked</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">33,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,300 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Oolachans,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">82,500</td>
+<td class="tdr">8,250 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">6,700</td>
+<td class="tdr">1,340 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;salted</td>
+<td class="tdr">bbls.</td>
+<td class="tdr">380</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,800 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Trout, fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr">lbs.</td>
+<td class="tdr">14,025</td>
+<td class="tdr">1,402 50</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Fish, assorted</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">322,725</td>
+<td class="tdr">16,136 25</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Smelts, fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">52,100</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,126 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Rock cod</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">39,250</td>
+<td class="tdr">1,962 50</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Skil, salted</td>
+<td class="tdr">bbls.</td>
+<td class="tdr">1,560</td>
+<td class="tdr">18,720 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Fooshqua, fresh</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">268,350</td>
+<td class="tdr">13,417 50</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Fur seal-skins</td>
+<td class="tdr">No.</td>
+<td class="tdr">33,570</td>
+<td class="tdr">335,700 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Hair&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"</td>
+<td class="tdr">"&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">7,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">5,250 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Sea-otter skins</td>
+<td class="tdr">"&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">115</td>
+<td class="tdr">11,500 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Fish oil</td>
+<td class="tdr">gals.</td>
+<td class="tdr">141,420</td>
+<td class="tdr">70,710 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Oysters</td>
+<td class="tdr">sacks</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">5,250 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Clams</td>
+<td class="tdr">"&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">3,500</td>
+<td class="tdr">5,250 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Mussels</td>
+<td class="tdr">"&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">250</td>
+<td class="tdr">500 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Crabs</td>
+<td class="tdr">No.</td>
+<td class="tdr">175,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">5,250 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Abelones</td>
+<td class="tdr">boxes</td>
+<td class="tdr">100</td>
+<td class="tdr">500 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Isinglass</td>
+<td class="tdr">lbs.</td>
+<td class="tdr">5,000</td>
+<td class="tdr">1,750 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Estimated fish consumed in province</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">100,000 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Shrimps, prawns, etc.</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">5,000 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Estimated consumption by Indians&mdash;</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Salmon</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">2,732,500 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Halibut</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">190,000 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sturgeon and other fish</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">260,000 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fish oils</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">75,000 00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Approximate yield</td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdr">$6,605,467 61</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<p>
++&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+<br />
+|      Kind of Fish.       | Quantity.  |    Value.       |<br />
+|                          |            |                 |<br />
+|&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+<br />
+|                          |            |                 |<br />
+| Salmon in cans      lbs. | 20,122,128 |  $2,414,655 36  |<br />
+|    "   fresh        lbs. |  2,187,000 |     218,700 00  |<br />
+|    "   salted      bbls. |      3,749 |      37,460 00  |<br />
+|    "   smoked       lbs. |     12,900 |       2,580 00  |<br />
+| Sturgeon, fresh          |    318,600 |      15,930 00  |<br />
+| Halibut,    "            |    605,050 |      30,152 50  |<br />
+| Herring,    "            |    190,000 |       9,500 00  |<br />
+|   "    smoked            |     33,000 |       3,300 00  |<br />
+| Oolachans,  "            |     82,500 |       8,250 00  |<br />
+|   "     fresh            |      6,700 |       1,340 00  |<br />
+|   "    salted      bbls. |        380 |       3,800 00  |<br />
+| Trout, fresh        lbs. |     14,025 |       1,402 50  |<br />
+| Fish, assorted           |    322,725 |      16,136 25  |<br />
+| Smelts, fresh            |     52,100 |       3,126 00  |<br />
+| Rock cod                 |     39,250 |       1,962 50  |<br />
+| Skil, salted       bbls. |      1,560 |      18,720 00  |<br />
+| Fooshqua, fresh          |    268,350 |      13,417 50  |<br />
+| Fur seal-skins       No. |     33,570 |     335,700 00  |<br />
+| Hair    "             "  |      7,000 |       5,250 00  |<br />
+| Sea-otter skins       "  |        115 |      11,500 00  |<br />
+| Fish oil           gals. |    141,420 |      70,710 00  |<br />
+| Oysters            sacks |      3,000 |       5,250 00  |<br />
+| Clams                 "  |      3,500 |       6,125 00  |<br />
+| Mussels               "  |        250 |         500 00  |<br />
+| Crabs                No. |    175,000 |       5,250 00  |<br />
+| Abelones           boxes |        100 |         500 00  |<br />
+| Isinglass           lbs. |      5,000 |       1,750 00  |<br />
++&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;+                 |<br />
+| Estimated fish consumed in province   |     100,000 00  |<br />
+| Shrimps, prawns, etc.                 |       5,000 00  |<br />
+| Estimated consumption by Indians&mdash;    |                 |<br />
+|    Salmon                             |   2,732,500 00  |<br />
+|    Halibut                            |     190,000 00  |<br />
+|    Sturgeon and other fish            |     260,000 00  |<br />
+|    Fish oils                          |      75,000 00  |<br />
++&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+<br />
+|        Approximate yield              |  $6,605,467 61  |<br />
++&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>When it is considered that this is the showing of one of the newest
+communities on the continent, numbering only the population of what we
+would call a small city, suffering for want of capital and nearly all
+that capital brings with it, there is no longer occasion for surprise
+at the provincial boast that they posses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>s far more extensive and richer
+fishing-fields than any on the Atlantic coast. Time and enterprise will
+surely test this assertion, but it is already evident that there is a
+vast revenue to be wrested from those waters.</p>
+
+<p>I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded $236,000 in 1887, and
+may yet be decided to be exclusively an American and not a British
+Columbian source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the extraction of
+oil from herrings and from dog-fish and whales, all of which are small
+channels of revenue.</p>
+
+<p>I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a civil engineer of
+high repute who has explored the greater part of southern British
+Columbia&mdash;at least in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and
+mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not to place too high a
+value upon the printed matter put forth in praise of any new country, I
+was especially pleased to obtain this man's practical impressions
+concerning the store and quality and kinds of timber the province
+contains. He said, not to use his own words, that timber is found all
+the way back from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most
+plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of those mountains and on
+the west slope of the Coast Range. The very largest trees are between
+the Coast Range and the coast. The country between the Rocky Mountains
+and the Coast Range is dry by comparison with the parts where the timber
+thrives best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between the
+Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tamaracks reach six and eight
+feet in diameter, and attain a height of 200 feet <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>not infrequently.
+There are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though not very
+many) in this region. There is very little leaf-wood, and no hard-wood.
+Maples are found, to be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than
+trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves westward the same
+timber prevails, but it grows shorter and smaller until the low coast
+country is reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests occur
+again. This coast region is largely a flat country, but there are not
+many miles of it.</p>
+
+<p>To this rule, as here laid down, there are some notable exceptions. One
+particular tree, called there the bull-pine&mdash;it is the pine of Lake
+Superior and the East&mdash;grows to great size all over the province. It is
+a common thing to find the trunks of these trees measuring four feet in
+diameter, or nearly thirteen feet in circumference. It is not especially
+valuable for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short-lived when
+exposed to the weather, and is therefore not in demand for railroad
+work; but for the ordinary uses to which builders put timber it answers
+very well.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG283" id="ILLO_PG283"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0299.jpg" width="678" height="411" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE POTLATCH</h4>
+
+<p>There is a maple which attains great size at the coast, and which, when
+dressed, closely resembles bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the
+vine-maple. The trees are found with a diameter of two-and-a-half to
+three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above forty or fifty feet. The
+wood is crooked. It runs very badly. This, of course, is what gives it
+the beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner or later,
+find a ready market for it. There is plenty of hemlock i<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>n the province,
+but it is nothing like so large as that which is found in the East, and
+its bark is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for nothing
+larger than railway ties, and the trees grow in such inaccessible
+places, half-way up the mountains, that it is for the most part
+unprofitable to handle it. The red cedars&mdash;the wood of which is consumed
+in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes&mdash;are also small. On the
+other hand, the white cedar reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet
+of thickness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraordinary to
+find these cedars reaching 200 feet above the ground, and one was cut at
+Port Moody, in clearing the way for the railroad, that had a length of
+310 feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the wood of these
+trees is what is consumed, and usually the trunks, hollow and empty,
+stand grimly in their places after the fire would otherwise have been
+forgotten. These great tubes are often of such dimensions that men put
+windows and doors in them and use them for dwellings. In the valleys are
+immense numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood species, white
+birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but they are not estimated in the
+forest wealth of the province, because of the expense that marketing
+them would entail.</p>
+
+<p>This fact concerning the small timber indicates at once the primitive
+character of the country, and the vast wealth it possesses in what might
+be called heroic timber&mdash;that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way
+to market even from out that unopened wilderness. It was the opinion of
+the engineer to whom I have referred that timber <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>land which does not
+attract the second glance of a prospector in British Columbia would be
+considered of the first importance in Maine and New Brunswick. To put it
+in another way, river-side timber land which in those countries would
+fetch fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British Columbia
+would not be taken up. In time it may be cut, undoubtedly it must be,
+when new railroads alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even
+roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests.</p>
+
+<p>A great business is carried on in the shipment of ninety-foot and
+one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to the great car-building works of
+our country and Canada. They are used in the massive bottom frames of
+palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reached in this industry
+is not in the size of the logs, but in the capacities of the saw-mills,
+and in the possibilities of transportation by rail, for these logs
+require three cars to support their length. Except for the valleys, the
+whole vast country is enormously rich in this timber, the mountains
+(excepting the Rockies) being clothed with it from their bases to their
+tops. Vancouver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. It
+bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it has the oak-tree,
+and does not possess the tamarack. The Vancouver Island oaks do not
+exceed two or two-and-a-half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir (our
+Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, especially on the north
+end of the island. In the old offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at
+Vancouver are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across,
+showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was forty feet in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+circumference. Tens of thousands of these firs are from eight to ten
+feet in diameter at the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, the wood of which
+is not very valuable; Englemann's spruce, which is very like white
+spruce, and is very abundant; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in
+diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow cypress;
+crab-apple, occurring as a small tree or shrub; western birch, common in
+the Columbia region; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Vancouver
+Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abundance and of large size in
+the Peace River and upper Fraser regions; dogwood, arbutus, and several
+minor trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance in various
+districts or all over the province are the following: hazel, red elder,
+willow, barberry, wild red cherry, blackberry, yellow plum,
+choke-cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, bearberry, currant, and snowberry,
+mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mulberry, and blueberry.</p>
+
+<p>I would have liked to write at length concerning the enterprising cities
+of the province, but, after all, they may be trusted to make themselves
+known. It is the region behind them which most interests mankind, and
+the Government has begun, none too promptly, a series of expeditions for
+exploiting it. As for the cities, the chief among them and the capital,
+Victoria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its business district
+wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive appearance, and its detached
+dwellings&mdash;all of frame, and of the distinctive type which marks the
+houses of the California<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span> towns&mdash;are surrounded by gardens. It has a
+beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few years it will have spread
+to Esquimault, now less than two miles distant. This is now the seat of
+a British admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose water is of
+a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At Esquimault are government
+offices, churches, schools, hotels, stores, a naval "canteen," and a
+dry-dock 450 feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its entrance.
+The electric street railroad of Victoria was extended to Esquimault in
+the autumn of 1890. Of the climate of Victoria Lord Lorne said, "It is
+softer and more constant than that of the south of England."</p>
+
+<p>Vancouver, the principal city of the main-land, is slightly smaller than
+Victoria, but did not begin to displace the forest until 1886. After
+that every house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it boasts a
+hotel comparable in most important respects with any in Canada, many
+noble business buildings of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches,
+a really great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a notable
+system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The Canadian Pacific Railway
+terminates here, and so does the line of steamers for China and Japan.
+The city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an arm of Burrard
+Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights, and shows no sign of halting its
+hitherto rapid growth. Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still
+smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more than naming.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p>
+<p>In the original settlements in that territory a peculiar institution
+occasioned gala times for the red men now and then. This was the
+"potlatch," a thing to us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is
+begotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its meaning. It is a
+feast and merrymaking at the expense of some man who has earned or saved
+what he deems considerable wealth, and who desires to distribute every
+iota of it at once in edibles and drinkables among the people of his
+tribe or village. He does this because he aspires to a chieftainship, or
+merely for the credit of a "potlatch"&mdash;a high distinction. Indians have
+been known to throw away such a sum of money that their "potlatch" has
+been given in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have been
+both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and ornaments have been
+distributed in addition to the feast.</p>
+
+<p>The custom has a new significance now. It is the white man who is to
+enjoy a greater than all previous potlatches in that region. The
+treasure has been garnered during the ages by time or nature or
+whatsoever you may call the host, and the province itself is offered as
+the feast.</p>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_NINE" id="CHAPTER_NINE"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>DAN DUNN'S OUTFIT</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>t Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in British Columbia, a
+small white steamboat, built on the spot, and exposing a single great
+paddle-wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her still few
+trips through a wilderness that, but for her presence, would be as
+completely primitive as almost any in North America. Her route lay down
+the Columbia River a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles to a
+point called Sproat's Landing, where some rapids interrupt navigation.
+The main load upon the steamer's deck was of steel rails for a railroad
+that was building into a new mining region in what is called the
+Kootenay District, just north of our Washington and Idaho. The sister
+range to the Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the new
+highway, which would then connect the valley of the Columbia with the
+Kootenay River. There was a temptation beyond the mere chance to join
+the first throng that pushed open a gateway and began the breaking of a
+trail in a brand-new country. There was to be witnessed the propulsion
+of civilization beyond old confines by steam-power, and this required
+railroad building in the Rockies, where that science finds its most
+formidable problems. And around and through all that was being done
+pressed a new population, made up of many of the elements that produced
+our old-time border life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span> and gave birth to some of the most picturesque
+and exciting chapters in American History.</p>
+
+<p>It should be understood that here in the very heart of British Columbia
+only the watercourses have been travelled, and there was neither a
+settlement nor a house along the Columbia in that great reach of its
+valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific Railway, except at
+the landing at which this boat stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Over all the varying scene, as the boat ploughed along, hung a mighty
+silence; for almost the only life on the deep wooded sides of the
+mountains was that of stealthy game. At only two points were any human
+beings lodged, and these were wood-choppers who supplied the fuel for
+the steamer&mdash;a Chinaman in one place, and two or three white men farther
+on. In this part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens in two
+long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more than two miles wide and
+twenty to thirty miles in length. Their prodigious towering walls are
+densely wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. The forest
+growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance crowds it beyond the edge of
+the grand stream in the fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose
+roots are bedded in the soft mass of centuries of forest d&eacute;bris.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the journey the clerk of the steamer told me that wild animals
+were frequently seen crossing the river ahead of the vessel; bear, he
+said, and deer and elk and porcupine. When I left him to go to my
+state-room and dress for the rough journey ahead of me, he came to my
+door, calling in excited tones for me to come ou<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>t on the deck. "There's
+a big bear ahead!" he cried, and as he spoke I saw the black head of the
+animal cleaving the quiet water close to the nearer shore. Presently
+Bruin's feet touched the bottom, and he bounded into the bush and
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>The scenery was superb all the day, but at sundown nature began to revel
+in a series of the most splendid and spectacular effects. For an hour a
+haze had clothed the more distant mountains as with a transparent veil,
+rendering the view dream-like and soft beyond description. But as the
+sun sank to the summit of the uplifted horizon it began to lavish the
+most intense colors upon all the objects in view. The snowy peaks turned
+to gaudy prisms as of crystal, the wooded summits became impurpled, the
+nearer hills turned a deep green, and the tranquil lake assumed a bright
+pea-color. Above all else, the sky was gorgeous. Around its western edge
+it took on a rose-red blush that blended at the zenith with a deep blue,
+in which were floating little clouds of amber and of flame-lit pearl.</p>
+
+<p>A moonless night soon closed around the boat, and in the morning we were
+at Sproat's Landing, a place two months old. The village consisted of a
+tiny cluster of frame-houses and tents perched on the edge of the steep
+bank of the Columbia. One building was the office and storehouse of the
+projected railroad, two others were general trading stores, one was the
+hotel, and the other habitations were mainly tents.</p>
+
+<p>I firmly believe there never was a hotel like the hostlery there. In a
+general way its design was an adaptation of the p<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>lan of a hen-coop.
+Possibly a box made of gridirons suggests more clearly the principle of
+its construction. It was two stories high, and contained about a baker's
+dozen of rooms, the main one being the bar-room, of course. After the
+framework had been finished, there was perhaps half enough "slab" lumber
+to sheathe the outside of the house, and this had been made to serve for
+exterior and interior walls, and the floors and ceilings besides. The
+consequence was that a flock of gigantic canaries might have been kept
+in it with propriety, but as a place of abode for human beings it
+compared closely with the Brooklyn Bridge.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG293" id="ILLO_PG293"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0309.jpg" width="732" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>AN INDIAN CANOE ON THE COLUMBIA</h4>
+
+<p>They have in our West many very frail hotels that the people call
+"telephone houses," because a tenant can hear in every room whatever is
+spoken in any part of the building; but in this house one could stand
+in any room a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>nd see into all the others. A clergyman and his wife
+stopped in it on the night before I arrived, and the good woman stayed
+up until nearly daylight, pinning papers on the walls and laying them on
+the floor until she covered a corner in which to prepare for bed.</p>
+
+<p>I hired a room and stored my traps in it, but I slept in one of the
+engineers' tents, and met with a very comical adventure. The tent
+contained two cots, and a bench on which the engineer, who occupied one
+of the beds, had heaped his clothing. Supposing him to be asleep, I
+undressed quietly, blew out the candle, and popped into my bed. As I did
+so one pair of its legs broke down, and it naturally occurred to me, at
+almost the same instant, that the bench was of about the proper height
+to raise the fallen end of the cot to the right level.</p>
+
+<p>"Broke down, eh?" said my companion&mdash;a man, by-the-way, whose face I
+have never yet seen.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I replied. "Can I put your clothing on the floor and make use of
+that bench?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, that you can."</p>
+
+<p>So out of bed I leaped, put his apparel in a heap on the floor, and ran
+the bench under my bed. It proved to be a neat substitute for the broken
+legs, and I was quickly under the covers again and ready for sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The engineer's voice roused me.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I call the beauty of a head-piece," he said. Presently he
+repeated the remark.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you speaking to me?" I asked.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>
+<p>"Yes; I'm saying that's what I call the beauty of a head-piece. It's
+wonderful; and many's the day and night I'll think of it, if I live.
+What do I mean? Why, I mean that that is what makes you Americans such a
+great people&mdash;it's the beauty of having head-pieces on your shoulders.
+It's so easy to think quick if you've got something to think with. Here
+you are, and your bed breaks down. What would I do? Probably nothing.
+I'd think what a beastly scrape it was, and I'd keep on thinking till I
+went to sleep. What do you do? Why, as quick as a flash you says,
+'Hello, here's a go!' 'May I have the bench?' says you. 'Yes,' says I.
+Out of bed you go, and you clap the bench under the bed, and there you
+are, as right as a trivet. That's the beauty of a head-piece, and that's
+what makes America the wonderful country she is."</p>
+
+<p>Never was a more sincere compliment paid to my country, and I am glad I
+obtained it so easily.</p>
+
+<p>There was a barber pole in front of the house, set up by a "prospector"
+who had run out of funds (and everything else except hope), and who,
+like all his kind, had stopped to "make a few dollars" wherewith to
+outfit again and continue his search for gold. He noted the local need
+of a barber, and instantly became one by purchasing a razor on credit,
+and painting a pole while waiting for custom. He was a jocular fellow&mdash;a
+born New Yorker, by-the-way.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't shave me close," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Close?" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest victim I've slashed yet if
+I get off any of your beard at all. How's the razor?"</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+<p>"All right."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, it ain't," said he; "you're setting your nerves to stand it,
+so's not to be called a tender-foot. I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend
+bar when I bumped up agin this place. If you could see the blood
+streaming down your face you'd faint."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his self-depreciation, he performed as artistic and painless
+an operation as I ever sat through.</p>
+
+<p>While I was being shaved the loungers in the barber-shop entered into a
+conversation that revealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the
+deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen cackled out-of-doors,
+and the loungers fell to questioning one another as to which hen had
+laid an egg.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be the black one," said the barber.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky's cackle," said a more
+deliberate and careful speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled un," ventured a third.</p>
+
+<p>"She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber.</p>
+
+<p>"Could it be the bantam?" another inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Thus they discussed with earnestness this most interesting event of the
+morning, until a young man darted into the room with his eyes lighted by
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Bill," said he, almost breathlessly, "that's the speckled hen
+a-cackling, by thunder! She's laid an egg, I guess."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG297" id="ILLO_PG297"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0313.jpg" width="317" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>"YOU'RE SETTING YOUR NERVES TO STAND IT"</h4>
+
+<p>In Sproat's Landing we saw the nucleus of a railroad terminal point. The
+queer hotel was but little more peculiar than many of the people who
+gathered on the single street on pay-day to spend their hard-earned
+money up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>on a great deal of illicit whiskey and a few rude necessaries
+from the limited stock on sale in the stores. There never had been any
+grave disorder there, yet the floating population was as motley a
+collection of the riffraff of the border as one could well imagine, and
+there was only one policeman to enforce the law in a territory the size
+of Rhode Island. He was quite a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>s remarkable in his way as any other
+development of that embryotic civilization. His name was Jack Kirkup,
+and all who knew him spoke of him as being physically the most superb
+example of manhood in the Dominion. Six feet and three inches in height,
+with the chest, neck, and limbs of a giant, his three hundred pounds of
+weight were so exactly his complement as to give him the symmetry of an
+Apollo. He was good-looking, with the beauty of a round-faced,
+good-natured boy, and his thick hair fell in a cluster of ringlets over
+his forehead and upon his neck. No knight of Arthur's circle can have
+been more picturesque a figure in the forest than this "Jack." He was as
+neat as a dandy. He wore high boots and corduroy knickerbockers, a
+flannel shirt and a sack-coat, and rode his big bay horse with the ease
+and grace of a Skobeleff. He smoked like a fire of green brush, but had
+never tasted liquor in his life. In a dozen years he had slept more
+frequently in the open air, upon pebble beds or in trenches in the snow,
+than upon ordinary bedding, and he exhibited, in his graceful movements,
+his sparkling eyes and ruddy cheeks, his massive frame and his
+imperturbable good-nature, a degree of health and vigor that would seem
+insolent to the average New Yorker. Now that the railroad was building,
+he kept ever on the trail, along what was called "the right of
+way"&mdash;going from camp to camp to "jump" whiskey peddlers and gamblers
+and to quell disorder&mdash;except on pay-day, once a month, when he stayed
+at Sproat's Landing.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG299" id="ILLO_PG299"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0315.jpg" width="371" height="405" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>JACK KIRKUP, THE MOUNTAIN SHERIFF</h4>
+
+<p>The echoes of his fearless behavior and lively adventures rang in every
+gathering. The general tenor of the stories was to the ef<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>fect that he
+usually gave one warning to evil-doers, and if they did not heed that he
+"cleaned them out." He carried a revolver, but never had used it. Even
+when the most notorious gambler on our border had crossed over into
+"Jack's" bailiwick the policeman depended upon his fists. He had met the
+gambler and had "advised" him to take the cars next day. The gambler, in
+reply, had suggested that both would get along more quietly if each
+minded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span> his own affairs, whereupon Kirkup had said, "You hear me: take
+the cars out of here to-morrow." The little community (it was Donald, B.
+C., a very rough place at the time) held its breathing for twenty-four
+hours, and at the approach of train-time was on tiptoe with strained
+anxiety. At twenty minutes before the hour the policeman, amiable and
+easy-going as ever in appearance, began a tour of the houses. It was in
+a tavern that he found the gambler.</p>
+
+<p>"You must take the train," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't make me," replied the gambler.</p>
+
+<p>There were no more words. In two minutes the giant was carrying the limp
+body of the ruffian to a wagon, in which he drove him to the jail. There
+he washed the blood off the gambler's face and tidied his collar and
+scarf. From there the couple walked to the cars, where they parted
+amicably.</p>
+
+<p>"I had to be a little rough," said Kirkup to the loungers at the
+station, "because he was armed like a pin-cushion, and I didn't want to
+have to kill him."</p>
+
+<p>We made the journey from Sproat's Landing to the Kootenay River upon a
+sorry quartet of pack-horses that were at other times employed to carry
+provisions and material to the construction camps. They were of the kind
+of horses known all over the West as "cayuses." The word is the name of
+a once notable tribe of Indians in what is now the State of Washington.
+To these Indians is credited the introduction of this small and peculiar
+breed of horses, but many persons in the West think the horses get the
+nickname because of a humorous fancy begotten of their wildness, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>nd
+suggesting that they are only part horses and part coyotes. But all the
+wildness and the characteristic "bucking" had long since been "packed"
+out of these poor creatures, and they needed the whip frequently to urge
+them upon a slow progress. Kirkup was going his rounds, and accompanied
+us on our journey of less than twenty miles to the Kootenay River. On
+the way one saw every stage in the construction of a railway. The
+process of development was reversed as we travelled, because the work
+had been pushed well along where we started, and was but at its
+commencement where we ended our trip. At the landing half a mile or more
+of the railroad had been completed, even to the addition of a locomotive
+and two gondola cars. Beyond the little strip of rails was a long reach
+of graded road-bed, and so the progress of the work dwindled, until at
+last there was little more than the trail-cutters' path to mark what had
+been determined as the "right of way."</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of clearness, I will first explain the steps that are taken
+at the outset in building a railroad, rather than tell what parts of the
+undertaking we came upon in passing over the various "contracts" that
+were being worked in what appeared a confusing and hap-hazard disorder.
+I have mentioned that one of the houses at the landing was the railroad
+company's storehouse, and that near by were the tents of the surveyors
+or civil engineers. The road was to be a branch of the Canadian Pacific
+system, and these engineers were the first men sent into the country,
+with instructions to survey a line to the new mining region,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span> into which
+men were pouring from the older parts of Canada and from our country. It
+was understood by them that they were to hit upon the most direct and at
+the same time the least expensive route for the railroad to take. They
+went to the scene of their labors by canoes, and carried tents,
+blankets, instruments, and what they called their "grub stakes," which
+is to say, their food. Then they travelled over the ground between their
+two terminal points, and back by another route, and back again by still
+another route, and so back and forth perhaps four and possibly six
+times. In that way alone were they enabled to select the line which
+offered the shortest length and the least obstacles in number and degree
+for the workmen who were to come after them.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG303" id="ILLO_PG303"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0319.jpg" width="406" height="596" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY</h4>
+
+<p>At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. Stewart, who is famous
+in his profession as the most tireless and intrepid exponent of its
+difficulties in the Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune to
+be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. It is his custom to
+start out with a blanket, some bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to
+be gone for weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have been a
+hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes and requirements, or one
+possessing in any higher degree the quality called endurance. He has
+spent years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding and exploring
+the various passes, the most direct and feasible routes to and from
+them, the valleys between the ranges, and the characteristics of each
+section of the country. In a vast country that has not otherwise been
+one-third <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>explored he has made himself familiar with the full southern
+half. He has not known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen an
+apple growing upon a tree in many years. During his long and
+close-succeeding trips he has run the whole gamut of the adventures
+incident to the lives of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger,
+exposure, peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes from
+frost and storm and flood that Nature unvanquished visits upon those who
+first brave her depths. Such is the work and such are the men that
+figure in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone beyond a well-settled
+region can form a more or less just estimate of that which one of these
+professional pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I had
+several "tastes," as the Irish express it, of that very Kootenay Valley.
+I can say conscientiously that I never was in a wilder region. In going
+only a few yards from the railroad "right of way" the difficulties of an
+experienced pedestrianism like my own instantly became tremendous. There
+was a particularly choice spot for fishing at a distance of
+three-quarters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled the
+road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would have strengthened the
+<i>Pilgrim's Progress</i> had he known of such conditions with which to
+surround his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion and unsteady
+bowlders no larger than a man's head the ground was all but covered.
+Among this wreckage trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks
+of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as dense as any I ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+saw was formed of soft-wood saplings and bushes, so that it was next to
+impossible to move a yard in any direction. It was out of the question
+for anyone to see three yards ahead, and there was often no telling when
+a foot was put down whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon
+a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows here and there were a
+foot deep or were the mouths of fissures that reached to China. I fished
+too long one night, and was obliged to make that journey after dark.
+After ten minutes crowded with falls and false steps, the task seemed so
+hopelessly impossible that I could easily have been induced to turn back
+and risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide.</p>
+
+<p>It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural conditions which the
+railroad men were overcoming that the gradual steps of their progress
+became most interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, after
+the specifications have been drawn up and the contracts signed, are the
+"right-of-way" men. These are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at
+the heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for the road-bed.
+The trail-cutters are guided by the long line of stakes with which the
+engineers have marked the course the road is to take. The trail-men are
+sent out to cut what in general parlance would be called a path, over
+which supplies are to be thereafter carried to the workmen's camps. The
+path they cut must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage along
+it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load will sometimes consist of
+the framework of a kitchen range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a
+five-foot swath through th<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>e forest is a trail of serviceable width. The
+trail-cutters fell the trees to right and left, and drag the fallen
+trunks out of the path as they go along, travelling and working between
+a mile and two miles each day, and moving their tents and provisions on
+pack-horses as they advance. They keep reasonably close to the projected
+line of the railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding one
+that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller ravines. Great distortions,
+such as hills or gullies, which the railroad must pass through or over,
+the trail men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose tastes
+are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock at almost any angle, like
+flies of larger growth. This trail, when finished, leads from the
+company's storehouse all along the line, and from that storehouse, on
+the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and tools and clothing,
+powder, dynamite, tents, and living utensils, to be used by the workmen,
+their bosses, and the engineers.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the "right-of-way" men. These
+are axemen also. All that they do is to cut the trees down and drag them
+out of the way.</p>
+
+<p>It is when the axemen have cleared the right of way that the first view
+of the railroad in embryo is obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is
+a wide avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little like any
+forest drive that we are accustomed to in the realms of civilization.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG308" id="ILLO_PG308"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0324.jpg" width="279" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>FALLING MONARCHS</h4>
+
+<p>Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards the production of an
+even and level thoroughfare, without protuberanc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>e or depression, and in
+the course of our ride to Dan Dunn's camp on the Kootenay we saw the
+rapidly developing railroad in each phase of its evolution from the
+rough surface of the wilderness. Now we would come upon a long reach of
+finished road-bed on comparatively level ground all ready for the rails,
+with carpenters at work in little gullies which they were spanning with
+timber trestles. Next we would see a battalion of men and dump-carts
+cutting into a hill of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring
+valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and symmetrical wall of
+earth-work, with sloping sides and level top, to bridge the gap between
+hill and hill. Again, we came upon places where men ran towards us
+shouting that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>a "blast" was to be fired. Here was what was called
+"rockwork," where some granite rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was
+being blown to flinders with dynamite.</p>
+
+<p>And so, through all these scenes upon the pack-trail, we came at last to
+a white camp of tents hidden in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest,
+and nestling beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water flecked
+with the foam from an eternal battle with a myriad of sunken rocks. It
+was Dunn's headquarters&mdash;the construction camp. Evening was falling, and
+the men were clambering down the hill-side trails from their work. There
+was no order in the disposition of the tents, nor had the forest been
+prepared for them. Their white sides rose here and there wherever there
+was a space between the trees, as if so many great white moths had
+settled in a garden. Huge trees had been felled and thrown across
+ravines to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and at the
+river's edge two or three tents seemed to have been pushed over the
+steep bluff to find lodgement on the sandy beach beside the turbulent
+stream.</p>
+
+<p>There were other camps on the line of this work, and it is worth while
+to add a word about their management and the system under which they
+were maintained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be the outfit
+of a contractor. The whole work of building a railroad is let out in
+contracts for portions of five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great
+jobs of seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one piece, it
+is customary for the contractor to divide his task and sublet it. But a
+fairly representative bit of mountain work is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span> that which I found Dan
+Dunn superintending, as the factotum of the contractor who undertook it.</p>
+
+<p>If a contractor acts as "boss" himself, he stays upon the ground; but in
+this case the contractor had other undertakings in hand. Hence the
+presence of Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. Dunn is a man
+of means, and is himself a contractor by profession, who has worked his
+way up from a start as a laborer.</p>
+
+<p>The camp to which we came was a portable city, complete except for its
+lack of women. It had its artisans, its professional men, its store and
+workshops, its seat of government and officers, and its policeman, its
+amusement hall, its work-a-day and social sides. Its main peculiarity
+was that its boss (for it was like an American city in the possession of
+that functionary also) had announced that he was going to move it a
+couple of miles away on the following Sunday. One tent was the
+stableman's, with a capacious "corral" fenced in near by for the keeping
+of the pack horses and mules. His corps of assistants was a large one;
+for, besides the pack-horses that connected the camp with the outer
+world, he had the keeping of all the "grade-horses," so called&mdash;those
+which draw the stone and dirt carts and the little dump-cars on the
+false tracks set up on the levels near where "filling" or "cutting" is
+to be done. Another tent was the blacksmith's. He had a "helper," and
+was a busy man, charged with all the tool-sharpening, the care of all
+the horses' feet, and the repairing of all the iron-work of the wagons,
+cars, and dirt-scrapers. Near by was the harness-man's t<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>ent, the shop of
+the leather-mender. In the centre of the camp, like a low citadel, rose
+a mound of logs and earth bearing on a sign the single word "Powder,"
+but containing within its great sunken chamber a considerable store of
+various explosives&mdash;giant, black, and Judson powder, and dynamite.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG311" id="ILLO_PG311"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0327.jpg" width="198" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>DAN DUNN ON HIS WORKS</h4>
+
+<p>More tremendous force is used in railroad blasting than most persons
+imagine. In order to perform a quick job of removing a section of solid
+mountain, the drill-men, after making a bore, say, twenty feet in depth,
+begin what they call "springing" it by exploding little cartridges in
+the bottom of the drill hole until they have produced a considerable
+chamber there. The average amount of explosive for which they thus
+prepare a place is 40 or 50 kegs of giant powder and 10 kegs of black
+powder; but Dunn told me he had seen 280 kegs of black powder and 500
+pounds of dynamite used in a single blast in mountain work.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another tent was that of the time-keeper. He journeyed twice a day all
+over the work, five miles up and five down. On one journey he noted what
+men were at labor in the forenoon, and on his return he tallied those
+who were entitled to pay for the second half of the day. Such an
+official knows the name of every laborer, and, moreover, he knows the
+pecuniary rating of each man, so that when the workmen stop him to order
+shoes or trousers, blankets, shirts, tobacco, penknives, or what not, he
+decides upon his own responsibility whether they have sufficient money
+coming to them to meet the accommodation.</p>
+
+<p>The "store" was simply another tent. In it was kept a fair supply of the
+articles in constant demand&mdash;a supply brought from the headquarters
+store at the other end of the trail, and constantly replenished by the
+pack-horses. This trading-place was in charge of a man called "the
+book-keeper," and he had two or three clerks to assist him. The stock
+was precisely like that of a cross-roads country store in one of our
+older States. Its goods included simple medicines, boots, shoes,
+clothing, cutlery, tobacco, cigars, pipes, hats and caps, blankets,
+thread and needles, and several hundred others among the ten thousand
+necessaries of a modern laborer's life. The only legal tender received
+there took the shape of orders written by the time-keeper, for the man
+in charge of the store was not required to know the ratings of the men
+upon the pay-roll.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG313" id="ILLO_PG313"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0329.jpg" width="684" height="439" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE SUPPLY TRAIN OVER THE MOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p>The doctor's tent was among the rest, but his office might aptly have
+been said to be "in the saddle." He was nominally em<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>ployed by the
+company, but each man was "docked," or charged, seventy-five cents a
+month for medical services whether he ever needed a doctor or not. When
+I was in the camp there was only one sick man&mdash;a rheumatic. He had a
+tent all to himself, and his meals were regularly carried to him. Though
+he was a stranger to every man there, and had worked only one day before
+he surrendered to sickness, a purse of about forty dollars had been
+raised for him among the men, and he was to be "packed" to Sproat's
+Landing on a mule at the company's expense whenever the doctor decreed
+it wise to move him. Of course invalidism of a more serious nature is
+not infrequent where men work in the paths of sliding rocks, beneath
+caving earth, amid falling forest trees, around giant blasts, and with
+heavy tools.</p>
+
+<p>Another one of the tents was that of the "boss packer." He superintended
+the transportation of supplies on the pack-trail. This "job of 200 men,"
+as Dunn styled his camp, employed thirty pack horses and mules. The
+pack-trains consisted of a "bell-horse" and boy, and six horses
+following. Each animal was rated to carry a burden of 400 pounds of dead
+weight, and to require three quarts of meal three times a day.</p>
+
+<p>Another official habitation was the "store-man's" tent. As a rule, there
+is a store-man to every ten miles of construction work; often every camp
+has one. The store-man keeps account of the distribution of the supplies
+of food. He issues requisitions upon the head storehouse of the company,
+and makes out orders for each day's rations from the camp store. The
+cooks are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span> therefore under him, and this fact suggests a mention of the
+principal building in the camp&mdash;the mess hall, or "grub tent."</p>
+
+<p>This structure was of a size to accommodate two hundred men at once. Two
+tables ran the length of the unbroken interior&mdash;tables made roughly of
+the slabs or outside boards from a saw-mill. The benches were huge
+tree-trunks spiked fast upon stumps. There was a bench on either side of
+each table, and the places for the men were each set with a tin cup and
+a tin pie plate. The bread was heaped high on wooden platters, and all
+the condiments&mdash;catsup, vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt&mdash;were in cans
+that had once held condensed milk. The cooks worked in an open-ended
+extension at the rear of the great room. The rule is to have one cook
+and two "cookees" to each sixty men.</p>
+
+<p>While I was a new arrival just undergoing introduction, the men, who had
+come in from work, and who had "washed up" in the little creeks and at
+the river bank, began to assemble in the "grub tent" for supper. They
+were especially interesting to me because there was every reason to
+believe that they formed an assembly as typical of the human flotsam of
+the border as ever was gathered on the continent. Very few were what
+might be called born laborers; on the contrary, they were mainly men of
+higher origin who had failed in older civilizations; outlaws from the
+States; men who had hoped for a gold-mine until hope was all but dead;
+men in the first flush of the gold fever; ne'er-do-wells; and here and
+there a working-man by training. They ate as a good many other sorts of
+men do,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span> with great rapidity, little etiquette, and just enough
+unselfishness to pass each other the bread. It was noticeable that they
+seemed to have no time for talking. Certainly they had earned the right
+to be hungry, and the food was good and plentiful.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG317" id="ILLO_PG317"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0333.jpg" width="572" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>A SKETCH ON THE WORK</h4>
+
+<p>Dan Dunn's tent was just in front of the mess tent, a few feet away on
+the edge of the river bluff. It was a little "A" tent, with a single cot
+on one side, a wooden chest on the other, and a small table between the
+two at the farther end, opposite the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Are ye looking at my wolverenes?" said he. "There's good men among
+them, and some that ain't so good, and many that's worse. But
+railroading is good enough for most of 'em. It ain't too rich for any
+man's blood, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span> assure ye."</p>
+
+<p>Over six feet in height, broad-chested, athletic, and carrying not an
+ounce of flesh that could be spared, Dan Dunn's was a striking figure
+even where physical strength was the most serviceable possession of
+every man. From never having given his personal appearance a
+thought&mdash;except during a brief period of courtship antecedent to the
+establishment of a home in old Ontario&mdash;he had so accustomed himself to
+unrestraint that his habitual attitude was that of a long-bladed
+jack-knife not fully opened. His long spare arms swung limberly before a
+long spare body set upon long spare legs. His costume was one that is
+never described in the advertisements of city clothiers. It consisted of
+a dust-coated slouch felt hat, which a dealer once sold for black, of a
+flannel shirt, of homespun trousers, of socks, and of heavy "brogans."
+In all, his dress was what the &aelig;sthetes of Mr. Wilde's day might have
+aptly termed a symphony in dust. His shoes and hat had acquired a
+mud-color, and his shirt and trousers were chosen because they
+originally possessed it. Yet Dan Dunn was distinctly a cleanly man, fond
+of frequent splashing in the camp toilet basins&mdash;the Kootenay River and
+its little rushing tributaries. He was not shaven. As a rule he is not,
+and yet at times he is, as it happens. I learned that on Sundays, when
+there was nothing to do except to go fishing, or to walk over to the
+engineer's camp for intellectual society, he felt the unconscious
+impulse of a forgotten training, and put on a coat. He even tied a black
+silk ribbon under his collar on such occasions, and if no one had given
+him a good cigar duri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>ng the week, he took out his best pipe (which had
+been locked up, because whatever was not under lock and key was certain
+to be stolen in half an hour). Then he felt fitted, as he would say,
+"for a hard day's work at loafing."</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG319" id="ILLO_PG319"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0335.jpg" width="375" height="283" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>THE MESS TENT AT NIGHT</h4>
+
+<p>If you came upon Dan Dunn on Broadway, he would look as awkward as any
+other animal removed from its element; yet on a forest trail not even
+Davy Crockett was handsomer or more picturesque. His face is
+reddish-brown and as hard-skinned as the top of a drum, befitting a man
+who has lived out-of-doors all his life. But it is a finely moulded
+face, instinct with good-nature and some gentleness. The witchery of
+quick Irish humor lurks often in his eyes, but can quickly give place
+on occasion to a firm light, which is best rea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>d in connection with the
+broad, strong sweep of his massive under-jaw. There you see his fitness
+to command small armies, even of what he calls "wolverenes." He is
+willing to thrash any man who seems to need the operation, and yet he is
+equally noted for gathering a squad of rough laborers in every camp to
+make them his wards. He collects the money such men earn, and puts it in
+bank, or sends it to their families.</p>
+
+<p>"It does them as much good to let me take it as to chuck it over a
+gin-mill bar," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>As we stood looking into the crowded booth, where the men sat elbow to
+elbow, and all the knife blades were plying to and from all the plates
+and mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed.</p>
+
+<p>"The time has gone by," said he, "when you could keep an outfit on salt
+pork and bacon. It's as far gone as them days when they say the Hudson
+Bay Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. Did ye never
+hear of that? Why, sure, man, 'twas only fifty years ago that when meal
+hours came the bosses of the big trading company would give a workman a
+stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, and tell him he'd have an hour
+to catch his fill. But in railroading nowadays we give them the best
+that's going, and all they want of it&mdash;beef, ham, bacon, potatoes, mush,
+beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and game right out of the woods, and
+every sort of vegetable (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well,
+or they wouldn't stay."</p>
+
+<p>He said that the supplies of food are calculated on the basis of
+three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to a man&mdash;all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span> the varieties of
+food being proportioned so that the total weight will be
+three-and-a-half pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and for
+small amounts, so as to economize in the number of horses required on
+the pack-trail. The amount to be consumed by the horses is, of course,
+included in the loads. The cost of "packing" food over long distances is
+more considerable than would be supposed. It was estimated that at
+Dunn's camp the freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of
+places farther in the mountains where the cost was double that. Indeed,
+a discussion of the subject brought to light the fact that in remote
+mining camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in bottles up to
+the price of champagne. At one camp on the Kootenay bacon was selling at
+the time I was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried peaches
+fetched forty cents under competition.</p>
+
+<p>As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef and vegetables, with tea
+and coffee and pie. The head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp,
+and therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. Every sort of
+cook drifts into camps like these, and that camp considers itself the
+most fortunate which happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who
+has cooked on a steamboat; but a cook from a lumber camp is rated almost
+as proudly.</p>
+
+<br /><br />
+<a name="ILLO_PG322" id="ILLO_PG322"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 80%;">
+<img src="images/p0338.jpg" width="401" height="398" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>"THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS"</h4>
+
+<p>"Ye would not think it," said Dunn, "but some of them men has been bank
+clerks, and there's doctors and teachers among 'em&mdash;everything, in fact,
+except preachers. I never knew a preacher to get into a railroad gang.
+The men are always changing&mdash;coming and going. We don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span> have to
+advertise for new hands. The woods is full of men out of a job, and out
+of everything&mdash;pockets, elbows, and all. They drift in like peddlers on
+a pay-day. They come here with no more clothing than will wad a gun. The
+most of them will get nothing after two months' work. You see, they're
+mortgaged with their fares against them (thirty to forty dollars for
+them which the railroad brings from the East), and then they have their
+meals to pay for, at five dollars a week while they're here, and on top
+of that is all the clothing and shoes and blankets and tobacco, and
+everything they need&mdash;all charged agin them. It's just as well for
+them, for the most of them are too rich if they're a dollar ah<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>ead.
+There's few of them can stand the luxury of thirty dollars. When they
+get a stake of them dimensions, the most of them will stay no longer
+after pay-day than John Brown stayed in heaven. The most of them bang it
+all away for drink, and they are sure to come back again, but the
+'prospectors' and chronic tramps only work to get clothes and a flirting
+acquaintance with food, as well as money enough to make an affidavit to,
+and they never come back again at all. Out of 8500 men we had in one big
+work in Canada, 1500 to 2000 knocked off every month. Ninety per cent.
+came back. They had just been away for an old-fashioned drunk."</p>
+
+<p>It would be difficult to draw a parallel between these laborers and any
+class or condition of men in the East. They were of every nationality
+where news of gold-mines, of free settlers' sections, or of quick
+fortunes in the New World had penetrated. I recognized Greeks, Finns,
+Hungarians, Danes, Scotch, English, Irish, and Italians among them. Not
+a man exhibited a coat, and all were tanned brown, and were as spare and
+slender as excessively hard work can make a man. There was not a
+superfluity or an ornament in sight as they walked past me; not a
+necktie, a finger-ring, nor a watch-chain. There were some very
+intelligent faces and one or two fine ones in the band. Two typical
+old-fashioned prospectors especially attracted me. They were evidently
+of gentle birth, but time and exposure had bent them, and silvered their
+long, unkempt locks. Worse than all, it had planted in their faces a
+blended expression of sadness a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>nd hope fatigued that was painful to see.
+It is the brand that is on every old prospector's face. A very few of
+the men were young fellows of thirty, or even within the twenties. Their
+youth impelled them to break away from the table earlier than the
+others, and, seizing their rods, to start off for the fishing in the
+river.</p>
+
+<p>But those who thought of active pleasure were few indeed. Theirs was
+killing work, the most severe kind, and performed under the broiling
+sun, that at high mountain altitudes sends the mercury above 100 on
+every summer's day, and makes itself felt as if the rarefied atmosphere
+was no atmosphere at all. After a long day at the drill or the pick or
+shovel in such a climate, it was only natural that the men should, with
+a common impulse, seek first the solace of their pipes, and then of the
+shake-downs in their tents. I did not know until the next morning how
+severely their systems were strained; but it happened at sunrise on that
+day that I was at my ablutions on the edge of the river when Dan Dunn's
+gong turned the silent forest into a bedlam. It was called the
+seven-o'clock alarum, and was rung two hours earlier than that hour, so
+that the men might take two hours after dinner out of the heat of the
+day, "else the sun would kill them," Dunn said. This was apparently his
+device, and he kept up the transparent deception by having every clock
+and watch in the camp set two hours out of time.</p>
+
+<p>With the sounding of the gong the men began to appear outside the little
+tents in which they slept in couples. They came stumbling down the
+bluff to wash in the river, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>and of all the pitiful sights I ever saw,
+they presented one of the worst; of all the straining and racking and
+exhaustion that ever hard labor gave to men, they exhibited the utmost.
+They were but half awakened, and they moved so painfully and stiffly
+that I imagined I could hear their bones creak. I have seen spavined
+work-horses turned out to die that moved precisely as these men did. It
+was shocking to see them hobble over the rough ground; it was pitiful to
+watch them as they attempted to straighten their stiffened bodies after
+they had been bent double over the water. They gained erectness by slow
+jolts, as if their joints were of iron that had rusted. Of course they
+soon regained whatever elasticity nature had left them, and were
+themselves for the day&mdash;an active, muscular force of men. But that early
+morning sight of them was not such a spectacle as a right-minded man
+enjoys seeing his fellows take part in.</p>
+
+
+<br />
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h2>Interesting Works</h2>
+
+<h3>of</h3>
+
+<h2>Travel and Exploration.</h2>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+
+<p><b>Allen's Blue-Grass Region.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and other Kentucky Articles.
+By <span class="smcap">James Lane Allen</span>. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Miss Edwards's Egypt.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers. By <span class="smcap">Amelia B. Edwards</span>.
+Profusely Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Hearn's West Indies.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Two Years in the French West Indies. By <span class="smcap">Lafcadio Hearn</span>.
+Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 00.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Miss Scidmore's Japan.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Jinrikisha Days in Japan. By <span class="smcap">Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore</span>.
+Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 00.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Child's South America.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Spanish-American Republics. By <span class="smcap">Theodore Child</span>. Profusely
+Illustrated. Square 8vo, Cloth, $3 50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>The Tsar and His People.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Tsar and His People; or, Social Life in Russia. By <span class="smcap">Theodore
+Child</span>, and Others. Profusely Illustrated. Square 8vo, Cloth,
+Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $3 00.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Child's Summer Holidays.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Summer Holidays. Travelling Notes in Europe. By <span class="smcap">Theodore Child</span>.
+Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 25.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Warner's Southern California.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Our Italy. An Exposition of the Climate and Resources of
+Southern California. By <span class="smcap">Charles Dudley Warner</span>. Illustrated. 8vo,
+Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Warner's South and West.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada. By
+<span class="smcap">Charles Dudley Warner</span>. Post 8vo, Half Leather, $1 75.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Curtis's Spanish America</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Capitals of Spanish America. By <span class="smcap">William Eleroy Curtis</span>. With
+a Colored Map and 358 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Extra, $3 50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Bridgman's Algeria</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Winters in Algeria. Written and Illustrated by <span class="smcap">Frederick Arthur
+Bridgman</span>. Square 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Pennells' Hebrides</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Our Journey to the Hebrides. By <span class="smcap">Joseph Pennell</span> and <span class="smcap">Elizabeth
+Robins Pennell</span>. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 75.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Miss Bisland's Trip Around the World</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Flying Trip Around the World. By <span class="smcap">Elizabeth Bisland</span>. With
+Portrait. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Mrs. Custer's Two Volumes</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Boots and Saddles</span>; or, Life in Dakota with General Custer. With
+Portrait.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Following the Guidon</span>. Illustrated.&mdash;By Mrs. <span class="smcap">Elizabeth
+B. Custer</span>. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 50 each.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Captain King's Campaigning with Crook</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Campaigning with Crook, and Stories of Army Life. By Captain
+<span class="smcap">Charles King</span>, U.S.A. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 25.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Mrs. Wallace's Travel Sketches</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Storied Sea. By <span class="smcap">Susan E. Wallace</span>. 18mo, Cloth, $1 00.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Meriwether's A Tramp Trip</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Tramp Trip. How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day. By <span class="smcap">Lee
+Meriwether</span>. With Portrait. 12mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><b>Nordhoff's California</b>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Peninsular California. Some Account of the Climate, Soil,
+Productions, and Present Condition chiefly of the Northern Half
+of Lower California. By <span class="smcap">Charles Nordhoff</span>. Maps and
+Illustrations. Square 8vo, Cloth, $1 00; Paper, 75 cents.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<h3>Published by HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, <span class="smcap">New York</span>.</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span> <i>will send any of the above works by mail, postage
+prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the
+price.</i></p>
+
+
+<br /><br />
+<div class="footnotes">
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">
+<span class="label">[1]</span></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;Since this was written Father Lacombe's work has been
+continued at Fort McLeod in the same province as Calgary. In this
+smaller place he finds more time for his literary pursuits.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2">
+<span class="label">[2]</span></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a
+grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero.
+He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic
+happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His
+parents were passengers on an English vessel which was captured by the
+Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where he was born on
+February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was
+slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man
+of striking and handsome appearance.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<br /><br />
+<b>Transcriber's Notes:</b><br />
+original hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the original<br />
+Page 7, "doctor's workshop" changed to "doctor's workshop."<br />
+Page 29, "he in vented concerning" changed to "he invented concerning"<br />
+Page 33, "through why it was" changed to "though why it was"<br />
+Page 110, "Nine times in-ten" changed to "Nine times in ten"<br />
+Page 156, "mainland" changed to "main-land" [Ed. for consistency]<br />
+Page 169, "to get baffalo meat" changed to "to get buffalo meat"<br />
+Page 238, "that we be come" changed to "that we become"<br />
+Page 282, "two-and-a half" changed to "two-and-a-half"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
+
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+</pre>
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+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On Canada's Frontier
+       Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the
+       Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of
+       Western Canada
+
+Author: Julian Ralph
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2011 [EBook #35208]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON CANADA'S FRONTIER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marcia Brooks, Ross Cooling and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
+http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from
+images generously made available by The Internet
+Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  ON CANADA'S FRONTIER
+
+  Sketches
+
+  OF HISTORY, SPORT, AND ADVENTURE AND OF THE INDIANS, MISSIONARIES
+  FUR-TRADERS, AND NEWER SETTLERS OF WESTERN CANADA
+
+  BY
+
+  JULIAN RALPH
+
+  ILLUSTRATED
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
+
+  1892
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers.
+
+  _All rights reserved_.
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+
+  THE PEOPLE OF CANADA
+
+  THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR WHO, DURING MANY LONG
+  JOURNEYS IN THE CANADIAN WEST WAS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE TREATED WITH AN
+  EXTREME FRIENDLINESS TO WHICH HE HERE TESTIFIES BUT WHICH HE CANNOT
+  EASILY RETURN IN EQUAL MEASURE
+
+
+
+
+  PREFACE
+
+
+If all those into whose hands this book may fall were as well informed
+upon the Dominion of Canada as are the people of the United States,
+there would not be needed a word of explanation of the title of this
+volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer that what is here related
+applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is necessary to explain that
+the work deals solely with scenes and phases of life in the newer, and
+mainly the western, parts of that country. The great English colony
+which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of history has for its
+capitals such proud and notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto,
+Halifax, and many others, to distinguish the progressive civilization of
+the region east of Lake Huron--the older provinces. But the Canada of
+the geographies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United
+States; it is, in fact, the "British America" of old. A great
+trans-Canadian railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific
+slope to the provinces of old Canada with stitches of steel across the
+Plains. There the same mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own
+West is elbowing the fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and is
+laying out farms far north, in the smiling Peace River district, where
+it was only a little while ago supposed that there were but two seasons,
+winter and late spring. It is with that new part of Canada, between the
+ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy new cities of the
+Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some references to the North are
+added in those chapters that treat of hunting and fishing and
+fur-trading.
+
+The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of
+papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during the
+past three years. The first one to be published was that which describes
+a settler's colony in which a few titled foreigners took the lead; the
+others were written so recently that they should possess the same
+interest and value as if they here first met the public eye. What that
+interest and value amount to is for the reader to judge, the author's
+position being such that he may only call attention to the fact that he
+had access to private papers and documents when he prepared the sketches
+of the Hudson Bay Company, and that, in pursuing information about the
+great province of British Columbia, he was not able to learn that a
+serious and extended study of its resources had ever been made. The
+principal studies and sketches were prepared for and published in
+Harper's Magazine. The spirit in which they were written was solely that
+of one who loves the open air and his fellow-men of every condition and
+color, and who has had the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada
+something of the old and almost departed life of the plainsmen and
+woodsmen, and of the newer forces of nation-building on our continent.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+                            PAGE
+
+   I. Titled Pioneers          1
+
+  II. Chartering a Nation     11
+
+ III. A Famous Missionary     53
+
+  IV. Antoine's Moose-yard    66
+
+   V. Big Fishing            115
+
+  VI. "A Skin for a Skin"    134
+
+ VII. "Talking Musquash"     190
+
+VIII. Canada's El Dorado     214
+
+  IX. Dan Dunn's Outfit      290
+
+
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                            PAGE
+
+  _The Romantic Adventure of Old Sun's Wife_        Frontispiece
+
+  _Dr. Rudolph Meyer's Place on the Pipestone_                 2
+
+  _Settler's Sod Cabin_                                        3
+
+  _Whitewood, a Settlement on the Prairie_                     4
+
+  _Interior of Sod Cabin on the Frontier_                      5
+
+  _Prairie Sod Stable_                                         7
+
+  _Trained Ox Team_                                            9
+
+  _Indian Boys Running a Foot-race_                           31
+
+  _Indian Mother and Boy_                                     36
+
+  _Opening of the Soldier Clan Dance_                         39
+
+  _Sketch in the Soldier Clan Dance_                          43
+
+  _A Fantasy from the Pony War-dance_                         47
+
+  _Throwing the Snow Snake_                                   51
+
+  _Father Lacombe Heading the Indians_                        61
+
+  _The Hotel--Last Sign of Civilisation_                      69
+
+  _"Give me a light"_                                         73
+
+  _Antoine, from Life_                                        79
+
+  _The Portage Sleigh on a Lumber Road_                       83
+
+  _The Track in the Winter Forest_                            87
+
+  _Pierre from Life_                                          91
+
+  _Antoine's Cabin_                                           93
+
+  _The Camp at Night_                                         97
+
+  _A Moose Bull Fight_                                       101
+
+  _On the Moose Trail_                                       103
+
+  _In sight of the Game--"Now Shoot"_                        105
+
+  _Success_                                                  109
+
+  _Hunting the Caribou--"Shoot! Shoot!"_                     111
+
+  _Indians Hunting Nets on Lake Nipigon_                     119
+
+  _Trout-fishing Through the Ice_                            127
+
+  _Rival Traders Racing to the Indian Camp_                  137
+
+  _The Bear-trap_                                            143
+
+  _Huskie Dogs Fighting_                                     147
+
+  _Painting the Robe_                                        151
+
+  _Coureur du Bois_                                          159
+
+  _A Fur-trader in the Council Tepee_                        163
+
+  _Buffalo Meat for the Post_                                167
+
+  _The Indian Hunter of 1750_                                171
+
+  _Indian Hunter Hanging Deer Out of the Reach of Wolves_    173
+
+  _Making the Snow-shoe_                                     177
+
+  _A Hudson Bay Man (Quarter-breed)_                         181
+
+  _The Coureur du Bois and the Savage_                       185
+
+  _Talking Musquash_                                         193
+
+  _Indian Hunters Moving Camp_                               198
+
+  _Setting a Mink-trap_                                      201
+
+  _Wood Indians Come to Trade_                               205
+
+  _A Voyageur, or Canoe-man, of Great Slave Lake_            209
+
+  _In a Stiff Current_                                       211
+
+  _Voyageur with Tumpline_                                   217
+
+  _Voyageurs in Camp for the Night_                          221
+
+  _"Huskie" Dogs on the Frozen Highway_                      227
+
+  _The Factor's Fancy Toboggan_                              233
+
+  _Halt of a York Boat Brigade for the Night_                239
+
+  _An Impression of Shuswap Lake, British Columbia_          251
+
+  _The Tschummum, or Tool Used in Making Canoes_             257
+
+  _The First of the Salmon Run, Fraser River_                261
+
+  _Indian Salmon-fishing in the Thrasher_                    266
+
+  _Going to the Potlatch--Big Canoe, North-west Coast_       269
+
+  _The Salmon Cache_                                         275
+
+  _An Ideal of the Coast_                                    279
+
+  _The Potlatch_                                             283
+
+  _An Indian Canoe on the Columbia_                          293
+
+  _"You're setting your nerves to stand it"_                 297
+
+  _Jack Kirkup, the Mountain Sheriff_                        299
+
+  _Engineer on the Preliminary Survey_                       303
+
+  _Falling Monarchs_                                         308
+
+  _Dan Dunn on His Works_                                    311
+
+  _The Supply Train Over the Mountain_                       313
+
+  _A Sketch on the Work_                                     317
+
+  _The Mess Tent at Night_                                   319
+
+  _"They Gained Erectness by Slow Jolts"_                    322
+
+
+
+
+  ON CANADA'S FRONTIER
+
+
+  I
+
+  TITLED PIONEERS
+
+
+There is a very remarkable bit of this continent just north of our State
+of North Dakota, in what the Canadians call Assiniboia, one of the
+North-west Provinces. Here the plains reach away in an almost level,
+unbroken, brown ocean of grass. Here are some wonderful and some very
+peculiar phases of immigration and of human endeavor. Here is Major
+Bell's farm of nearly one hundred square miles, famous as the Bell Farm.
+Here Lady Cathcart, of England, has mercifully established a colony of
+crofters, rescued from poverty and oppression. Here Count Esterhazy has
+been experimenting with a large number of Hungarians, who form a colony
+which would do better if those foreigners were not all together, with
+only each other to imitate--and to commiserate. But, stranger than all
+these, here is a little band of distinguished Europeans, partly noble
+and partly scholarly, gathered together in as lonely a spot as can be
+found short of the Rockies or the far northern regions of this
+continent.
+
+[Illustration: DR. RUDOLPH MEYER'S PLACE ON THE PIPESTONE]
+
+These gentlemen are Dr. Rudolph Meyer, of Berlin, the Comte de Cazes and
+the Comte de Raffignac, of France, and M. Le Bidau de St. Mars, of that
+country also. They form, in all probability, the most distinguished and
+aristocratic little band of immigrants and farmers in the New World.
+
+Seventeen hundred miles west of Montreal, in a vast prairie where
+settlers every year go mad from loneliness, these polished Europeans
+till the soil, strive for prizes at the provincial fairs, fish, hunt,
+read the current literature of two continents, and are happy. The soil
+in that region is of remarkable depth and richness, and is so black that
+the roads and cattle-trails look like ink lines on brown paper. It is
+part of a vast territory of uniform appearance, in one portion of which
+are the richest wheat-lands of the continent. The Canadian Pacific
+Railway crosses Assiniboia, with stops about five miles apart--some mere
+stations and some small settlements. Here the best houses are little
+frame dwellings; but very many of the settlers live in shanties made of
+sods, with such thick walls and tight roofs, all of sod, that the awful
+winters, when the mercury falls to forty degrees below zero, are endured
+in them better than in the more costly frame dwellings.
+
+[Illustration: SETTLER'S SOD CABIN]
+
+I stopped off the cars at Whitewood, picking that four-year-old village
+out at hap-hazard as a likely point at which to see how the immigrants
+live in a brand-new country. I had no idea of the existence of any of
+the persons I found there. The most perfect hospitality is offered to
+strangers in such infant communities, and while enjoying the shelter of
+a merchant's house I obtained news of the distinguished settlers, all
+of whom live away from the railroad in solitude not to be conceived by
+those who think their homes the most isolated in the older parts of the
+country. I had only time to visit Dr. Rudolph Meyer, five miles from
+Whitewood, in the valley of the Pipestone.
+
+[Illustration: WHITEWOOD, A SETTLEMENT ON THE PRAIRIE]
+
+The way was across a level prairie, with here and there a bunch of young
+wolf-willows to break the monotonous scene, with tens of thousands of
+gophers sitting boldly on their haunches within reach of the wagon whip,
+with a sod house in sight in one direction at one time and a frame house
+in view at another. The talk of the driver was spiced with news of
+abundant wild-fowl, fewer deer, and marvellously numerous small
+quadrupeds, from wolves and foxes down. He talked of bachelors living
+here and there alone on that sea of grass, for all the world like men
+in small boats on the ocean; and I saw, contrariwise, a man and wife who
+blessed Heaven for an unheard-of number of children, especially prized
+because each new-comer lessened the loneliness. I heard of the long and
+dreadful winters when the snowfall is so light that horses and mules may
+always paw down to grass, though cattle stand and starve and freeze to
+death. I heard, too, of the way the snow comes in flurried squalls, in
+which men are lost within pistol-shot of their homes. In time the wagon
+came to a sort of coulee or hollow, in which some mechanics imported
+from Paris were putting up a fine cottage for the Comte de Raffignac.
+Ten paces farther, and I stood on the edge of the valley of the
+Pipestone, looking at a scene so poetic, pastoral, and beautiful that in
+the whole transcontinental journey there were few views to compare with
+it.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SOD CABIN ON THE FRONTIER]
+
+Reaching away far below the level of the prairie was a bowl-like valley,
+a mile long and half as wide, with a crystal stream lying like a ribbon
+of silver midway between its sloping walls. Another valley, longer yet,
+served as an extension to this. On the one side the high grassy walls
+were broken with frequent gullies, while on the other side was a
+park-like growth of forest trees. Meadows and fields lay between, and
+nestling against the eastern or grassy wall was the quaint,
+old-fashioned German house of the learned doctor. Its windows looked out
+on those beautiful little valleys, the property of the doctor--a little
+world far below the great prairie out of which sportive and patient Time
+had hollowed it. Externally the long, low, steep-roofed house was
+German, ancient, and picturesque in appearance. Its main floor was all
+enclosed in the sash and glass frame of a covered porch, and outside of
+the walls of glass were heavy curtains of straw, to keep out the sun in
+summer and the cold in winter. In-doors the house is as comfortable as
+any in the world. Its framework is filled with brick, and its trimmings
+are all of pine, oiled and varnished. In the heart of the house is a
+great Russian stove--a huge box of brick-work, which is filled full of
+wood to make a fire that is made fresh every day, and that heats the
+house for twenty-four hours. A well-filled wine-cellar, a well-equipped
+library, where Harper's Weekly, and _Uber Land und Mer_, _Punch_,
+_Puck_, and _Die Fliegende Blaetter_ lie side by side, a kindly wife, and
+a stumbling baby, tell of a combination of domestic joys that no man is
+too rich to envy. The library is the doctor's workshop. He is now
+engaged in compiling a digest of the economic laws of nations. He is
+already well known as the author of a _History of Socialism_ (in
+Germany, the United States, Scandinavia, Russia, France, Belgium, and
+elsewhere), and also for his _History of Socialism in Germany_. He
+writes in French and German, and his works are published in Germany.
+
+[Illustration: PRAIRIE SOD STABLE]
+
+Dr. Meyer is fifty-three years old. He is a political exile, having been
+forced from Prussia for connection with an unsuccessful opposition to
+Bismarck. It is because he is a scholar seeking rest from the turmoil of
+politics that one is able to comprehend his living in this overlooked
+corner of the world. Yet when that is understood, and one knows what an
+Arcadia his little valley is, and how complete are his comforts
+within-doors, the placidity with which he smokes his pipe, drinks his
+beer, and is waited upon by servants imported from Paris, becomes less a
+matter for wonder than for congratulation. He has shared part of one
+valley with the Comte de Raffignac, who thinks there is nothing to
+compare with it on earth. The count has had his house built near the
+abruptly-broken edge of the prairie, so that he may look down upon the
+calm and beautiful valley and enjoy it, as he could not had he built in
+the valley itself. He is a youth of very old French family, who loves
+hunting and horses. He was contemplating the raising of horses for a
+business when I was there. But the count mars the romance of his
+membership in this little band by going to Paris now and then, as a
+young man would be likely to.
+
+Out-of-doors one saw what untold good it does to the present and future
+settlers to have such men among them. The hot-houses, glazed vegetable
+beds, the plots of cultivated ground, the nurseries of young trees--all
+show at what cost of money and patience the Herr Doctor is experimenting
+with every tree and flower and vegetable and cereal to discover what can
+be grown with profit in that region of rich soil and short summers, and
+what cannot. He is in communication with the seedsmen, to say nothing of
+the savants, of Europe and this country, and whatever he plants is of
+the best. Near his quaint dwelling he has a house for his gardener, a
+smithy, a tool-house, a barn, and a cheese-factory, for he makes gruyere
+cheese in great quantities. He also raises horses and cattle.
+
+The Comte de Cazes has a sheltered, favored claim a few miles to the
+northward, near the Qu' Appele River. He lives in great comfort, and is
+so successful a farmer that he carries off nearly all the prizes for the
+province, especially those given for prime vegetables. He has his wife
+and daughter and one of his sons with him, and an abundance of means,
+as, indeed, these distinguished settlers all appear to have.
+
+[Illustration: TRAINED OX TEAM]
+
+These men have that faculty, developed in all educated and thinking
+souls, which enables them to banish loneliness and entertain themselves.
+Still, though Dr. Meyer laughs at the idea of danger, it must have been
+a little disquieting to live as he does during the Riel rebellion,
+especially as an Indian reservation is close by, and wandering red men
+are seen every day upon the prairie. Indeed, the Government thought fit
+to send men of the North-west Mounted Police to visit the doctor twice a
+week as lately as a year after the close of the half-breed uprising.
+
+
+
+
+  II
+
+  CHARTERING A NATION
+
+
+How it came about that we chartered the Blackfoot nation for two days
+had better not be told in straightforward fashion. There is more that is
+interesting in going around about the subject, just as in reality we did
+go around and about the neighborhood of the Indians before we determined
+to visit them.
+
+In the first place, the most interesting Indian I ever saw--among many
+kinds and many thousands--was the late Chief Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot
+people. More like a king than a chief he looked, as he strode upon the
+plains, in a magnificent robe of white bead-work as rich as ermine, with
+a gorgeous pattern illuminating its edges, a glorious sun worked into
+the front of it, and many artistic and chromatic figures sewed in gaudy
+beads upon its back. He wore an old white chimney-pot hat, bound around
+with eagle feathers, a splendid pair of _chaperajos_, all worked with
+beads at the bottoms and fringed along the sides, and bead-worked
+moccasins, for which any lover of the Indian or collector of his
+paraphernalia would have exchanged a new Winchester rifle without a
+second's hesitation. But though Crowfoot was so royally clothed, it was
+in himself that the kingly quality was most apparent. His face was
+extraordinarily like what portraits we have of Julius Caesar, with the
+difference that Crowfoot had the complexion of an Egyptian mummy. The
+high forehead, the great aquiline nose, the thin lips, usually closed,
+the small, round, protruding chin, the strong jawbones, and the keen
+gray eyes composed a face in which every feature was finely moulded, and
+in which the warrior, the commander, and the counsellor were strongly
+suggested. And in each of these roles he played the highest part among
+the Indians of Canada from the moment that the whites and the red men
+contested the dominion of the plains until he died, a short time ago.
+
+He was born and lived a wild Indian, and though the good fathers of the
+nearest Roman Catholic mission believe that he died a Christian, I am
+constrained to see in the reason for their thinking so only another
+proof of the consummate shrewdness of Crowfoot's life-long policy. The
+old king lay on his death-bed in his great wig-a-wam, with twenty-seven
+of his medicine-men around him, and never once did he pretend that he
+despised or doubted their magic. When it was evident that he was about
+to die, the conjurers ceased their long-continued, exhausting formula of
+howling, drumming, and all the rest, and, Indian-like, left Death to
+take his own. Then it was that one of the watchful, zealous priests,
+whose lives have indeed been like those of fathers to the wild Indians,
+slipped into the great tepee and administered the last sacrament to the
+old pagan.
+
+"Do you believe?" the priest inquired.
+
+"Yes, I believe," old Crowfoot grunted. Then he whispered, "But don't
+tell my people."
+
+Among the last words of great men, those of Saponaxitaw (his Indian
+name) may never be recorded, but to the student of the American
+aborigine they betray more that is characteristic of the habitual
+attitude of mind of the wild red man towards civilizing influences than
+any words I ever knew one to utter.
+
+As the old chief crushed the bunch-grass beneath his gaudy moccasins at
+the time I saw him, and as his lesser chiefs and headmen strode behind
+him, we who looked on knew what a great part he was bearing and had
+taken in Canada. He had been chief of the most powerful and savage tribe
+in the North, and of several allied tribes as well, from the time when
+the region west of the Mississippi was _terra incognita_ to all except a
+few fur traders and priests. His warriors ruled the Canadian wilderness,
+keeping the Ojibbeways and Crees in the forests to the east and north,
+routing the Crows, the Stonies, and the Big-Bellies whenever they
+pleased, and yielding to no tribe they met except the Sioux to the
+southward in our territory. The first white man Crowfoot ever knew
+intimately was Father Lacombe, the noble old missionary, whose fame is
+now world-wide among scholars. The peaceful priest and the warrior chief
+became fast friends, and from the day when the white men first broke
+down the border and swarmed upon the plains, until at the last they ran
+what Crowfoot called their "fire-wagons" (locomotives) through his land,
+he followed the priest's counselling in most important matters. He
+treated with the authorities, and thereafter hindered his braves from
+murder, massacre, and warfare. Better than that, during the Riel
+rebellion he more than any other man, or twenty men, kept the red man of
+the plains at peace when the French half-breeds, led by their mentally
+irresponsible disturber, rebelled against the Dominion authorities.
+
+When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he spoke, his nation listened
+in silence. He had killed as many men as any Indian warrior alive; he
+was a mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and mangled in skin,
+limb, and bone. He never would learn English or pretend to discard his
+religion. He was an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At eighty
+odd years of age there lived no red-skin who dared answer him back when
+he spoke his mind. But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist.
+Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and because a grand old
+priest was his truest friend, he gave orders that his body should be
+buried in a coffin, Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in
+the summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a high hill, and
+knew that his bones were guarded night and day by watchers from among
+his people. Two or three days before he died his best horse was
+slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. "That was wrong," he
+said; "there was no sense in doing that; and besides, the horse was
+worth good money." But he was always at least as far as that in advance
+of his people, and it was natural that not only his horse, but his gun
+and blankets, his rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the
+happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried with him.
+
+There are different ways of judging which is the best Indian, but from
+the stand-point of him who would examine that distinct product of
+nature, the Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian Blackfeet
+are among if not quite the best. They are almost as primitive and
+natural as any, nearly the most prosperous, physically very fine, the
+most free from white men's vices. They are the most reasonable in their
+attitude towards the whites of any who hold to the true Indian
+philosophy. The sum of that philosophy is that civilization gets men a
+great many comforts, but bundles them up with so many rules and
+responsibilities and so much hard work that, after all, the wild Indian
+has the greatest amount of pleasure and the least share of care that men
+can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of the red-skins who
+considers them as children, governed mainly by emotion, and acting upon
+undisciplined impulse; and I know of no more hearty, natural children
+than the careless, improvident, impulsive boys and girls of from five to
+eighty years of age whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three
+Bulls, his brother.
+
+The Blackfeet of Canada number about two thousand men, women, and
+children. They dwell upon a reserve of nearly five hundred square miles
+of plains land, watered by the beautiful Bow River, and almost within
+sight of the Rocky Mountains. It is in the province of Alberta, north of
+our Montana. There were three thousand and more of these Indians when
+the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across their hunting-ground,
+seven or eight years ago, but they are losing numbers at the rate of
+two hundred and fifty a year, roughly speaking. Their neighbors, the
+tribes called the Bloods and the Piegans, are of the same nation. The
+Sarcis, once a great tribe, became weakened by disease and war, and many
+years ago begged to be taken into the confederation. These tribes all
+have separate reserves near to one another, but all have heretofore
+acknowledged each Blackfoot chief as their supreme ruler. Their old men
+can remember when they used to roam as far south as Utah, and be gone
+twelve months on the war-path and on their foraging excursions for
+horses. They chased the Crees as far north as the Crees would run, and
+that was close to the arctic circle. They lived in their war-paint and
+by the chase. Now they are caged. They live unnaturally and die as
+unnaturally, precisely like other wild animals shut up in our parks.
+Within their park each gets a pound of meat with half a pound of flour
+every day. Not much comes to them besides, except now and then a little
+game, tobacco, and new blankets. They are so poorly lodged and so
+scantily fed that they are not fit to confront a Canadian winter, and
+lung troubles prey among them.
+
+It is a harsh way to put it (but it is true of our own government also)
+to say that one who has looked the subject over is apt to decide that
+the policy of the Canadian Government has been to make treaties with the
+dangerous tribes, and to let the peaceful ones starve. The latter do not
+need to starve in Canada, fortunately; they trust to the Hudson Bay
+Company for food and care, and not in vain. Having treated with the
+wilder Indians, the rest of the policy is to send the brightest of their
+boys to trade-schools, and to try to induce the men to till the soil.
+Those who do so are then treated more generously than the others. I have
+my own ideas with which to meet those who find nothing admirable in any
+except a dead Indian, and with which to discuss the treatment and policy
+the live Indian endures, but this is not the place for the discussion.
+Suffice it that it is not to be denied that between one hundred and
+fifty and two hundred Blackfeet are learning to maintain several plots
+of farming land planted with oats and potatoes. This they are doing with
+success, and with the further result of setting a good example to the
+rest. But most of the bucks are either sullenly or stupidly clinging to
+the shadow and the memory of the life that is gone.
+
+It was a recollection of that life which they portrayed for us. And they
+did so with a fervor, an abundance of detail and memento, and with a
+splendor few men have seen equalled in recent years--or ever may hope to
+witness again.
+
+We left the cars at Gleichen, a little border town which depends almost
+wholly upon the Blackfeet and their visitors for its maintenance. It has
+two stores--one where the Indians get credit and high prices (and at
+which the red men deal), and one at which they may buy at low rates for
+cash, wherefore they seldom go there. It has two hotels and a half-dozen
+railway men's dwellings, and, finally, it boasts a tiny little station
+or barracks of the North-west Mounted Police, wherein the lower of the
+two rooms is fitted with a desk, and hung with pistols, guns,
+handcuffs, and cartridge belts, while the upper room contains the cots
+for the men at night.
+
+We went to the store that the Indians favor--just such a store as you
+see at any cross-roads you drive past in a summer's outing in the
+country--and there were half a dozen Indians beautifying the door-way
+and the interior, like magnified majolica-ware in a crockery-shop. They
+were standing or sitting about with thoughtful expressions, as Indians
+always do when they go shopping; for your true Indian generates such a
+contemplative mood when he is about to spend a quarter that one would
+fancy he must be the most prudent and deliberate of men, instead of what
+he really is--the greatest prodigal alive except the negro. These bucks
+might easily have been mistaken for waxworks. Unnaturally erect, with
+arms folded beneath their blankets, they stood or sat without moving a
+limb or muscle. Only when a new-comer entered did they stir. Then they
+turned their heads deliberately and looked at the visitor fixedly, as
+eagles look at you from out their cages. They were strapping fine
+fellows, each bundled up in a colored blanket, flapping cloth leg-gear,
+and yellow moccasins. Each had the front locks of his hair tied in an
+upright bunch, like a natural plume, and several wore little brass
+rings, like baby finger-rings, around certain side locks down beside
+their ears.
+
+There they stood, motionless and speechless, waiting until the impulse
+should move them to buy what they wanted, with the same deliberation
+with which they had waited for the original impulse which sent them to
+the store. If Mr. Frenchman, who kept the store, had come from behind
+his counter, English fashion, and had said: "Come, come; what d'you
+want? Speak up now, and be quick about it. No lounging here. Buy or get
+out." If he had said that, or anything like it, those Indians would have
+stalked out of his place, not to enter it again for a very long time, if
+ever. Bartering is a serious and complex performance to an Indian, and
+you might as well try to hurry an elephant up a gang-plank as try to
+quicken an Indian's procedure in trading.
+
+We purchased of the Frenchman a chest of tea, a great bag of lump sugar,
+and a small case of plug tobacco for gifts to the chief. Then we hired a
+buck-board wagon, and made ready for the journey to the reserve.
+
+The road to the reserve lay several miles over the plains, and commanded
+a view of rolling grass land, like a brown sea whose waves were
+petrified, with here and there a group of sickly wind-blown trees to
+break the resemblance. The road was a mere wagon track and horse-trail
+through the grass, but it was criss-crossed with the once deep ruts that
+had been worn by countless herds of buffalo seeking water.
+
+Presently, as we journeyed, a little line of sand-hills came into view.
+They formed the Blackfoot cemetery. We saw the "tepees of the dead" here
+and there on the knolls, some new and perfect, some old and
+weather-stained, some showing mere tatters of cotton flapping on the
+poles, and still others only skeleton tents, the poles remaining and the
+cotton covering gone completely. We knew what we would see if we looked
+into those "dead tepees" (being careful to approach from the windward
+side). We would see, lying on the ground or raised upon a framework, a
+bundle that would be narrow at top and bottom, and broad in the
+middle--an Indian's body rolled up in a sheet of cotton, with his best
+bead-work and blanket and gun in the bundle, and near by a kettle and
+some dried meat and corn-meal against his feeling hungry on his long
+journey to the hereafter. As one or two of the tepees were new, we
+expected to see some family in mourning; and, sure enough, when we
+reached the great sheer-sided gutter which the Bow River has dug for its
+course through the plains, we halted our horse and looked down upon a
+lonely trio of tepees, with children playing around them and women
+squatted by the entrances. Three families had lost members, and were
+sequestered there in abject surrender to grief.
+
+Those tents of the mourners were at our feet as we rode southward, down
+in the river gully, where the grass was green and the trees were leafy
+and thriving; but when we turned our faces to the eastward, where the
+river bent around a great promontory, what a sight met our gaze! There
+stood a city of tepees, hundreds of them, showing white and yellow and
+brown and red against the clear blue sky. A silent and lifeless city it
+seemed, for we were too far off to see the people or to hear their
+noises. The great huddle of little pyramids rose abruptly from the level
+bare grass against the flawless sky, not like one of those melancholy
+new treeless towns that white men are building all over the prairie, but
+rather like a mosquito fleet becalmed at sea. There are two camps on
+the Blackfoot Reserve, the North Camp and the South Camp, and this town
+of tents was between the two, and was composed of more households than
+both together; for this was the assembling for the sun-dance, their
+greatest religious festival, and hither had come Bloods, Piegans, and
+Sarcis as well as Blackfeet. Only the mourners kept away; for here were
+to be echoed the greatest ceremonials of that dead past, wherein lives
+dedicated to war and to the chase inspired the deeds of valor which each
+would now celebrate anew in speech or song. This was to be the
+anniversary of the festival at which the young men fastened themselves
+by a strip of flesh in their chests to a sort of Maypole rope, and tore
+their flesh apart to demonstrate their fitness to be considered braves.
+At this feast husbands had the right to confess their women, and to cut
+their noses off if they had been untrue, and if they yet preferred life
+to the death they richly merited. At this gala-time sacrifices of
+fingers were made by brave men to the sun. Then every warrior boasted of
+his prowess, and the young beaus feasted their eyes on gayly-clad
+maidens the while they calculated for what number of horses they could
+be purchased of their parents. And at each recurrence of this wonderful
+holiday-time every night was spent in feasting, gorging, and gambling.
+In short, it was the great event of the Indian year, and so it remains.
+Even now you may see the young braves undergo the torture; and if you
+may not see the faithless wives disciplined, you may at least perceive a
+score who have been, as well as hear the mighty boasting, and witness
+the dancing, gaming, and carousing.
+
+We turned our backs towards the tented field, for we had not yet
+introduced ourselves to Mr. Magnus Begg, the Indian agent in charge of
+the reserve. We were soon within his official enclosure, where a pretty
+frame house, an office no bigger than a freight car, and a roomy barn
+and stable were all overtopped by a central flag-staff, and shaded by
+flourishing trees. Mr. Begg was at home, and, with his accomplished
+wife, welcomed us in such a hearty manner as one could hardly have
+expected, even where white folks were so "mighty unsartin" to appear as
+they are on the plains. The agent's house without is like any pretty
+village home in the East; and within, the only distinctive features are
+a number of ornamental mounted wild-beast's heads and a room whose walls
+are lined about with rare and beautiful Blackfoot curios in skin and
+stone and bead-work. But, to our joy, we found seated in that room the
+famous chief Old Sun. He is the husband of the most remarkable Indian
+squaw in America, and he would have been Crowfoot's successor were it
+not that he was eighty-seven years of age when the Blackfoot Caesar died.
+As chief of the North Blackfeet, Old Sun boasts the largest personal
+following on the Canadian plains, having earned his popularity by his
+fighting record, his commanding manner, his eloquence, and by that
+generosity which leads him to give away his rations and his presents. No
+man north of Mexico can dress more gorgeously than he upon occasion, for
+he still owns a buckskin outfit beaded to the value of a Worth gown.
+Moreover, he owns a red coat, such as the Government used to give only
+to great chiefs. The old fellow had lost his vigor when we saw him, and
+as he sat wrapped in his blanket he looked like a half-emptied meal bag
+flung on a chair. He despises English, but in that marvellous Volapuek of
+the plains called the sign language he told us that his teeth were gone,
+his hearing was bad, his eyes were weak, and his flesh was spare. He
+told his age also, and much else besides, and there is no one who reads
+this but could have readily understood his every statement and
+sentiment, conveyed solely by means of his hands and fingers. I noticed
+that he looked like an old woman, and it is a fact that old Indian men
+frequently look so. Yet no one ever saw a young brave whose face
+suggested a woman's, though their beardless countenances and long hair
+might easily create that appearance.
+
+Mr. Remington was anxious to paint Old Sun and his squaw, particularly
+the latter, and he easily obtained permission, although when the time
+for the mysterious ordeal arrived next day the old chief was greatly
+troubled in his superstitious old brain lest some mischief would befall
+him through the medium of the painting. To the Indian mind the sun,
+which they worship, has magical, even devilish, powers, and Old Sun
+developed a fear that the orb of day might "work on his picture" and
+cause him to die. Fortunately I found in Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter,
+a person who had undergone the process without dire consequences, was
+willing to undergo it again, and who added that his father and mother
+had submitted to the operation, and yet had lived to a yellow old age.
+When Old Sun brought his wife to sit for her portrait I put all
+etiquette to shame in staring at her, as you will all the more readily
+believe when you know something of her history.
+
+Old Sun's wife sits in the council of her nation--the only woman, white,
+red, or black, of whom I have ever heard who enjoys such a prerogative
+on this continent. She earned her peculiar privileges, if any one ever
+earned anything. Forty or more years ago she was a Piegan maiden known
+only in her tribe, and there for nothing more than her good origin, her
+comeliness, and her consequent value in horses. She met with outrageous
+fortune, but she turned it to such good account that she was speedily
+ennobled. She was at home in a little camp on the plains one day, and
+had wandered away from the tents, when she was kidnapped. It was in this
+wise: other camps were scattered near there. On the night before the day
+of her adventure a band of Crows stole a number of horses from a camp of
+the Gros Ventres, and very artfully trailed their plunder towards and
+close to the Piegan camp before they turned and made their way to their
+own lodges. When the Gros Ventres discovered their loss, and followed
+the trail that seemed to lead to the Piegan camp, the girl and her
+father, an aged chief, were at a distance from their tepees, unarmed and
+unsuspecting. Down swooped the Gros Ventres. They killed and scalped the
+old man, and then their chief swung the young girl upon his horse behind
+him, and binding her to him with thongs of buckskin, clashed off
+triumphantly for his own village. That has happened to many another
+Indian maiden, most of whom have behaved as would a plaster image,
+saving a few days of weeping. Not such was Old Sun's wife. When she and
+her captor were in sight of the Gros Ventre village, she reached forward
+and stole the chief's scalping-knife out of its sheath at his side. With
+it, still wet with her father's blood, she cut him in the back through
+to the heart. Then she freed his body from hers, and tossed him from the
+horse's back. Leaping to the ground beside his body, she not only
+scalped him, but cut off his right arm and picked up his gun, and rode
+madly back to her people, chased most of the way, but bringing safely
+with her the three greatest trophies a warrior can wrest from a
+vanquished enemy. Two of them would have distinguished any brave, but
+this mere village maiden came with all three. From that day she has
+boasted the right to wear three eagle feathers.
+
+Old Sun was a young man then, and when he heard of this feat he came and
+hitched the requisite number of horses to her mother's travois poles
+beside her tent. I do not recall how many steeds she was valued at, but
+I have heard of very high-priced Indian girls who had nothing except
+their feminine qualities to recommend them. In one case I knew that a
+young man, who had been casting what are called "sheep's eyes" at a
+maiden, went one day and tied four horses to her father's tent. Then he
+stood around and waited, but there was no sign from the tent. Next day
+he took four more, and so he went on until he had tied sixteen horses to
+the tepee. At the least they were worth $20, perhaps $30, apiece. At
+that the maiden and her people came out, and received the young man so
+graciously that he knew he was "the young woman's choice," as we say in
+civilized circles, sometimes under very similar circumstances.
+
+At all events, Old Sun was rich and powerful, and easily got the savage
+heroine for his wife. She was admitted to the Blackfoot council without
+a protest, and has since proven that her valor was not sporadic, for she
+has taken the war-path upon occasion, and other scalps have gone to her
+credit.
+
+After a while we drove over to where the field lay littered with tepees.
+There seemed to be no order in the arrangement of the tents as we looked
+at the scene from a distance. Gradually the symptoms of a great stir and
+activity were observable, and we saw men and horses running about at one
+side of the nomad settlement, as well as hundreds of human figures
+moving in the camp. Then a nearer view brought out the fact that the
+tepees, which were of many sizes, were apt to be white at the base,
+reddish half-way up, and dark brown at the top. The smoke of the fires
+within, and the rain and sun without, paint all the cotton or canvas
+tepees like that, and very pretty is the effect. When closer still, we
+saw that each tepee was capped with a rude crown formed of pole
+ends--the ends of the ribs of each structure; that some of the tents
+were gayly ornamented with great geometric patterns in red, black, and
+yellow around the bottoms; and that others bore upon their sides rude
+but highly colored figures of animals--the clan sign of the family
+within. Against very many of the frail dwellings leaned a travois, the
+triangle of poles which forms the wagon of the Indians. There were three
+or four very large tents, the headquarters of the chiefs of the soldier
+bands and of the head chief of the nation; and there was one spotless
+new tent, with a pretty border painted around its base, and the figure
+of an animal on either side. It was the new establishment of a bride and
+groom. A hubbub filled the air as we drew still nearer; not any noise
+occasioned by our approach, but the ordinary uproar of the camp--the
+barking of dogs, the shouts of frolicking children, the yells of young
+men racing on horseback and of others driving in their ponies. When we
+drove between the first two tents we saw that the camp had been
+systematically arranged in the form of a rude circle, with the tents in
+bunches around a great central space, as large as Madison Square if its
+corners were rounded off.
+
+We were ushered into the presence of Three Bulls, in the biggest of all
+the tents. By common consent he was presiding as chief and successor to
+Crowfoot, pending the formal election, which was to take place at the
+feast of the sun-dance. European royalty could scarcely have managed to
+invest itself with more dignity or access to its presence with more
+formality than hedged about this blanketed king. He had assembled his
+chiefs and headmen to greet us, for we possessed the eminence of persons
+bearing gifts. He was in mourning for Crowfoot, who was his brother, and
+for a daughter besides, and the form of expression he gave to his grief
+caused him to wear nothing but a flannel shirt and a breech-cloth, in
+which he sat with his big brown legs bare and crossed beneath him. He is
+a powerful man, with an uncommonly large head, and his facial features,
+all generously moulded, indicate amiability, liberality, and
+considerable intelligence. Of middle age, smooth-skinned, and plump,
+there was little of the savage in his looks beyond what came of his long
+black hair. It was purposely wore unkempt and hanging in his eyes, and
+two locks of it were bound with many brass rings. When we came upon him
+our gifts had already been received and distributed, mainly to three or
+four relatives. But though the others sat about portionless, all were
+alike stolid and statuesque, and whatever feelings agitated their
+breasts, whether of satisfaction or disappointment, were equally hidden
+by all.
+
+When we entered the big tepee we saw twenty-one men seated in a circle
+against the wall and facing the open centre, where the ground was
+blackened by the ashes of former fires. Three Bulls sat exactly opposite
+the queer door, a horseshoe-shaped hole reaching two feet above the
+ground, and extended by the partly loosened lacing that held the edges
+of the tent-covering together. Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter, made a
+long speech in introducing each of us. We stood in the middle of the
+ring, and the chief punctuated the interpreter's remarks with that queer
+Indian grunt which it has ever been the custom to spell "ugh," but which
+you may imitate exactly if you will try to say "Ha" through your nose
+while your mouth is closed. As Mr. L'Hereux is a great talker, and is of
+a poetic nature, there is no telling what wild fancy of his active brain
+he invented concerning us, but he made a friendly talk, and that was
+what we wanted. As each speech closed, Three Bulls lurched forward just
+enough to make the putting out of his hand a gracious act, yet not
+enough to disturb his dignity. After each salutation he pointed out a
+seat for the one with whom he had shaken hands. He announced to the
+council in their language that we were good men, whereat the council
+uttered a single "Ha" through its twenty-one noses. If you had seen the
+rigid stateliness of Three Bulls, and had felt the frigid
+self-possession of the twenty-one ramrod-mannered under-chiefs, as well
+as the deference which was in the tones of the other white men in our
+company, you would comprehend that we were made to feel at once honored
+and subordinate. Altogether we made an odd picture: a circle of men
+seated tailor fashion, and my own and Mr. Remington's black shoes
+marring the gaudy ring of yellow moccasins in front of the savages, as
+they sat in their colored blankets and fringed and befeathered gear,
+each with the calf of one leg crossed before the shin of the other.
+
+But L'Hereux's next act after introducing us was one that seemed to
+indicate perfect indifference to the feelings of this august body. No
+one but he, who had spent a quarter of a century with them in closest
+intimacy, could have acted as he proceeded to do. He cast his eyes on
+the ground, and saw the mounds of sugar, tobacco, and tea heaped before
+only a certain few Indians. "Now who has done dose t'ing?" he inquired.
+"Oh, dat vill nevaire do 'tall. You haf done dose t'ing, Mistaire Begg?
+No? Who den? Chief? Nevaire mind. I make him all rount again, vaire
+deeferent. You shall see somet'ing." With that, and yet without ceasing
+to talk for an instant, now in Indian and now in his English, he began
+to dump the tea back again into the chest, the sugar into the bag, and
+the plug tobacco in a heap by itself. Not an Indian moved a
+muscle--unless I was right in my suspicion that the corners of Three
+Bulls' mouth curved upward slightly, as if he were about to smile. "Vot
+kind of wa-a-y to do-o somet'ing is dat?" the interpreter continued, in
+his sing-song tone. "You moos' haf one maje-dome [major-domo] if you
+shall try satisfy dose Engine." He always called the Indians "dose
+Engine." "Dat chief gif all dose present to his broders und cousins,
+which are in his famille. Now you shall see me, vot I shall do." Taking
+his hat, he began filling it, now with sugar and now with tea, and
+emptying it before some six or seven chiefs. Finally, when a double
+share was left, he gave both bag and chest to Three Bulls, to whom he
+also gave all the tobacco. "Such tam-fool peezness," he went on, "I do
+not see in all my life. I make visitation to de t'ree soljier chief
+vhich shall make one grand darnce for dose gentlemen, und here is for
+dose soljier chief not anyt'ing 'tall, vhile everyt'ing was going to one
+lot of beggaire relation of T'ree Bull. Dat is what I call one tam-fool
+way to do some'ting."
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN BOYS RUNNING A FOOT-RACE]
+
+The redistribution accomplished, Three Bulls wore a grin of
+satisfaction, and one chief who had lost a great pile of presents, and
+who got nothing at all by the second division, stalked solemnly out of
+the tent, through not until Three Bulls had tossed the plugs of tobacco
+to all the men around the circle, precisely as he might have thrown
+bones to dogs, but always observing a certain order in making each round
+with the plugs. All were thus served according to their rank. Then Three
+Bulls rummaged with one hand behind him in the grass, and fetched
+forward a great pipe with a stone bowl and wooden handle--a sort of
+chopping-block of wood--and a large long-bladed knife. Taking a plug of
+tobacco in one hand and the knife in the other, he pared off enough
+tobacco to fill the pipe. Then he filled it, and passed it, stem
+foremost, to a young man on the left-hand side of the tepee. The
+superior chiefs all sat on the right-hand side. The young man knew that
+he had been chosen to perform the menial act of lighting the pipe, and
+he lighted it, pulling two or three whiffs of smoke to insure a good
+coal of fire in it before passing it back--though why it was not
+considered a more menial task to cut the tobacco and fill the pipe than
+to light it I don't know.
+
+Three Bulls puffed the pipe for a moment, and then turning the stem from
+him, pointed it at the chief next in importance, and to that personage
+the symbol of peace was passed from hand to hand. When that chief had
+drawn a few whiffs, he sent the pipe back to Three Bulls, who then
+indicated to whom it should go next. Thus it went dodging about the
+circle like a marble on a bagatelle board. When it came to me, I
+hesitated a moment whether or not to smoke it, but the desire to be
+polite outweighed any other prompting, and I sucked the pipe until some
+of the Indians cried out that I was "a good fellow."
+
+While all smoked and many talked, I noticed that Three Bulls sat upon a
+soft seat formed of his blanket, at one end of which was one of those
+wickerwork contrivances, like a chair back, upon which Indians lean when
+seated upon the ground. I noticed also that one harsh criticism passed
+upon Three Bulls was just; that was that when he spoke, others might
+interrupt him. It was said that even women "talked back" to him at times
+when he was haranguing his people. Since no one spoke when Crowfoot
+talked, the comparison between him and his predecessor was injurious to
+him; but it was Crowfoot who named Three Bulls for the chieftainship.
+Besides, Three Bulls had the largest following (under that of the too
+aged Old Sun), and was the most generous chief and ablest politician of
+all. Then, again, the Government supported him with whatever its
+influence amounted to. This was because Three Bulls favored agricultural
+employment for the tribe, and was himself cultivating a patch of
+potatoes. He was in many other ways the man to lead in the new era, as
+Crowfoot had been for the era that was past.
+
+When we retired from the presence of the chief, I asked Mr. L'Hereux how
+he had dared to take back the presents made to the Indians and then
+distribute them differently. The queer Frenchman said, in his
+indescribably confident, jaunty way:
+
+"Why, dat is how you mus' do wid dose Engine. Nevaire ask one of dose
+Engine anyt'ing, but do dose t'ing which are right, and at de same time
+make explanashion what you are doing. Den dose Engine can say no t'ing
+'tall. But if you first make explanashion and den try to do somet'ng,
+you will find one grand trouble. Can you explain dis and dat to one hive
+of de bees? Well, de hive of de bee is like dose Engine if you shall
+talk widout de promp' action."
+
+He said, later on, "Dose Engine are children, and mus' not haf
+consideration like mans and women."
+
+The news of our generosity ran from tent to tent, and the Black Soldier
+band sent out a herald to cry the news that a war-dance was to be held
+immediately. As immediately means to the Indian mind an indefinite and
+very enduring period, I amused myself by poking about the village, in
+tents and among groups of men or women, wherever chance led me. The
+herald rode from side to side of the enclosure, yelling like a New York
+fruit peddler. He was mounted on a bay pony, and was fantastically
+costumed with feathers and war-paint. Of course every man, woman, and
+child who had been in-doors, so to speak, now came out of the tepees,
+and a mighty bustle enlivened the scene. The worst thing about the camp
+was the abundance of snarling cur-dogs. It was not safe to walk about
+the camp without a cane or whip, on account of these dogs.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN MOTHER AND BOY]
+
+The Blackfeet are poor enough, in all conscience, from nearly every
+stand-point from which we judge civilized Communities, but their tribal
+possessions include several horses to each head of a family; and though
+the majority of their ponies would fetch no more than $20 apiece out
+there, even this gives them more wealth per capita than many civilized
+peoples can boast. They have managed, also, to keep much of the savage
+paraphernalia of other days in the form of buckskin clothes, elaborate
+bead-work, eagle headdresses, good guns, and the outlandish adornments
+of their chiefs and medicine-men. Hundreds of miles from any except such
+small and distant towns as Calgary and Medicine Hat, and kept on the
+reserve as much as possible, there has come to them less damage by
+whiskey and white men's vices than perhaps most other tribes have
+suffered. Therefore it was still possible for me to see in some tents
+the squaws at work painting the clan signs on stretched skins, and
+making bead-work for moccasins, pouches, "chaps," and the rest. And in
+one tepee I found a young and rather pretty girl wearing a suit of
+buckskin, such as Cooper and all the past historians of the Indian knew
+as the conventional every-day attire of the red-skin. I say I saw the
+girl in a tent, but, as a matter of fact, she passed me out-of-doors,
+and with true feminine art managed to allow her blanket to fall open for
+just the instant it took to disclose the precious dress beneath it. I
+asked to be taken into the tent to which she went, and there, at the
+interpreter's request, she threw off her blanket, and stood, with a
+little display of honest coyness, dressed like the traditional and the
+theatrical belle of the wilderness. The soft yellowish leather, the
+heavy fringe upon the arms, seams, and edges of the garment, her
+beautiful beaded leggings and moccasins, formed so many parts of a very
+charming picture. For herself, her face was comely, but her figure
+was--an Indian's. The figure of the typical Indian woman shows few
+graceful curves.
+
+The reader will inquire whether there was any real beauty, as we judge
+it, among these Indians. Yes, there was; at least there were good looks
+if there was not beauty. I saw perhaps a dozen fine-looking men, half a
+dozen attractive girls, and something like a hundred children of varying
+degrees of comeliness--pleasing, pretty, or beautiful. I had some jolly
+romps with the children, and so came to know that their faces and arms
+met my touch with the smoothness and softness of the flesh of our own
+little ones at home. I was surprised at this; indeed, the skin of the
+boys was of the texture of velvet. The madcap urchins, what riotous fun
+they were having! They flung arrows and darts, ran races and wrestled,
+and in some of their play they fairly swarmed all over one another,
+until at times one lad would be buried in the thick of a writhing mass
+of legs and arms several feet in depth. Some of the boys wore only
+"G-strings" (as, for some reason, the breech-clout is commonly called on
+the prairie), but others were wrapped in old blankets, and the larger
+ones were already wearing the Blackfoot plume-lock, or tuft of hair tied
+and trained to stand erect above the forehead. The babies within the
+tepees were clad only in their complexions.
+
+The result of an hour of waiting on our part and of yelling on the part
+of the herald resulted in a war-dance not very different in itself from
+the dances we have most of us seen at Wild West shows. An immense tomtom
+as big as the largest-sized bass-drum was set up between four poles,
+around which colored cloths were wrapped, and from the tops of which the
+same gay stuff floated on the wind in bunches of party-colored ribbons.
+Around this squatted four young braves, who pounded the drum-head and
+chanted a tune, which rose and fell between the shrillest and the
+deepest notes, but which consisted of simple monosyllabic sounds
+repeated thousands of times. The interpreter said that originally the
+Indians had words to their songs, but these were forgotten no man knows
+when, and only the so-called tunes (and the tradition that there once
+were words for them) are perpetuated. At all events, the four braves
+beat the drum and chanted, until presently a young warrior, hideous with
+war-paint, and carrying a shield and a tomahawk, came out of a tepee and
+began the dancing. It was the stiff-legged hopping, first on one foot
+and then on the other, which all savages appear to deem the highest form
+the terpsichorean art can take. In the course of a few circles around
+the tomtom he began shouting of valorous deeds he never had performed,
+for he was too young to have ridden after buffalo or into battle.
+Presently he pretended to see upon the ground something at once
+fascinating and awesome. It was the trail of the enemy. Then he danced
+furiously and more limberly, tossing his head back, shaking his hatchet
+and many-tailed shield high aloft, and yelling that he was following the
+foe, and would not rest while a skull and a scalp-lock remained in
+conjunction among them. He was joined by three others, and all danced
+and yelled like madmen. At the last the leader came to a sort of
+standard made of a stick and some cloth, tore it out from where it had
+been thrust in the ground, and holding it far above his head, pranced
+once around the circle, and thus ended the dance.
+
+[Illustration: OPENING OF THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE]
+
+The novelty and interest in the celebration rested in the
+surroundings--the great circle of tepees; the braves in their blankets
+stalking hither and thither; the dogs, the horses, the intrepid riders,
+dashing across the view. More strange still was the solemn line of the
+medicine-men, who, for some reason not explained to me, sat in a row
+with their backs to the dancers a city block away, and crooned a low
+guttural accompaniment to the tomtom. But still more interesting were
+the boys, of all grades of childhood, who looked on, while not a woman
+remained in sight. The larger boys stood about in groups, watching the
+spectacle with eyes afire with admiration, but the little fellows had
+flung themselves on their stomachs in a row, and were supporting their
+chubby faces upon their little brown hands, while their elbows rested on
+the grass, forming a sort of orchestra row of Lilliputian spectators.
+
+We arranged for a great spectacle to be gotten up on the next afternoon,
+and were promised that it should be as notable for the numbers
+participating in it and for the trappings to be displayed as any the
+Blackfeet had ever given upon their reserve. The Indians spent the
+entire night in carousing over the gift of tea, and we knew that if they
+were true to most precedents they would brew and drink every drop of it.
+Possibly some took it with an admixture of tobacco and wild currant to
+make them drunk, or, in reality, very sick--which is much the same thing
+to a reservation Indian. The compounds which the average Indian will
+swallow in the hope of imitating the effects of whiskey are such as to
+tax the credulity of those who hear of them. A certain patent
+"painkiller" ranks almost as high as whiskey in their estimation; but
+Worcestershire sauce and gunpowder, or tea, tobacco, and wild currant,
+are not at all to be despised when alcohol, or the money to get it with,
+is wanting. I heard a characteristic story about these red men while I
+was visiting them. All who are familiar with them know that if medicine
+is given them to take in small portions at certain intervals they are
+morally sure to swallow it all at once, and that the sicker it makes
+them, the more they will value it. On the Blackfoot Reserve, only a
+short time ago, our gentle and insinuating Sedlitz-powders were classed
+as children's stuff, but now they have leaped to the front rank as
+powerful medicines. This is because some white man showed the Indian how
+to take the soda and magnesia first, and then swallow the tartaric acid.
+They do this, and when the explosion follows, and the gases burst from
+their mouths and noses, they pull themselves together and remark, "Ugh!
+him heap good."
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH IN THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE]
+
+On the morning of the day of the great spectacle I rode with Mr. Begg
+over to the ration-house to see the meat distributed. The dust rose in
+clouds above all the trails as the cavalcade of men, women, children,
+travoises and dogs, approached the station. Men were few in the
+disjointed lines; most of them sent their women or children. All rode
+astraddle, some on saddles and some bareback. As all urged their horses
+in the Indian fashion, which is to whip them unceasingly, and prod them
+constantly with spurless heels, the bobbing movement of the riders'
+heads and the gymnastics of their legs produced a queer scene. Here and
+there a travois was trailed along by a horse or a dog, but the majority
+of the pensioners were content to carry their meat in bags or otherwise
+upon their horses. While the slaughtering went on, and after that, when
+the beef was being chopped up into junks, I sat in the meat-contractor's
+office, and saw the bucks, squaws, and children come, one after another,
+to beg. I could not help noticing that all were treated with marked and
+uniform kindness, and I learned that no one ever struck one of the
+Indians, or suffered himself to lose his temper with them. A few of the
+men asked for blankets, but the squaws and the children wanted soap. It
+was said that when they first made their acquaintance with this symbol
+of civilization they mistook it for an article of diet, but that now
+they use it properly and prize it. When it was announced that the meat
+was ready, the butchers threw open an aperture in the wall of the
+ration-house, and the Indians huddled before it as if they had flung
+themselves against the house in a mass. I have seen boys do the same
+thing at the opening of a ticket window for the sale of gallery seats in
+a theatre. There was no fighting or quarrelling, but every Indian pushed
+steadily and silently with all his or her might. When one got his share
+he tore himself away from the crowd as briers are pulled out of hairy
+cloth. They are a hungry and an economical people. They bring pails for
+the beef blood, and they carry home the hoofs for jelly. After a steer
+has been butchered and distributed, only his horns and his paunch
+remain.
+
+The sun blazed down on the great camp that afternoon and glorified the
+place so that it looked like a miniature Switzerland of snowy peaks. But
+it was hot, and blankets were stretched from the tent tops, and the
+women sat under them to catch the air and escape the heat. The salaried
+native policeman of the reserve, wearing a white stove-pipe hat with
+feathers, and a ridiculous blue coat, and Heaven alone knows what other
+absurdities, rode around, boasting of deeds he never performed, while a
+white cur made him all the more ridiculous by chasing him and yelping at
+his horse's tail.
+
+And then came the grand spectacle. The vast plain was forgotten, and the
+great campus within the circle of tents was transformed into a theatre.
+The scene was a setting of white and red tents that threw their
+clear-cut outlines against a matchless blue sky. The audience was
+composed of four white men and the Indian boys, who were flung about by
+the startled horses they were holding for us. The players were the
+gorgeous cavalrymen of nature, circling before their women and old men
+and children, themselves plumed like unheard-of tropical birds, the
+others displaying the minor splendor of the kaleidoscope. The play was
+"The Pony War-dance, or the Departure for Battle." The acting was
+fierce; not like the conduct of a mimic battle on our stage, but
+performed with the desperate zest of men who hope for distinction in
+war, and may not trifle about it. It had the earnestness of a challenged
+man who tries the foils with a tutor. It was impressive, inspiring, at
+times wildly exciting.
+
+[Illustration: A FANTASY FROM THE PONY WAR-DANCE]
+
+There were threescore young men in the brilliant cavalcade. They rode
+horses that were as wild as themselves. Their evolutions were rude, but
+magnificent. Now they dashed past us in single file, and next they came
+helter-skelter, like cattle stampeding. For a while they rode around and
+around, as on a race-course, but at times they deserted the enclosure,
+parted into small bands, and were hidden behind the curtains of their
+own dust, presently to reappear with a mad rush, yelling like maniacs,
+firing their pieces, and brandishing their arms and their finery wildly
+on high. The orchestra was composed of seven tomtoms that had been dried
+taut before a camp fire. The old men and the chiefs sat in a semicircle
+behind the drummers on the ground.
+
+All the tribal heirlooms were in the display, the cherished gewgaws,
+trinkets, arms, apparel, and finery they had saved from the fate of
+which they will not admit they are themselves the victims. I never saw
+an old-time picture of a type of savage red man or of an extravagance of
+their costuming that was not revived in this spectacle. It was as if the
+plates in my old school-books and novels and tales of adventure were all
+animated and passing before me. The traditional Indian with the eagle
+plumes from crown to heels was there; so was he with the buffalo horns
+growing out of his skull; so were the idyllic braves in yellow
+buckskin fringed at every point. The shining bodies of men, bare naked,
+and frescoed like a Bowery bar-room, were not lacking; neither were
+those who wore masses of splendid embroidery with colored beads. But
+there were as many peculiar costumes which I never had seen pictured.
+And not any two men or any two horses were alike. As barber poles are
+covered with paint, so were many of these choice steeds of the nation.
+Some were spotted all over with daubs of white, and some with every
+color obtainable. Some were branded fifty times with the white hand, the
+symbol of peace, but others bore the red hand and the white hand in
+alternate prints. There were horses painted with the figures of horses
+and of serpents and of foxes. To some saddles were affixed colored
+blankets or cloths that fell upon the ground or lashed the air,
+according as the horse cantered or raced. One horse was hung all round
+with great soft woolly tails of some white material. Sleigh-bells were
+upon several.
+
+Only half a dozen men wore hats--mainly cowboy hats decked with
+feathers. Many carried rifles, which they used with one hand. Others
+brought out bows and arrows, lances decked with feathers or ribbons,
+poles hung with colored cloths, great shields brilliantly painted and
+fringed. Every visible inch of each warrior was painted, the naked ones
+being ringed, streaked, and striped from head to foot. I would have to
+catalogue the possessions of the whole nation to tell all that they wore
+between the brass rings in their hair and the cartridge-belts at their
+waists, and thus down to their beautiful moccasins.
+
+Two strange features further distinguished their pageant. One was the
+appearance of two negro minstrels upon one horse. Both had blackened
+their faces and hands; both wore old stove-pipe hats and queer
+long-tailed white men's coats. One wore a huge false white mustache, and
+the other carried a coal-scuttle. The women and children roared with
+laughter at the sight. The two comedians got down from their horse, and
+began to make grimaces, and to pose this way and that, very comically.
+Such a performance had never been seen on the reserve before. No one
+there could explain where the men had seen negro minstrels. The other
+unexpected feature required time for development. At first we noticed
+that two little Indian boys kept getting in the way of the riders. As we
+were not able to find any fixed place of safety from the excited
+horsemen, we marvelled that these children were permitted to risk their
+necks.
+
+Suddenly a hideously-painted naked man on horseback chased the little
+boys, leaving the cavalcade, and circling around the children. He rode
+back into the ranks, and still they loitered in the way. Then around
+swept the horsemen once more, and this time the naked rider flung
+himself from his horse, and seizing one boy and then the other, bore
+each to the ground, and made as if he would brain them with his hatchet
+and lift their scalps with his knife. The sight was one to paralyze an
+on-looker. But it was only a theatrical performance arranged for the
+occasion. The man was acting over again the proudest of his
+achievements. The boys played the parts of two white men whose scalps
+now grace his tepee and gladden his memory.
+
+[Illustration: THROWING THE SNOW SNAKE]
+
+For ninety minutes we watched the glorious riding, the splendid horses,
+the brilliant trappings, and the paroxysmal fervor of the excited
+Indians. The earth trembled beneath the dashing of the riders; the air
+palpitated with the noise of their war-cries and bells. We could have
+stood the day out, but we knew the players were tired, and yet would
+not cease till we withdrew. Therefore we came away.
+
+We had enjoyed a never-to-be-forgotten privilege. It was if we had seen
+the ghosts of a dead people ride back to parody scenes in an era that
+had vanished. It was like the rising of the curtain, in response to an
+"encore," upon a drama that has been played. It was as if the sudden
+up-flashing of a smouldering fire lighted, once again and for an
+instant, the scene it had ceased to illumine.
+
+
+
+
+  III
+
+  A FAMOUS MISSIONARY
+
+
+The former chief of the Blackfeet--Crowfoot--and Father Lacombe, the
+Roman Catholic missionary to the tribe, were the most interesting and
+among the most influential public characters in the newer part of
+Canada. They had much to do with controlling the peace of a territory
+the size of a great empire.
+
+The chief was more than eighty years old; the priest is a dozen years
+younger; and yet they represented in their experiences the two great
+epochs of life on this continent--the barbaric and the progressive. In
+the chief's boyhood the red man held undisputed sway from the Lakes to
+the Rockies. In the priest's youth he led, like a scout, beyond the
+advancing hosts from Europe. But Father Lacombe came bearing the olive
+branch of religion, and he and the barbarian became fast friends,
+intimates in a companionship as picturesque and out of the common as any
+the world could produce.
+
+There is something very strange about the relations of the French and
+the French half-breeds with the wild men of the plains. It is not
+altogether necessary that the Frenchman should be a priest, for I have
+heard of French half-breeds in our Territories who showed again and
+again that they could make their way through bands of hostiles in
+perfect safety, though knowing nothing of the language of the tribes
+there in war-paint. It is most likely that their swarthy skins and black
+hair, and their knowledge of savage ways aided them. But when not even a
+French half-breed has dared to risk his life among angry Indians, the
+French missionaries went about their duty fearlessly and unscathed.
+There was one, just after the dreadful massacre of the Little Big Horn,
+who built a cross of rough wood, painted it white, fastened it to his
+buck-board, and drove through a country in which a white man with a pale
+face and blond hair would not have lived two hours.
+
+It must be remembered that in a vast region of country the French priest
+and _voyageur_ and _coureur des bois_ were the first white men the
+Indians saw, and while the explorers and traders seldom quarrelled with
+the red men or offered violence to them, the priests never did. They
+went about like women or children, or, rather, like nothing else than
+priests. They quickly learned the tongues of the savages, treated them
+fairly, showed the sublimest courage, and acted as counsellors,
+physicians, and friends. There is at least one brave Indian fighter in
+our army who will state it as his belief that if all the white men had
+done thus we would have had but little trouble with our Indians.
+
+Father Lacombe was one of the priests who threaded the trails of the
+North-western timber land and the Far Western prairie when white men
+were very few indeed in that country, and the only settlements were
+those that had grown around the frontier forts and the still earlier
+mission chapels. For instance, in 1849, at twenty-two years of age, he
+slept a night or two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was then a
+village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the great building of the St.
+Paul _Pioneer Press_ now stands, then stood the village chapel. For two
+years he worked at his calling on either side of the American frontier,
+and then was sent to what is now Edmonton, in that magical region of
+long summers and great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River
+District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and Idaho. There the Rockies
+are broken and lowered, and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the
+region warmer than the land far to the south of it. But Father Lacombe
+went farther--400 miles north to Lake Labiche. There he found what he
+calls a fine colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the Hudson
+Bay Company--white men from England, France, and the Orkney Islands, and
+Indians and half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests were
+so infrequent that in the intervals between them the white men and
+Indian women married one another, not without formality and the sanction
+of the colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the Church.
+Father Lacombe was called upon to bless and solemnize many such matches,
+to baptize many children, and to teach and preach what scores knew but
+vaguely or not at all.
+
+In time he was sent to Calgary in the province of Alberta. It is one of
+the most bustling towns in the Dominion, and the biggest place west of
+Winnipeg. Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but
+from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, sixty
+miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with
+the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere
+post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The
+buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the
+bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed
+the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." But
+the other Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the territory
+as final, and the country thereabouts was an almost constant
+battle-ground between the Blackfoot nation of allied tribes and the
+Sioux, Crows, Flatheads, Crees, and others.
+
+The good priest--for if ever there was a good man Father Lacombe is
+one--saw fighting enough, as he roamed with one tribe and the other, or
+journeyed from tribe to tribe. His mission led him to ignore tribal
+differences, and to preach to all the Indians of the plains. He knew the
+chiefs and headmen among them all, and so justly did he deal with them
+that he was not only able to minister to all without attracting the
+enmity of any, but he came to wield, as he does to-day, a formidable
+power over all of them.
+
+He knew old Crowfoot in his prime, and as I saw them together they were
+like bosom friends. Together they had shared dreadful privation and
+survived frightful winters and storms. They had gone side by side
+through savage battles, and each respected and loved the other. I think
+I make no mistake in saying that all through his reign Crowfoot was the
+greatest Indian monarch in Canada; possibly no tribe in this country was
+stronger in numbers during the last decade or two. I have never seen a
+nobler-looking Indian or a more king-like man. He was tall and straight,
+as slim as a girl, and he had the face of an eagle or of an ancient
+Roman. He never troubled himself to learn the English language; he had
+little use for his own. His grunt or his "No" ran all through his tribe.
+He never shared his honors with a squaw. He died an old bachelor,
+saying, wittily, that no woman would take him.
+
+It must be remembered that the degradation of the Canadian Indian began
+a dozen or fifteen years later than that of our own red men. In both
+countries the railroads were indirectly the destructive agents, and
+Canada's great transcontinental line is a new institution. Until it
+belted the prairie the other day the Blackfoot Indians led very much the
+life of their fathers, hunting and trading for the whites, to be sure,
+but living like Indians, fighting like Indians, and dying like them. Now
+they don't fight, and they live and die like dogs. Amid the old
+conditions lived Crowfoot--a haughty, picturesque, grand old savage. He
+never rode or walked without his headmen in his retinue, and when he
+wished to exert his authority, his apparel was royal indeed. His coat of
+gaudy bead-work was a splendid garment, and weighed a dozen pounds. His
+leg-gear was just as fine; his moccasins would fetch fifty dollars in
+any city to-day. Doubtless he thought his hat was quite as impressive
+and king-like, but to a mere scion of effeminate civilization it looked
+remarkably like an extra tall plug hat, with no crown in the top and a
+lot of crows' plumes in the band. You may be sure his successor wears
+that same hat to-day, for the Indians revere the "state hat" of a brave
+chief, and look at it through superstitious eyes, so that those queer
+hats (older tiles than ever see the light of St. Patrick's Day) descend
+from chief to chief, and are hallowed.
+
+But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of the conquest of the
+wilderness contains no more pathetic story than that of how the kind old
+priest, Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieutenants against the
+coming of the pale-faces. He went to the reservation and assembled the
+leaders before him in council. He told them that the white men were
+building a great railroad, and in a month their workmen would be in that
+virgin country. He told the wondering red men that among these laborers
+would be found many bad men seeking to sell whiskey, offering money for
+the ruin of the squaws. Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for
+him, because he loved the Indians and doubted their strength, he assured
+them that contact with these white men would result in death, in the
+destruction of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of
+disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. The Indians smoked and
+reflected. Then they spoke through old Crowfoot:
+
+"We have listened. We will keep upon our reservation. We will not go to
+see the railroad."
+
+But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more profoundly was he
+convinced of the ruin of the tribe should the "children," as he sagely
+calls all Indians, disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve,
+and gathered the chief and the headmen, and warned them of the soulless,
+diabolical, selfish instincts of the white men. Again the grave warriors
+promised to obey him.
+
+The railroad laborers came with camps and money and liquors and numbers,
+and the prairie thundered the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And
+one morning the old priest looked out of the window of his bare bedroom
+and saw curling wisps of gray smoke ascending from a score of tepees on
+the hill beside Calgary.[1] Angry, amazed, he went to his doorway and
+opened it, and there upon the ground sat some of the headmen and the old
+men, with bowed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his
+questions! Note how wisely he chose the name of children for them, when
+I tell you that their spokesman at last answered with the excuse that
+the buffaloes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the white men
+brought money which the squaws could get. And what is the end? There are
+always tepees on the hills now beside every settlement near the
+Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary lifted his trembling
+forefinger towards the sky, when I was there, and said: "Mark me. In
+fifteen years there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the
+Canadian prairie--not one."
+
+Through all that revolutionary railroad building and the rush of new
+settlers, Father Lacombe and Crowfoot kept the Indians from war, and
+even from depredations and from murder. When the half-breeds arose under
+Riel, and every Indian looked to his rifle and his knife, and when the
+mutterings that preface the war-cry sounded in every lodge, Father
+Lacombe made Crowfoot pledge his word that the Indians should not rise.
+The priest represented the Government on these occasions. The Canadian
+statesmen recognize the value of his services. He is the great authority
+on Indian matters beyond our border; the ambassador to and spokesman for
+the Indians.
+
+But Father Lacombe is more than that. He is the deepest student of the
+Indian languages that Canada possesses. The revised edition of Bishop
+Barager's _Grammar of the Ochipwe Language_ bears these words upon its
+title-page: "Revised by the Rev. Father Lacombe, Oblate Mary Immaculate,
+1878." He is the author of the authoritative _Dictionnaire et Grammaire
+de la Langue Crise_, the dictionary of the Cree dialect published in
+1874. He has compiled just such another monument to the Blackfoot
+language, and will soon publish it, if he has not done so already. He is
+in constant correspondence with our Smithsonian Institution; he is
+famous to all who study the Indian; he is beloved or admired throughout
+Canada.
+
+[Illustration: FATHER LACOMBE HEADING THE INDIANS]
+
+His work in these lines is labor of love. He is a student by nature. He
+began the study of the Algonquin language as a youth in older Canada,
+and the tongues of many of these tribes from Labrador to Athabasca are
+but dialects of the language of the great Algonquin nation--the Algic
+family. He told me that the white man's handling of Indian words in the
+nomenclature of our cities, provinces, and States is as brutal as
+anything charged against the savages. Saskatchewan, for instance, means
+nothing. "Kissiskatchewan" is the word that was intended. It means
+"rapid current." Manitoba is senseless, but "Manitowapa" (the mysterious
+strait) would have been full of local import. However, there is no need
+to sadden ourselves with this expert knowledge. Rather let us be
+grateful for every Indian name with which we have stamped individuality
+upon the map of the world be it rightly or wrong set forth.
+
+It is strange to think of a scholar and a priest amid the scenes that
+Father Lacombe has witnessed. It was one of the most fortunate
+happenings of my life that I chanced to be in Calgary and in the little
+mission beside the chapel when Chief Crowfoot came to pay his respects
+to his old black-habited friend. Anxious to pay the chief such a
+compliment as should present the old warrior to me in the light in which
+he would be most proud to be viewed, Father Lacombe remarked that he had
+known Crowfoot when he was a young man and a mighty warrior. The old
+copper-plated Roman smiled and swelled his chest when this was
+translated. He was so pleased that the priest was led to ask him if he
+remembered one night when a certain trouble about some horses, or a
+chance duel between the Blackfoot tribe and a band of its enemies, led
+to a midnight attack. If my memory serves me, it was the Bloods (an
+allied part of the Blackfoot nation) who picked this quarrel. The chief
+grinned and grunted wonderfully as the priest spoke. The priest asked if
+he remembered how the Bloods were routed. The chief grunted even more
+emphatically. Then the priest asked if the chief recalled what a pickle
+he, the priest, was in when he found himself in the thick of the fight.
+At that old Crowfoot actually laughed.
+
+After that Father Lacombe, in a few bold sentences, drew a picture of
+the quiet, sleep-enfolded camp of the Blackfoot band, of the silence and
+the darkness. Then he told of a sudden musket-shot; then of the
+screaming of the squaws, and the barking of the dogs, and the yelling of
+the children, of the general hubbub and confusion of the startled camp.
+The cry was everywhere "The Bloods! the Bloods!" The enemy shot a
+fusillade at close quarters into the Blackfoot camp, and the priest ran
+out towards the blazing muskets, crying that they must stop, for he,
+their priest, was in the camp. He shouted his own name, for he stood
+towards the Bloods precisely as he did towards the Blackfoot nation. But
+whether the Bloods heard him or not, they did not heed him. The blaze of
+their guns grew stronger and crept nearer. The bullets whistled by. It
+grew exceedingly unpleasant to be there. It was dangerous as well.
+Father Lacombe said that he did all he could to stop the fight, but when
+it was evident that his behavior would simply result in the massacre of
+his hosts and of himself in the bargain, he altered his cries into
+military commands. "Give it to 'em!" he screamed. He urged Crowfoot's
+braves to return two shots for every one from the enemy. He took
+command, and inspired the bucks with double valor. They drove the Bloods
+out of reach and hearing.
+
+All this was translated to Crowfoot--or Saponaxitaw, for that was his
+Indian name--and he chuckled and grinned, and poked the priest in the
+side with his knuckles. And good Father Lacombe felt the magnetism of
+his own words and memory, and clapped the chief on the shoulder, while
+both laughed heartily at the climax, with the accompanying mental
+picture of the discomfited Bloods running away, and the clergyman
+ordering their instant destruction.
+
+There may not be such another meeting and rehearsal on this continent
+again. Those two men represented the passing and the dominant races of
+America; and yet, in my view, the learned and brave and kindly
+missionary is as much a part of the dead past as is the royalty that
+Crowfoot was the last to represent.
+
+[Footnote 1: Since this was written Father Lacombe's work has been
+continued at Fort McLeod in the same province as Calgary. In this
+smaller place he finds more time for his literary pursuits.]
+
+
+
+
+  IV
+
+  ANTOINE'S MOOSE-YARD
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was the night of a great dinner at the club. Whenever the door of the
+banqueting hall was opened, a burst of laughter or of applause disturbed
+the quiet talk of a few men who had gathered in the reading-room--men of
+the sort that extract the best enjoyment from a club by escaping its
+functions, or attending them only to draw to one side its choicest
+spirits for never-to-be-forgotten talks before an open fire, and over
+wine and cigars used sparingly.
+
+"I'm tired," an artist was saying--"so tired that I have a horror of my
+studio. My wife understands my condition and bids me go away and rest."
+
+"That is astonishing," said I; "for, as a rule, neither women nor men
+can comprehend the fatigue that seizes an artist or writer. At most of
+our homes there comes to be a reluctant recognition of the fact that we
+say we are tired, and that we persist in the assumption by knocking off
+work. But human fatigue is measured by the mile of walking, or the cords
+of firewood that have been cut, and the world will always hold that if
+we have not hewn wood or tramped all day, it is absurd for us to talk
+of feeling tired. We cannot alter this; we are too few."
+
+"Yes," said another of the little party. "The world shares the feeling
+of the Irishman who saw a very large, stout man at work at reporting in
+a courtroom. 'Faith!' said he, 'will ye look at the size of that man--to
+be airning his living wid a little pincil?' The world would acknowledge
+our right to feel tired if we used crow-bars to write or draw with; but
+pencils! pshaw! a hundred weigh less than a pound."
+
+"Well," said I, "all the same, I am so tired that my head feels like
+cork; so tired that for two days I have not been able to summon an idea
+or turn a sentence neatly. I have been sitting at my desk writing
+wretched stuff and tearing it up, or staring blankly out of the window."
+
+"Glorious!" said the artist, startling us all with his vehemence and
+inapt exclamation. "Why, it is providential that I came here to-night.
+If that's the way you feel, we are a pair, and you will go with me and
+rest. Do you hunt? Are you fond of it?"
+
+"I know all about it," said I, "but I have not definitely determined
+whether I am fond of it or not. I have been hunting only once. It was
+years ago, when I was a mere boy. I went after deer with a poet, an
+editor, and a railroad conductor. We journeyed to a lovely valley in
+Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, and put ourselves in the hands of a man
+seven feet high, who had a flintlock musket a foot taller than himself,
+and a wife who gave us saleratus bread and a bowl of pork fat for supper
+and breakfast. We were not there at dinner. The man stationed us a mile
+apart on what he said were the paths, or "runways," the deer would take.
+Then he went to stir the game up with his dogs. There he left us from
+sunrise till supper, or would have left us had we not with great
+difficulty found one another, and enjoyed the exquisite woodland quiet
+and light and shade together, mainly flat on our backs, with the white
+sails of the sky floating in an azure sea above the reaching fingers of
+the tree-tops. The editor marred the occasion with an unworthy suspicion
+that our hunter was at the village tavern picturing to his cronies what
+simple donkeys we were, standing a mile apart in the forsaken woods. But
+the poet said something so pregnant with philosophy that it always comes
+back to me with the mention of hunting. 'Where is your gun?' he was
+asked, when we came upon him, pacing the forest path, hands in pockets,
+and no weapon in sight. 'Oh, my gun?' he repeated. 'I don't know.
+Somewhere in among those trees. I covered it with leaves so as not to
+see it. After this, if I go hunting again, I shall not take a gun. It is
+very cold and heavy, and more or less dangerous in the bargain. You
+never use it, you know. I go hunting every few years, but I never yet
+have had to fire my gun, and I begin to see that it is only brought
+along in deference to a tradition descending from an era when men got
+something more than fresh air and scenery on a hunting trip.'"
+
+The others laughed at my story, but the artist regarded me with an
+expression of pity. He is a famous hunter--a genuine, devoted
+hunter--and one might almost as safely speak a light word of his
+relations as of his favorite mode of recreation.
+
+[Illustration: THE HOTEL--LAST SIGN OF CIVILIZATION]
+
+"Fresh air!" said he; "scenery! Humph! Your poet would not know which
+end of a gun to aim with. I see that you know nothing at all about
+hunting, but I will pay you the high compliment of saying that I can
+make a hunter of you. I have always insisted heretofore that a hunter
+must begin in boyhood; but never mind, I'll make a hunter of you at
+thirty-six. We will start to-morrow morning for Montreal, and in
+twenty-four hours you shall be in the greatest sporting region in
+America, incomparably the greatest hunting district. It is great because
+Americans do not know of it, and because it has all of British America
+to keep it supplied with game. Think of it! In twenty-four hours we
+shall be tracking moose near Hudson Bay, for Hudson Bay is not much
+farther from New York than Chicago--another fact that few persons are
+aware of."
+
+Environment is a positive force. We could feel that we were disturbing
+what the artist would call "the local tone," by rushing through the
+city's streets next morning with our guns slung upon our backs. It was
+just at the hour when the factory hands and the shop-girls were out in
+force, and the juxtaposition of those elements of society with two
+portly men bearing guns created a positive sensation. In the cars the
+artist held forth upon the terrors of the life upon which I was about to
+venture. He left upon my mind a blurred impression of sleeping
+out-of-doors like human cocoons, done up in blankets, while the savage
+mercury lurked in unknown depths below the zero mark. He said the
+camp-fire would have to be fed every two hours of each night, and he
+added, without contradiction from me, that he supposed he would have to
+perform this duty, as he was accustomed to it. Lest his forecast should
+raise my anticipation of pleasure extravagantly, he added that those
+hunters were fortunate who had fires to feed; for his part he had once
+walked around a tree stump a whole night to keep from freezing. He
+supposed that we would perform our main journeying on snow-shoes, but
+how we should enjoy that he could not say, as his knowledge of
+snow-shoeing was limited.
+
+At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who is always at a
+traveller's elbow with a fund of alarming information, cleared his
+throat as he sat opposite us, and inquired whether he had overheard that
+we did not know much about snow-shoes. An interesting fact concerning
+them, he said, was that they seemed easy to walk with at first, but if
+the learner fell down with them on it usually needed a considerable
+portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on his feet. Beginners
+only fell down, however, in attempting to cross a log or stump, but the
+forest where we were going was literally floored with such obstructions.
+The first day's effort to navigate with snow-shoes, he remarked, is
+usually accompanied by a terrible malady called _mal de raquette_, in
+which the cords of one's legs become knotted in great and excruciatingly
+painful bunches. The cure for this is to "walk it off the next day, when
+the agony is yet more intense than at first." As the stranger had
+reached his destination, he had little more than time to remark that the
+moose is an exceedingly vicious animal, invariably attacking all hunters
+who fail to kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped upon
+the car platform he let fall a simple but touching eulogy upon a dear
+friend who had recently lost his life by being literally cut in two,
+lengthwise, by a moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly
+stiffened fore-legs. The artist protested that the stranger was a
+sensationalist, unsupported by either the camp-fire gossip or the
+literature of hunters. Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled
+with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying.
+
+In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had in the United States:
+woollens thick as boards, hosiery that wards off the cold as armor
+resists missiles, gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps
+and coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and rich alike,
+blanket suits that are more picturesque than any other masculine garment
+worn north of the city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed,
+so many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little of (though many
+of us need them) that at a glance we say the Montrealers are foreigners.
+Montreal is the gayest city on this continent, and I have often thought
+that the clothing there is largely responsible for that condition.
+
+[Illustration: "GIVE ME A LIGHT"]
+
+A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid-winter finds the place
+inhospitably cold, and wonders how, as well as why, any one lives there.
+I well remember standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, with my
+teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly congealing, when my attention
+was called to the fact that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, laughing
+girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. I asked a Canadian
+lady how that could be possible, and she answered with a list of the
+principal garments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs of
+stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings over their shoes,
+with moccasins over them. They had so many woollen skirts that an
+American girl would not believe me if I gave the number. They wore heavy
+dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket suits over all this. They had
+mittens over their gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no
+longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed the cold; indeed, it
+occurred to me that their bravery amid the terrors of tobogganing was no
+bravery at all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a mass of
+woollens could scarcely expect damage if she fell from a steeple. When
+next I appeared out-of-doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel
+in a box of plash, and from that time out Montreal seemed, what it
+really is, the merriest of American capitals. And there I had come
+again, and was filling my trunk with this wonderful armor of
+civilization, while the artist sought advice as to which point to enter
+the wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most quickly.
+
+Mr. W. C. Van Horne, the President of the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
+proved a friend in need. He dictated a few telegrams that agitated the
+people of a vast section of country between Ottawa and the Great Lakes.
+And in the afternoon the answers came flying back. These were from
+various points where Hudson Bay posts are situated. At one or two the
+Indian trappers and hunters were all away on their winter expeditions;
+from another a famous white hunter had just departed with a party of
+gentlemen. At Mattawa, in Ontario, moose were close at hand and
+plentiful, and two skilled Indian hunters were just in from a trapping
+expedition; but the post factor, Mr. Rankin, was sick in bed, and the
+Indians were on a spree. To Mattawa we decided to go. It is a
+twelve-hour journey from New York to Montreal, and an eleven-hour
+journey from Montreal to the heart of this hunters' paradise; so that,
+had we known at just what point to enter the forest, we could have taken
+the trail in twenty-four hours from the metropolis, as the artist had
+predicted.
+
+Our first taste of the frontier, at Peter O'Farrall's Ottawa Hotel, in
+Mattawa, was delicious in the extreme. O'Farrall used to be game-keeper
+to the Marquis of Waterford, and thus got "a taste of the quality" that
+prompted him to assume the position he has chosen as the most lordly
+hotel-keeper in Canada. We do not know what sort of men own our great
+New York and Chicago and San Francisco hotels, but certainly they cannot
+lead more leisurely, complacent lives than Mr. O'Farrall. He has a
+bartender to look after the male visitors and the bar, and a matronly
+relative to see to the women and the kitchen, so that the landlord
+arises when he likes to enjoy each succeeding day of ease and
+prosperity. He has been known to exert himself, as when he chased a man
+who spoke slightingly of his liquor. And he was momentarily ruffled at
+the trying conduct of the artist on this hunting trip. The artist could
+not find his overcoat, and had the temerity to refer the matter to Mr.
+O'Farrall.
+
+"Sir," said the artist, "what do you suppose has become of my overcoat?
+I cannot find it anywhere."
+
+"I don't know anything about your botheration overcoat," said Mr.
+O'Farrall. "Sure, I've throuble enough kaping thrack of me own."
+
+The reader may be sure that O'Farrall's was rightly recommended to us,
+and that it is a well-managed and popular place, with good beds and
+excellent fare, and with no extra charge for the delightful addition of
+the host himself, who is very tall and dignified and humourous, and who
+is the oddest and yet most picturesque-looking public character in the
+Dominion. Such an oddity is certain to attract queer characters to his
+side, and Mr. O'Farrall is no exception to the rule. One of the
+waiter-girls in the dining-room was found never by any chance to know
+anything that she was asked about. For instance, she had never heard of
+Mr. Rankin, the chief man of the place. To every question she made
+answer, "Sure, there does be a great dale goin' on here and I know
+nothin' of it." Of her the artist ventured the theory that "she could
+not know everything on a waiter-girl's salary." John, the bartender, was
+a delightful study. No matter what a visitor laid down in the
+smoking-room, John picked it up and carried it behind the bar. Every one
+was continually losing something and searching for it, always to observe
+that John was able to produce it with a smile and the wise remark that
+he had taken the lost article and put it away "for fear some one would
+pick it up." Finally, there was Mr. O'Farrall's dog--a ragged,
+time-worn, petulant terrier, no bigger than a pint-pot. Mr. O'Farrall
+nevertheless called him "Fairy," and said he kept him "to protect the
+village children against wild bears."
+
+I shall never be able to think of Mattawa as it is--a plain little
+lumbering town on the Ottawa River, with the wreck and ruin of once
+grand scenery hemming it in on all sides in the form of ragged mountains
+literally ravaged by fire and the axe. Hints of it come back to me in
+dismembered bits that prove it to have been interesting: vignettes of
+little school-boys in blanket suits and moccasins, of great-spirited
+horses forever racing ahead of fur-laden sleighs, and of troops of
+olive-skinned French-Canadian girls, bundled up from their feet to those
+mischievous features which shot roguish glances at the artist--the
+biggest man, the people said, who had ever been seen in Mattawa. But the
+place will ever yield back to my mind the impression I got of the
+wonderful preparations that were made for our adventure--preparations
+that seemed to busy or to interest nearly every one in the village. Our
+Indians had come in from the Indian village three miles away, and had
+said they had had enough drink. Mr. John De Sousa, accountant at the
+post, took charge of them and of us, and the work of loading a great
+portage sleigh went on apace. The men of sporting tastes came out and
+lounged in front of the post, and gave helpful advice; the Indians and
+clerks went to and from the sleigh laden with bags of necessaries; the
+harness-maker made for us belts such as the lumbermen use to preclude
+the possibility of incurable strains in the rough life in the
+wilderness. The help at O'Farrall's assisted in repacking what we needed
+so that our trunks and town clothing could be stored. Mr. De Sousa sent
+messengers hither and thither for essentials not in stock at the post.
+Some women, even, were set at work to make "neaps" for us, a neap being
+a sort of slipper or unlaced shoe made of heavy blanketing and worn
+outside one's stockings to give added warmth to the feet.
+
+"You see, this is no casual rabbit-hunt," said the artist. The remark
+will live in Mattawa many a year.
+
+The Hudson Bay Company's posts differ. In the wilderness they are forts
+surrounded by stockades, but within the boundaries of civilization they
+are stores. That at Winnipeg is a splendid emporium, while that at
+Mattawa is like a village store in the United States, except that the
+top story is laden with guns, traps, snow-shoes, and the skins of wild
+beasts; while an outbuilding in the rear is the repository of scores of
+birch-bark canoes--the carriages of British America. Mr. Rankin, the
+factor there, lay in a bed of suffering and could not see us. Yet it
+seemed difficult to believe that we could be made the recipients of
+greater or more kindly attentions than were lavished upon us by his
+accountant, Mr. De Sousa. He ordered our tobacco ground for us ready for
+our pipes; selected the finest from among those extraordinary blankets
+that have been made exclusively for this company for hundreds of years;
+picked out the largest snow-shoes in his stock; bade us lay aside the
+gloves we had brought, and take mittens such as he produced, and for
+which we thanked him in our hearts many times afterwards; planned our
+outfit of food with the wisdom of an old campaigner; bethought himself
+to send for baker's bread; ordered high legs sewed on our moccasins--in
+a word, he made it possible for us to say afterwards that absolutely
+nothing had been overlooked or slighted in fitting out our expedition.
+
+[Illustration: ANTOINE, FROM LIFE]
+
+As I sat in the sleigh, tucked in under heavy skins and leaning at royal
+ease against other furs that covered a bale of hay, it seemed to me that
+I had become part of one of such pictures as we all have seen,
+portraying historic expeditions in Russia or Siberia. We carried
+fifteen hundred pounds of traps and provisions for camping, stabling,
+and food for men and beasts. We were five in all--two hunters, two
+Indians, and a teamster. We set out with the two huge mettlesome horses
+ahead, the driver on a high seat formed of a second bale of hay,
+ourselves lolling back under our furs, and the two Indians striding
+along over the resonant cold snow behind us. It was beginning to be
+evident that a great deal of effort and machinery was needed to "make a
+hunter" of a city man, and that it was going to be done thoroughly--two
+thoughts of a highly flattering nature.
+
+We were now clad for arctic weather, and perhaps nothing except a mummy
+was ever "so dressed up" as we were. We each wore two pairs of the
+heaviest woollen stockings I ever saw, and over them ribbed bicycle
+stockings that came to our knees. Over these in turn were our "neaps,"
+and then our moccasins, laced tightly around our ankles. We had on two
+suits of flannels of extra thickness, flannel shirts, reefing jackets,
+and "capeaux," as they call their long-hooded blanket coats, longer than
+snow-shoe coats. On our heads we had knitted tuques, and on our hands
+mittens and gloves. We were bound for Antoine's moose-yard, near Crooked
+Lake.
+
+The explanation of the term "moose-yard" made moose-hunting appear a
+simple operation (once we were started), for a moose-yard is the
+feeding-ground of a herd of moose, and our head Indian, Alexandre
+Antoine, knew where there was one. Each herd or family of these great
+wild cattle has two such feeding-grounds, and they are said to go
+alternately from one to the other, never herding in one place two years
+in succession. In this region of Canada they weigh between 600 and 1200
+pounds, and the reader will help his comprehension of those figures by
+recalling the fact that a 1200-pound horse is a very large one. Whether
+they desert a yard for twelve months because of the damage they do to
+the supply of food it offers to them, or whether it is instinctive
+caution that directs their movements, no one can more than conjecture.
+
+Their yards are always where soft wood is plentiful and water is near,
+and during a winter they will feed over a region from half a mile to a
+mile square. The prospect of going directly to the fixed home of a herd
+of moose almost robbed the trip of that speculative element that gives
+the greatest zest to hunting. But we knew not what the future held for
+us. Not even the artist, with all his experience, conjectured what was
+in store for us. And what was to come began coming almost immediately.
+
+The journey began upon a good highway, over which we slid along as
+comfortably as any ladies in their carriages, and with the sleigh-bells
+flinging their cheery music out over a desolate valley, with a leaden
+river at the bottom, and with small mountains rolling all about. The
+timber was cut off them, except here and there a few red or white pines
+that reared their green, brush-like tops against the general blanket of
+snow. The dull sky hung sullenly above, and now and then a raven flew
+by, croaking hoarse disapproval of our intrusion. To warn us of what we
+were to expect, Antoine had made a shy Indian joke, one of the few I
+ever heard: "In small little while," said he, "we come to all sorts of a
+road. Me call it that 'cause you get every sort riding, then you sure be
+suited."
+
+At five miles out we came to this remarkable highway. It can no more be
+adequately described here than could the experiences of a man who goes
+over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The reader must try to imagine the most
+primitive sort of a highway conceivable--one that has been made by
+merely felling trees through a forest in a path wide enough for a team
+and wagon. All the tree stumps were left in their places, and every here
+and there were rocks; some no larger than a bale of cotton, and some as
+small as a bushel basket. To add to the other alluring qualities of the
+road, there were tree trunks now and then directly across it, and, as a
+further inducement to traffic, the highway was frequently interrupted by
+"pitch holes." Some of these would be called pitch holes anywhere. They
+were at points where a rill crossed the road, or the road crossed the
+corner of a marsh. But there were other pitch holes that any intelligent
+New Yorker would call ravines or gullies. These were at points where one
+hill ran down to the water-level and another immediately rose
+precipitately, there being a watercourse between the two. In all such
+places there was deep black mud and broken ice. However, these were mere
+features of the character of this road--a character too profound for me
+to hope to portray it. When the road was not inclined either straight
+down or straight up, it coursed along the slanting side of a steep hill,
+so that a vehicle could keep to it only by falling against the forest
+at the under side and carroming along from tree to tree.
+
+[Illustration: THE PORTAGE SLEIGH ON A LUMBER ROAD]
+
+Such was the road. The manner of travelling it was quite as astounding.
+For nothing short of what Alphonse, the teamster, did would I destroy a
+man's character; but Alphonse was the next thing to an idiot. He made
+that dreadful journey at a gallop! The first time he upset the sleigh
+and threw me with one leg thigh-deep between a stone and a tree trunk,
+besides sending the artist flying over my head like a shot from a sling,
+he reseated himself and remarked: "That makes tree time I upset in dat
+place. Hi, there! Get up!" It never occurred to him to stop because a
+giant tree had fallen across the trail. "Look out! Hold tight!" he would
+call out, and then he would take the obstruction at a jump. The horses
+were mammoth beasts, in the best fettle, and the sleigh was of the
+solidest, strongest pattern. There were places where even Alphonse was
+anxious to drive with caution. Such were the ravines and unbridged
+waterways. But one of the horses had cut himself badly in such a place a
+year before, and both now made it a rule to take all such places flying.
+Fancy the result! The leap in air, and then the crash of the sled as it
+landed, the snap of the harness chains, the snorts of the winded beasts,
+the yells of the driver, the anxiety and nervousness of the passengers!
+
+At one point we had an exciting adventure of a far different sort. There
+was a moderately good stretch of road ahead, and we invited the Indians
+to jump in and ride a while. We noticed that they took occasional
+draughts from a bottle. They finished a full pint, and presently
+Alexandre produced another and larger phial. Every one knows what a
+drunken Indian is, and so did we. We ordered the sleigh stopped and all
+hands out for "a talk." Firmly, but with both power and reason on our
+side; we demanded a promise that not another drink should be taken, or
+that the horses be turned towards Mattawa at once. The promise was
+freely given.
+
+"But what is that stuff? Let me see it," one of the hunters asked.
+
+"It is de 'igh wine," said Alexandre.
+
+"High wine? Alcohol?" exclaimed the hunter, and, impulse being quicker
+than reason sometimes, flung the bottle high in air into the bush. It
+was an injudicious action, but both of us at once prepared to defend
+and re-enforce it, of course. As it happened, the Indians saw that no
+unkindness or unfairness was intended, and neither sulked nor made
+trouble afterwards.
+
+We were now deep in the bush. Occasionally we passed "a brule," or tract
+denuded of trees, and littered with trunks and tops of trunks rejected
+by the lumbermen. But every mile took us nearer to the undisturbed
+primeval forest, where the trees shoot up forty feet before the branches
+begin. There were no houses, teams, or men. In a week in the bush we saw
+no other sign of civilization than what we brought or made. All around
+us rose the motionless regiments of the forest, with the snow beneath
+them, and their branches and twigs printing lacework on the sky. The
+signs of game were numerous, and varied to an extent that I never heard
+of before. There were few spaces of the length of twenty-five feet in
+which the track of some wild beast or bird did not cross the road. The
+Indians read this writing in the snow, so that the forest was to them as
+a book would be to us. "What is that?" "And that?" "And that?" I kept
+inquiring. The answers told more eloquently than any man can describe it
+the story of the abundance of game in that easily accessible wilderness.
+"Dat red deer," Antoine replied. "Him fox." "Dat bear track; dat
+squirrel; dat rabbit." "Dat moose track; pass las' week." "Dat
+pa'tridge; dat wolf." Or perhaps it was the trail of a marten, or a
+beaver, or a weasel, or a fisher, mink, lynx, or otter that he pointed
+out, for all these "signs" were there, and nearly all were repeated
+again and again. Of the birds that are plentiful there the principal
+kinds are partridge, woodcock, crane, geese, duck, gull, loon, and owl.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRACK IN THE WINTER FOREST]
+
+When the sun set we prepared to camp, selecting a spot near a tiny rill.
+The horses were tethered to a tree, with their harness still on, and
+blankets thrown over them. We cleared a little space by the road-side,
+using our snow-shoes for shovels. The Indians, with their axes, turned
+up the moss and leaves, and levelled the small shoots and brushwood.
+Then one went off to cut balsam boughs for bedding, while the other set
+up two crotched sticks, with a pole upon them resting in the crotches,
+and throwing the canvas of an "A" tent over the frame, he looped the
+bottom of the tent to small pegs, and banked snow lightly all around it.
+The little aromatic branches of balsam were laid evenly upon the ground,
+a fur robe was thrown upon the leaves, our enormous blankets were spread
+half open side by side, and two coats were rolled up and thrown down for
+pillows. Pierre, the second Indian, made tiny slivers of some soft wood,
+and tried to start a fire. He failed. Then Alexandre Antoine brought two
+handfuls of bark, and lighting a small piece with a match, proceeded to
+build a fire in the most painstaking manner, and with an ingenuity that
+was most interesting. First he made a fire that could have been started
+in a teacup; then he built above and around it a skeleton tent of bits
+of soft wood, six to nine inches in length. This gave him a fire of the
+dimensions of a high hat. Next, he threw down two great bits of timber,
+one on either side of the fire, and a still larger back log, and upon
+these he heaped split soft wood. While this was being done, Pierre
+assailed one great tree after another, and brought them crashing down
+with noises that startled the forest quiet. Alphonse had opened the
+provision bags, and presently two tin pails filled with water swung from
+saplings over the fire, and a pan of fat salt pork was frizzling upon
+the blazing wood. The darkness grew dead black, and the dancing flames
+peopled the near forest with dodging shadows. Almost in the time it has
+taken me to write it, we were squatting on our heels around the fire,
+each with a massive cutting of bread, a slice of fried pork in a tin
+plate, and half a pint of tea, precisely as hot as molten lead, in a tin
+cup. Supper was a necessity, not a luxury, and was hurried out of the
+way accordingly. Then the men built their camp beside ours in front of
+the fire, and followed that by felling three or more monarchs of the
+bush. Nothing surprised me so much as the amount of wood consumed in
+these open-air fires. In five days at our permanent camp we made a great
+hole in the forest.
+
+But that first night in the open air, abed with nature, with British
+America for a bedroom! Only I can tell of it, for the others slept. The
+stillness was intense. There was no wind and not an animal or bird
+uttered a cry. The logs cracked and sputtered and popped, the horses
+shook their chains, the men all snored--white and red alike. The horses
+pounded the hollow earth; the logs broke and fell upon the cinders; one
+of the men talked in his sleep. But over and through it all the
+stillness grew. Then the fire sank low, the cold became intense, the
+light was lost, and the darkness swallowed everything. Some one got up
+awkwardly, with muttering, and flung wood upon the red ashes, and
+presently all that had passed was re-experienced.
+
+The ride next day was more exciting than the first stage. It was like
+the journey of a gun-carriage across country in a hot retreat. The sled
+was actually upset only once, but to prevent that happening fifty times
+the Indians kept springing at the uppermost side of the flying vehicle,
+and hanging to the side poles to pull the toppling construction down
+upon both runners. Often we were advised to leap out for safety's sake;
+at other times we wished we had leaped out. For seven hours we were
+flung about like cotton spools that are being polished in a revolving
+cylinder. And yet we were obliged to run long distances after the
+hurtling sleigh--long enough to tire us. The artist, who had spent years
+in rude scenes among rough men, said nothing at the time. What was the
+use? But afterwards, in New York, he remarked that this was the roughest
+travelling he had ever experienced.
+
+The signs of game increased. Deer and bear and wolf and fox and moose
+were evidently numerous around us. Once we stopped, and the Indians
+became excited. What they had taken for old moose tracks were the
+week-old footprints of a man. It seems strange, but they felt obliged to
+know what a man had gone into the bush for a week ago. They followed the
+signs, and came back smiling. He had gone in to cut hemlock boughs; we
+would find traces of a camp near by. We did. In a country where men are
+so few, they busy themselves about one another. Four or five days later,
+while we were hunting, these Indians came to the road and stopped
+suddenly, as horses do when lassoed. With a glance they read that two
+teams had passed during the night, going towards our camp. When we
+returned to camp the teams had been there, and our teamster had talked
+with the drivers. Therefore that load was lifted from the minds of our
+Indians. But their knowledge of the bush was marvellous. One point in
+the woods was precisely like another to us, yet the Indians would leap
+off the sleigh now and then and dive into the forest to return with a
+trap hidden there months before, or to find a great iron kettle.
+
+[Illustration: PIERRE, FROM LIFE]
+
+"Do you never get lost?" I asked Alexandre.
+
+"Me get los'? No, no get los'."
+
+"But how do you find your way?"
+
+"Me fin' way easy. Me know way me come, or me follow my tracks, or me
+know by de sun. If no sun, me look at trees. Trees grow more branches
+on side toward sun, and got rough bark on north side. At night me know
+by see de stars."
+
+We camped in a log-hut Alexandre had built for a hunting camp. It was
+very picturesque and substantial, built of huge logs, and caulked with
+moss. It had a great earthen bank in the middle for a fireplace, with an
+equally large opening in the roof, boarded several feet high at the
+sides to form a chimney. At one corner of the fire bank was an ingenious
+crane, capable of being raised and lowered, and projecting from a
+pivoted post, so that the long arm could be swung over or away from the
+fire. At one end of the single apartment were two roomy bunks built
+against the wall. With extraordinary skill and quickness the Indians
+whittled a spade out of a board, performing the task with an axe, an
+implement they can use as white men use a penknife, an implement they
+value more highly than a gun. They made a broom of balsam boughs, and
+dug and swept the dirt off the floor and walls, speedily making the
+cabin neat and clean. Two new bunks were put up for us, and bedded with
+balsam boughs and skins. Shelves were already up, and spread with pails
+and bottles, tin cups and plates, knives and forks, canned goods, etc.
+On them and on the floor were our stores.
+
+[Illustration: ANTOINE'S CABIN]
+
+We had a week's outfit, and we needed it, because for five days we could
+not hunt on account of the crust on the snow, which made such a noise
+when a human foot broke through it that we could not have approached any
+wild animal within half a mile. On the third day it rained, but without
+melting the crust. On the fourth day it snowed furiously, burying the
+crust under two inches of snow. On the fifth day we got our moose.
+
+In the mean time the log-cabin was our home. Alexandre and Pierre cut
+down trees every day for the fire, and Pierre disappeared for hours
+every now and then to look after traps set for otter, beaver, and
+marten. Alphonse attended his horses and served as cook. He could
+produce hotter tea than any other man in the world. I took mine for a
+walk in the arctic cold three times a day, the artist learned to pour
+his from one cup to another with amazing dexterity, and the Indians (who
+drank a quart each of green tea at each meal because it was stronger
+than our black tea) lifted their pans and threw the liquid fire down
+throats that had been inured to high wines. Whenever the fire was low,
+the cold was intense. Whenever it was heaped with logs, all the heat
+flew directly through the roof, and spiral blasts of cold air were
+sucked through every crack between logs in the cabin walls. Whenever the
+door opened, the cabin filled with smoke. Smoke clung to all we ate or
+wore. At night the fire kept burning out, and we arose with chattering
+teeth to build it anew. The Indians were then to be seen with their
+blankets pushed down to their knees, asleep in their shirts and
+trousers. At meal-times we had bacon or pork, speckled or lake trout,
+bread-and-butter, stewed tomatoes, and tea. There were two stools for
+the five men, but they only complicated the discomfort of those who got
+them; for it was found that if we put our tin plates on our knees, they
+fell off; if we held them in one hand, we could not cut the pork and
+hold the bread with the other hand; while if we put the plates on the
+floor beside the tea, we could not reach them. In a month we might have
+solved the problem. Life in that log shanty was precisely the life of
+the early settlers of this country. It was bound to produce great
+characters or early death. There could be no middle course with such an
+existence.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAMP AT NIGHT]
+
+Partridge fed in the brush impudently before us. Rabbits bobbed about in
+the clearing before the door. Squirrels sat upon the logs near by and
+gormandized and chattered. Great saucy birds, like mouse-colored robins,
+and known to the Indians as "meat-birds," stole our provender if we left
+it out-of-doors half an hour, and one day we saw a red deer jump in the
+bush a hundred yards away. Yet we got no game, because we knew there was
+a moose-yard within two miles on one side and within three miles on the
+other, and we dared not shoot our rifles lest we frighten the moose.
+Moose was all we were after. There was a lake near by, and the trout in
+those lakes up there attain remarkable size and numbers. We heard of
+35-pound specked trout, of lake trout twice as large, and of enormous
+muskallonge. The most reliable persons told of lakes farther in the
+wilderness where the trout are thick as salmon in the British Columbia
+streams--so thick as to seem to fill the water. We were near a lake that
+was supposed to have been fished out by lumbermen a year before, yet it
+was no sport at all to fish there. With a short stick and two yards of
+line and a bass hook baited with pork, we brought up four-pound and
+five-pound beauties faster than we wanted them for food. Truly we were
+in a splendid hunting country, like the Adirondacks eighty years ago,
+but thousands of times as extensive.
+
+Finally we started for moose. Our Indians asked if they might take their
+guns. We gave the permission. Alexandre, a thin, wiry man of forty
+years, carried an old Henry rifle in a woollen case open at one end like
+a stocking. He wore a short blanket coat and tuque, and trousers tied
+tight below the knee, and let into his moccasin-tops. He and his brother
+Francois are famous Hudson Bay Company trappers, and are two-thirds
+Algonquin and one-third French. He has a typical swarthy, angular Indian
+face and a French mustache and goatee. Naturally, if not by rank, a
+leader among his men, his manner is commanding and his appearance grave.
+He talks bad French fluently, and makes wretched headway in English.
+Pierre is a short, thickset, walnut-stained man of thirty-five, almost
+pure Indian, and almost a perfect specimen of physical development. He
+seldom spoke while on this trip, but he impressed us with his strength,
+endurance, quickness, and knowledge of woodcraft. Poor fellow! he had
+only a shot-gun, which he loaded with buckshot. It had no case, and both
+men carried their pieces grasped by the barrels and shouldered with the
+butts behind them.
+
+We set out in Indian-file, plunging at once into the bush. Never was
+forest scenery more exquisitely beautiful than on that morning as the
+day broke, for we breakfasted at four o'clock, and started immediately
+afterwards. Everywhere the view was fairy-like. There was not snow
+enough for snow-shoeing. But the fresh fall of snow was immaculately
+white, and flecked the scene apparently from earth to sky, for there was
+not a branch or twig or limb or spray of evergreen, or wart or fungous
+growth upon any tree that did not bear its separate burden of snow. It
+was a bridal dress, not a winding-sheet, that Dame Nature was trying on
+that morning. And in the bright fresh green of the firs and pines we saw
+her complexion peeping out above her spotless gown, as one sees the rosy
+cheeks or black eyes of a girl wrapped in ermine.
+
+[Illustration: A MOOSE BULL FIGHT]
+
+Mile after mile we walked, up mountain and down dale, slapped in the
+faces by twigs, knocking snow down the backs of our necks, slipping
+knee-deep in bog mud, tumbling over loose stones, climbing across
+interlaced logs, dropping to the height of one thigh between tree
+trunks, sliding, falling, tight-rope walking on branches over thin ice,
+but forever following the cat-like tread of Alexandre, with his
+seven-league stride and long-winded persistence. Suddenly we came to a
+queer sort of clearing dotted with protuberances like the bubbles on
+molasses beginning to boil. It was a beaver meadow. The bumps in the
+snow covered stumps of trees the beavers had gnawed down. The Indians
+were looking at some trough like tracks in the snow, like the trail of a
+tired man who had dragged his heels. "Moose; going this way," said
+Alexandre; and we turned and walked in the tracks. Across the meadow and
+across a lake and up another mountain they led us. Then we came upon
+fresher prints. At each new track the Indians stooped, and making a
+scoop of one hand, brushed the new-fallen snow lightly out of the
+indentations. Thus they read the time at which the print was made. "Las'
+week," "Day 'fore yesterday," they whispered. Presently they bent over
+again, the light snow flew, and one whispered, "This morning."
+
+[Illustration: ON THE MOOSE TRAIL]
+
+Stealthily Alexandre swept ahead; very carefully we followed. We dared
+not break a twig, or speak, or slip, or stumble. As it was, the breaking
+of the crust was still far too audible. We followed a little stream, and
+approached a thick growth of tamarack. We had no means of knowing that a
+herd of moose was lying in that thicket, resting after feeding. We knew
+it afterwards. Alexandre motioned to us to get our guns ready. We each
+threw a cartridge from the cylinder into the barrel, making a "click,
+click" that was abominably loud. Alexandre forged ahead. In five minutes
+we heard him call aloud: "Moose gone. We los' him." We hastened to his
+side. He pointed at some tracks in which the prints were closer together
+than any we had seen.
+
+"See! he trot," Alexandre explained.
+
+In another five minutes we had all but completed a circle, and were on
+the other side of the tamarack thicket. And there were the prints of the
+bodies of the great beasts. We could see even the imprint of the hair of
+their coats. All around were broken twigs and balsam needles. The moose
+had left the branches ragged, and on every hand the young bark was
+chewed or rubbed raw. Loading our rifles had lost us a herd of moose.
+
+[Illustration: IN SIGHT OF THE GAME--"NOW SHOOT!"]
+
+Back once again at the beaver dam, Alexandre and Pierre studied the
+moose-tramped snow and talked earnestly. They agreed that a desperate
+battle had been fought there between two bull moose a week before, and
+that those bulls were not in the "yard" where we had blundered. They
+examined the tracks over an acre or more, and then strode off at an
+obtuse angle from our former trail. Pierre, apparently not quite
+satisfied, kept dropping behind or disappearing in the bush at one side
+of us. So magnificent was his skill at his work that I missed him at
+times, and at other times found him putting his feet down where mine
+were lifted up without ever hearing a sound of his step or of his
+contact with the undergrowth. Alexandre presently motioned us with a
+warning gesture. He slowed his pace to short steps, with long pauses
+between. He saw everything that moved, heard every sound; only a deer
+could throw more and keener faculties into play than this born hunter.
+He heard a twig snap. We heard nothing. Pierre was away on a side
+search. Alexandre motioned us to be ready. We crept close together, and
+I scarcely breathed. We moved cautiously, a step at a time, like
+chessmen. It was impossible to get an unobstructed view a hundred feet
+ahead, so thick was the soft-wood growth. It seemed out of the question
+to try to shoot that distance. We were descending a hill-side into
+marshy ground. We crossed a corner of a grove of young alders, and saw
+before us a gentle slope thickly grown with evergreen--tamarack, the
+artist called it. Suddenly Alexandre bent forward and raised his gun.
+Two steps forward gave us his view. Five moose were fifty yards away,
+alarmed and ready to run. A big bull in the front of the group had
+already thrown back his antlers. By impulse rather than through reason I
+took aim at a second bull. He was half a height lower down the slope,
+and to be seen through a web of thin foliage. Alexandre and the artist
+fired as with a single pull at one trigger. The foremost bull staggered
+and fell forward, as if his knees had been broken. He was hit twice--in
+the heart and in the neck. The second bull and two cows and a calf
+plunged into the bush and disappeared. Pierre found that bull a mile
+away, shot through the lungs.
+
+It had taken us a week to kill our moose in a country where they were
+common game. That was "hunter's luck" with a vengeance. But at another
+season such a delay could scarcely occur. The time to visit that
+district is in the autumn, before snow falls. Then in a week one ought
+to be able to bag a moose, and move into the region where caribou are
+plenty.
+
+Mr. Remington, in the picture called "Hunting the Caribou," depicts a
+scene at a critical moment in the experience of any man who has
+journeyed on westward of where we found our moose, to hunt the caribou.
+There is a precise moment for shooting in the chase of all animals of
+the deer kind, and when that moment has been allowed to pass, the chance
+of securing the animal diminishes with astonishing rapidity--with more
+than the rapidity with which the then startled animal is making his
+flight, because to his flight you must add the increasing ambush of the
+forest. What is true of caribou in this respect is true of moose and red
+deer, elk and musk-ox in America, and of all the horned animals of the
+forests of the other great hemisphere. Every hunter who sees Mr.
+Remington's realistic picture knows at a glance that the two men have
+stolen noiselessly to within easy rifle-shot of a caribou, and that
+suddenly, at the last moment, the animal has heard them.
+
+[Illustration: SUCCESS]
+
+Perhaps he has seen them, and is standing--still as a Barye bronze--with
+his great, soft, wondering eyes riveted upon theirs. That is a situation
+familiar to every hunter. His prey has been browsing in fancied
+security, and yet with that nervous prudence that causes these timid
+beasts to keep forever raising their heads, and sweeping the view around
+them with their exquisite sight, and analyzing the atmosphere with
+their magical sense of smell. In one of these cautious pauses the
+caribou has seen the hunters. Both hunters and hunted seem instantly to
+turn to stone. Neither moves a muscle or a hair. If the knee or the foot
+of one of the men presses too hard upon a twig and it snaps, the caribou
+is as certain to throw his head high up and dart into the ingulfing
+net-work of the forest trunks and brush as day is certain to follow
+night. But when no movement has been made and no mishap has alarmed the
+beast, it has often happened that the two or more parties to this
+strangely thrilling situation have held their places for minutes at a
+stretch--minutes that seemed like quarters of an hour. In such cases the
+deer or caribou has been known to lower his head and feed again, assured
+in its mind that the suspected hunter is inanimate and harmless. Nine
+times in ten, though, the first to move is the beast, which tosses up
+its head, and "Shoot! shoot!" is the instant command, for the upward
+throwing of the head is a movement made to put the beast's great antlers
+into position for flight through the forest.
+
+[Illustration: HUNTING THE CARIBOU--"SHOOT! SHOOT!"]
+
+The caribou has very wide, heavy horns, and they are almost always
+circular--that is, the main part or trunk of each horn curves outward
+from the skull and then inward towards the point, in an almost true
+semicircle. They are more or less branched, but both the general shape
+of the whole horns and of the branches is such that when the head is
+thrown up and back they aid the animal's flight by presenting what may
+be called the point of a wedge towards the saplings and limbs and small
+forest growths through which the beast runs, parting and spreading every
+pair of obstacles to either side, and bending every single one out of
+the way of his flying body. The caribou of North America is the reindeer
+of Greenland; the differences between the two are very slight. The
+animal's home is the arctic circle, but in America it feeds and roams
+farther south than in Europe and Asia. It is a large and clumsy-looking
+beast, with thick and rather short legs and bulky body, and, seen in
+repose, gives no hint of its capacity for flight. Yet the caribou can
+run "like a streak of wind," and makes its way through leaves and brush
+and brittle, sapless vegetation with a modicum of noise so slight as to
+seem inexplicable. Nature has ingeniously added to its armament, always
+one, and usually two, palmated spurs at the root of its horns, and
+these grow at an obtuse angle with the head, upward and outward
+towards the nose. With these spurs--like shovels used sideways--the
+caribou roots up the snow, or breaks its crust and disperses it, to get
+at his food on the ground. The caribou are very large deer, and their
+strength is attested by the weight of their horns. I have handled
+caribou horns in Canada that I could not hold out with both hands when
+seated in a chair. It seemed hard to believe that an animal of the size
+of a caribou could carry a burden apparently so disproportioned to his
+head and neck. But it is still more difficult to believe, as all the
+woodsmen say, that these horns are dropped and new ones grown every
+year.
+
+It is not the especial beauty of Frederic Remington's drawings and
+paintings that they are absolutely accurate in every detail, but it is
+one of their beauties, and gives them especial value apart from their
+artistic excellence. He draws what he knows, and he knows what he draws.
+This scene of the electrically exquisite moment in a hunter's life, when
+great game is before him, and the instant has come for claiming it as
+his own with a steadily held and wisely chosen aim, will give the reader
+a perfect knowledge of how the Indians and hunters dress and equip
+themselves beyond the Canadian border. The scene is in the wilderness
+north of the Great Lakes. The Indian is of one of those tribes that are
+offshoots of the great Algonquin nation. He carries in that load he
+bears that which the plainsmen call "the grub stake," or quota of
+provisions for himself and his employer, as well as blankets to sleep
+in, pots, pans, sugar, the inevitable tea of those latitudes, and much
+else besides. Those Indians are not as lazy or as physically degenerate
+as many of the tribes in our country. They turn themselves into
+wonderful beasts of burden, and go forever equipped with a long, broad
+strap that they call a "tomp line," and which they pass around their
+foreheads and around their packs, the latter resting high up on their
+backs. It seems incredible, but they can carry one hundred to one
+hundred and fifty pounds of necessaries all day long in the roughest
+regions. The Hudson Bay Company made their ancestors its wards and
+dependents two centuries ago, and taught them to work and to earn their
+livelihood.
+
+
+
+
+  V
+
+  BIG FISHING
+
+
+
+
+In October every year there are apt to be more fish upon the land in the
+Nepigon country than one would suppose could find life in the waters.
+Most families have laid in their full winter supply, the main exceptions
+being those semi-savage families which leave their fish out--in
+preference to laying them in--upon racks whereon they are to be seen in
+rows and by the thousands.
+
+Nepigon, the old Hudson Bay post which is the outfitting place for this
+region, is 928 miles west of Montreal, on the Canadian Pacific Railway,
+and on an arm of Lake Superior. The Nepigon River, which connects the
+greatest of lakes with Lake Nepigon, is the only roadway in all that
+country, and therefore its mouth, in an arm of the great lake, is the
+front door to that wonderful region. In travelling through British
+Columbia I found one district that is going to prove of greater interest
+to gentlemen sportsmen with the rod, but I know of no greater fishing
+country than the Nepigon. No single waterway or system of navigable
+inland waters in North America is likely to wrest the palm from this
+Nepigon district as the haunt of fish in the greatest plenty, unless we
+term the salmon a fresh-water fish, and thus call the Fraser, Columbia,
+and Skeena rivers into the rivalry. There is incessant fishing in this
+wilderness north of Lake Superior from New-year's Day, when the ice has
+to be cut to get at the water, all through the succeeding seasons, until
+again the ice fails to protect the game. And there is every sort of
+fishing between that which engages a navy of sailing vessels and men,
+down through all the methods of fish-taking--by nets, by spearing, still
+fishing, and fly-fishing. A half a dozen sorts of finny game succumb to
+these methods, and though the region has been famous and therefore much
+visited for nearly a dozen years, the field is so extensive, so well
+stocked, and so difficult of access except to persons of means, that
+even to-day almost the very largest known specimens of each class of
+fish are to be had there.
+
+If we could put on wings early in October, and could fly down from
+James's Bay over the dense forests and countless lakes and streams of
+western Ontario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunter in a
+canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small houses forming a Hudson
+Bay post, and at even greater distances apart small bunches of the
+cotton or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway bands.
+But with the first glance at the majestic expanse of Lake Superior there
+would burst upon the view scores upon scores of white sails upon the
+water, and near by, upon the shore, a tent for nearly every sail. That
+is the time for the annual gathering for catching the big, chunky,
+red-fleshed fish they call the salmon-trout. They catch those that weigh
+from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty pounds, and at this time of the
+year their flesh is comparatively hard.
+
+Engaged in making this great catch are the boats of the Indians from far
+up the Nepigon and the neighboring streams; of the chance white men of
+the region, who depend upon nature for their sustenance; and of Finns,
+Norwegians, Swedes, and others who come from the United States side, or
+southern shore, to fish for their home markets. These fish come at this
+season to spawn, seeking the reefs, which are plentiful off the shore in
+this part of the lake. Gill nets are used to catch them, and are set
+within five fathoms of the surface by setting the inner buoy in water of
+that depth, and then paying the net out into deeper water and anchoring
+it. The run and the fishing continue throughout October. As a rule,
+among the Canadians and Canada Indians a family goes with each boat--the
+boats being sloops of twenty-seven to thirty feet in length, and capable
+of carrying fifteen pork barrels, which are at the outset filled with
+rock-salt. Sometimes the heads of two families are partners in the
+ownership of one of these sloops, but, however that may be, the custom
+is for the women and children to camp in tents along-shore, while the
+men (usually two men and a boy for each boat) work the nets. It is a
+stormy season of the year, and the work is rough and hazardous,
+especially for the nets, which are frequently lost.
+
+Whenever a haul is made the fish are split down the back and cleaned.
+Then they are washed, rolled in salt, and packed in the barrels. Three
+days later, when the bodies of the fish have thoroughly purged
+themselves, they are taken out, washed again, and are once more rolled
+in fresh salt and put back in the barrels, which are then filled to the
+top with water. The Indians subsist all winter upon this October catch,
+and, in addition, manage to exchange a few barrels for other provisions
+and for clothing. They demand an equivalent of six dollars a barrel in
+whatever they get in exchange, but do not sell for money, because, as I
+understand it, they are not obliged to pay the provincial license fee as
+fishermen, and therefore may not fish for the market. Even sportsmen who
+throw a fly for one day in the Nepigon country must pay the Government
+for the privilege. The Indians told me that eight barrels of these fish
+will last a family of six persons an entire winter. Such a demonstration
+of prudence and fore-thought as this, of a month's fishing at the
+threshold of winter, amounts to is a rare one for an Indian to make, and
+I imagine there is a strong admixture of white blood in most of those
+who make it. The full-bloods will not take the trouble. They trust to
+their guns and their traps against the coming of that wolf which they
+are not unused to facing.
+
+Up along the shores of Lake Nepigon, which is thirty miles by an air
+line north of Lake Superior, many of the Indians lay up white-fish for
+winter. They catch them in nets and cure them by frost. They do not
+clean them. They simply make a hole in the tail end of each fish, and
+string them, as if they were beads, upon sticks, which they set up into
+racks. They usually hang the fishes in rows of ten, and frequently
+store up thousands while they are at it. The Reverend Mr. Renison, who
+has had much to do with bettering the condition of these Indians, told
+me that he had caught 1020 pounds of white-fish in two nights with two
+gill nets in Lake Nepigon. It is unnecessary to add that he cleaned his.
+
+[Illustration: INDIANS HAULING NETS ON LAKE NEPIGON]
+
+Lake Nepigon is about seventy miles in length, and two-thirds as wide,
+at the points of its greatest measurement, and is a picturesque body of
+water, surrounded by forests and dotted with islands. It is a famous
+haunt for trout, and those fishermen who are lucky may at times see
+scores of great beauties lying upon the bottom; or, with a good guide
+and at the right season, may be taken to places where the water is
+fairly astir with them. Fishermen who are not lucky may get their
+customary experience without travelling so far, for the route is by
+canoe, on top of nearly a thousand miles of railroading; and one mode of
+locomotion consumes nearly as much time as the other, despite the
+difference between the respective distances travelled. The speckled
+trout in the lake are locally reported to weigh from three to nine
+pounds, but the average stranger will lift in more of three pounds'
+weight than he will of nine. Yet whatever they average, the catching of
+them is prime sport as you float upon the water in your picturesque
+birch-bark canoe, with your guide paddling you noiselessly along, and
+your spoon or artificial minnow rippling through the water or glinting
+in the sunlight. You need a stout bait-rod, for the gluttonous fish are
+game, and make a good fight every time. The local fishermen catch the
+speckled beauties with an unpoetic lump of pork.
+
+A lively French Canadian whom I met on the cars on my way to Nepigon
+described that region as "de mos' tareeble place for de fish in all over
+de worl'." And he added another remark which had at least the same
+amount of truth at the bottom of it. Said he: "You weel find dere dose
+Mees Nancy feeshermans from der Unite State, which got dose
+hunderd-dollar poles and dose leetle humbug flies, vhich dey t'row
+around and pull 'em back again, like dey was afraid some feesh would
+bite it. Dat is all one grand stupeedity. Dose man vhich belong dere put
+on de hook some pork, and catch one tareeble pile of fish. Dey don't
+give a ---- about style, only to catch dose feesh."
+
+To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself on the distance he can
+cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that
+French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific
+angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while
+his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question
+"science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout
+(the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible
+that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the
+trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if
+possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of
+bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the
+Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they
+make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is
+going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal
+quantities, at the other.
+
+The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The
+natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece
+of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give
+them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle,
+leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the
+struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it
+is managed peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water,
+making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they
+lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along
+the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the
+resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that
+it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck
+the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then
+measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above
+soundings--that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and
+their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep
+jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent
+intervals.
+
+The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon jack-fish, or pike. They
+haunt the grassy places in little bogs and coves, and are caught by
+trolling. A jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the famous
+guide in that country, tells of those fish of such size that when a man
+of ordinary height held the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of
+the fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsible for the further
+assertion that he saw an Indian squaw drag a net, with meshes seven
+inches square, and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more than
+fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another local historian told of a
+surveyor who caught a big jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and
+could only be dragged until its head came to the surface, when he shot
+it and it broke away--that narrative I will leave for the next New
+Yorker who goes to Nepigon. And yet it seems to me that such stories
+distinguish a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually caught
+there. Men would not dare to romance like that at many places I have
+fished in, where the trout are scheduled and numbered, and where you
+have got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the month to catch
+one.
+
+The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack-fish. At night they use
+a bark torch, and slaughter the big fish with comparative ease; but
+their great skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when the pike
+are sunning themselves in the grass and weeds along-shore. But when I
+made my trip up the river, I saw them using so many nets as to threaten
+the early reduction of the stream to the plane of the ordinary resort.
+The water was so clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see each
+one's catch--here a half-dozen suckers, there a jack-fish, and next a
+couple of beautiful trout. Finding a squaw attending to her net, we
+bought a trout from her before we had cast a line. The habit of buying
+fish under such circumstances becomes second nature to a New Yorker. We
+are a peculiar people. Our fishermen are modest away from the city, but
+at home they assume the confident tone which comes of knowing the way to
+Fulton fish-market.
+
+The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and
+saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are
+records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may
+actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yourself
+seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the
+Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and
+from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay
+post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles--an old York
+boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that
+Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted
+them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you
+will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the
+Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness,
+capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are
+built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the
+bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are
+very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic
+Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into
+eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.
+
+There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the
+bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario
+and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the
+ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions
+were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted
+upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried
+salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to
+deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The
+open-air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of hunting or
+chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the
+camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he
+ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa
+in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At
+night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted
+ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp
+that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking
+his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I
+ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the
+artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips,
+that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's
+ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the
+same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and
+baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the _piece de
+resistance_ at every meal. I know now--though I would not have confessed
+it at the time--that mixed with admiration of salt pork was a growing
+dread that in time, if no change offered itself, I should tire of that
+diet. I began to feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the Sea
+than a brother. The woodland atmosphere began to taste of it. When I
+came in-doors it seemed to me that the log shanty was gradually turning
+into fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it felt to eat
+quail a day for thirty days. One man cannot know everything. But I felt
+that I was learning.
+
+One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, and started out of
+the shanty door with an unwonted air of business.
+
+"Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. "Good job if get trout."
+
+A good job? Why the thought was like a floating spar to a sailor
+overboard! I went with him. It was a cold day, but I was dressed in
+Canadian style--the style of a country where every one puts on
+everything he owns: all his stockings at once, all his flannel shirts
+and drawers, all his coats on top of one another, and when there is
+nothing else left, draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of
+moccasins, a tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be able
+to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling with so many clothes on.
+They seem to separate you from yourself, and the person you feel inside
+your clothing might easily be mistaken for another individual. But you
+are warm, and that's the main thing.
+
+[Illustration: TROUT-FISHING THROUGH THE ICE]
+
+I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through the deathly
+stillness of the snow-choked forest, and presently, from a knoll and
+through an opening, we saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its
+unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with balsam, and pine and
+other evergreens, it looked as though some mighty hand had squeezed a
+colossal tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. Never had I
+seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so exquisitely pure and peaceful, so
+irresistibly beautiful. I think I should have hesitated to print my
+ham-like moccasin upon that virgin sheet had I been the guide, but
+"Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, making the powdery flakes fly before
+and behind him, and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly faded
+from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed the signs of a fox and a
+deer that had crossed during the night, so that our profanation of the
+scene was neither serious nor exclusive.
+
+The Indian walked to an island near the farther shore, and using his axe
+with the light, easy freedom that a white man sometimes attains with a
+penknife, he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six yards of
+fish-line in two in the middle of the piece, and tied one end of each
+part to one end of each stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a
+fastening would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to each
+fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little cube of pork fat which
+had gathered an envelope of granulated smoking-tobacco while at rest in
+his pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was a foot thick,
+and over these we stood, sticks in hand, with the lines dangling through
+the holes. Hardly had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened
+around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked to one side,
+and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It was a speckled trout. This
+surprised me, for I had no idea of catching anything but lake or gray
+trout in that water. I caught a gray trout next--a smaller one than the
+first--and in another minute I had landed another three-pound speckled
+beauty. My pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to
+fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork remained on those two
+hooks a week, and caught us many a mess of trout.
+
+There came a lull, which gave us time to philosophize on the contrast
+between this sort of fishing and the fashionable sport of using the most
+costly and delicate rods--like pieces of jewelry--and of calculating to
+a nicety what sort of flies to use in matching the changing weather of
+the varying tastes of trout in waters where even all these calculations
+and provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a day. Here I
+was, armed like an urchin beside a minnow brook, and catching bigger
+trout than I ever saw outside Fulton Market--trout of the choicest
+variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew impatient, and cut himself
+a new hole out over deep water. He caught a couple of two-and-a-half-pound
+brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was as well rewarded. But
+he was still discontented, and moved to a strait opening into a little
+bay, where he cut two more holes. "Eas' wind," said he, "fish no bite."
+
+I found on that occasion that no quantity of clothing will keep a man
+warm in that almost arctic climate. First my hands became cold, and then
+my feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up the fishing
+holes if the water was not constantly disturbed. The thermometer must
+have registered ten or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became
+quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice that formed upon
+them. When they coiled for an instant upon the ice at the edge of a
+hole, they stuck to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting my
+free hand in my pocket as fast as I shifted my pole from one hand to the
+other, I managed to persist in fishing. I noticed many interesting
+things as I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless
+wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not cold, though not half so
+warmly dressed as I. The circulation or vitality of those scions of
+nature must be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed to trouble
+them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found
+and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air,
+or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log
+fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did
+not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time.
+Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill,
+bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest
+quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised
+his head to listen. "Dat squirrel," he would say, when I asked him. Or,
+"Woodcock, him calling rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very
+queer, distant, muffled sound was. "You hear dat when you walk. Keep
+still, no hear dat," he said. It was the noise the ice made when I
+moved.
+
+As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log jutting out over the
+edge of the lake, and looked me over. A white weasel ran about in the
+bushes so close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut shell.
+That morning some partridge had been seen feeding in the bush close to
+members of our party. It was a country where small game is not hunted,
+and does not always hide at a man's approach. We had left our fish lying
+on the ice near the various holes from which we pulled them, and I
+thought of them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying out in
+their hoarse tones. They were sure to see the fish dotting the snow like
+raisins in a bowl of rice.
+
+"Won't they steal the fish?" I asked.
+
+"T'ink not," said the Indian.
+
+"I don't know anything about ravens," I said, "but if they are even
+distantly related to a crow, they will steal whatever they can lift."
+
+We could not see our fish around the bend of the lake, so the Indian
+dropped his rod and walked stolidly after the birds. As soon as he
+passed out of sight I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were
+unruly children.
+
+"'Way, there!" he cried--"'way! Leave dat fish, you. What you do dere,
+you t'ief?"
+
+It was an outcropping of the French blood in his veins that made it
+possible for him to do such violence to Indian reticence. The birds had
+seen our fish, and were about to seize them. Only the foolish bird
+tradition that renders it necessary for everything with wings to circle
+precisely so many times over its prey before taking it saved us our game
+and lost them their dinner. They had not completed half their quota of
+circles when Brossy began to yell at them. When he returned his brain
+had awakened, and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. He said
+that the lumbermen in that country pack their dinners in canvas sacks
+and hide them in the snow. Often the ravens come, and, searching out
+this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. I bade good-bye
+to pork three times a day after that. At least twice a day we feasted
+upon trout.
+
+
+
+
+  VI
+
+  "A SKIN FOR A SKIN"
+
+  The motto of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company
+
+
+Those who go to the newer parts of Canada to-day will find that several
+of those places which their school geographies displayed as Hudson Bay
+posts a few years ago are now towns and cities. In them they will find
+the trading stations of old now transformed into general stores.
+Alongside of the Canadian headquarters of the great corporation, where
+used to stand the walls of Fort Garry, they will see the principal store
+of the city of Winnipeg, an institution worthy of any city, and more
+nearly to be likened to Whiteley's Necessary Store in London than to any
+shopping-place in New York. As in Whiteley's you may buy a house, or
+anything belonging in or around a house, so you may in this great
+Manitoban establishment. The great retail emporium of Victoria, the
+capital of British Columbia, is the Hudson Bay store; and in Calgary,
+the metropolis of Alberta and the Canadian plains, the principal
+shopping-place in a territory beside which Texas dwindles to the
+proportions of a park is the Hudson Bay store.
+
+These and many other shops indicate a new development of the business of
+the last of England's great chartered monopolies, but instead of marking
+the manner in which civilization has forced it to abandon its original
+function, this merely demonstrates that the proprietors have taken
+advantage of new conditions while still pursuing their original trade.
+It is true that the huge corporation is becoming a great retail
+shop-keeping company. It is also true that by the surrender of its
+monopolistic privileges it got a consolation prize of money and of
+twenty millions of dollars' worth of land, so that its chief business
+may yet become that of developing and selling real estate. But to-day it
+is still, as it was two centuries ago, the greatest of fur-trading
+corporations, and fur-trading is to-day a principal source of its
+profits.
+
+Reminders of their old associations as forts still confront the visitor
+to the modern city shops of the company. The great shop in Victoria, for
+instance, which, as a fort, was the hub around which grew the wheel that
+is now the capital of the province, has its fur trade conducted in a
+sort of barn-like annex of the bazaar; but there it is, nevertheless,
+and busy among the great heaps of furs are men who can remember when the
+Hydahs and the T'linkets and the other neighboring tribes came down in
+their war canoes to trade their winter's catch of skins for guns and
+beads, vermilion, blankets, and the rest. Now this is the mere catch-all
+for the furs got at posts farther up the coast and in the interior. But
+upstairs, above the store, where the fashionable ladies are looking over
+laces and purchasing perfumes, you will see a collection of queer old
+guns of a pattern familiar to Daniel Boone. They are relics of the fur
+company's stock of those famous "trade-guns" which disappeared long
+before they had cleared the plains of buffalo, and which the Indians
+used to deck with brass nails and bright paint, and value as no man
+to-day values a watch. But close to the trade-guns of romantic memory is
+something yet more highly suggestive of the company's former position.
+This is a heap of unclaimed trunks, "left," the employes will tell you,
+"by travellers, hunters, and explorers who never came back to inquire
+for them."
+
+[Illustration: RIVAL TRADERS RACING TO THE INDIAN CAMP]
+
+It was not long ago that conditions existed such as in that region
+rendered the disappearance of a traveller more than a possibility. The
+wretched, squat, bow-legged, dirty laborers of that coast, who now dress
+as we do, and earn good wages in the salmon-fishing and canning
+industries, were not long ago very numerous, and still more villanous.
+They were not to be compared with the plains Indians as warriors or as
+men, but they were more treacherous, and wanting in high qualities. In
+the interior to-day are some Indians such as they were who are accused
+of cannibalism, and who have necessitated warlike defences at distant
+trading-posts. Travellers who escaped Indian treachery risked
+starvation, and stood their chances of losing their reckoning, of
+freezing to death, of encounters with grizzlies, of snow-slides, of
+canoe accidents in rapids, and of all the other casualties of life in a
+territory which to-day is not half explored. Those are not the trunks of
+Hudson Bay men, for such would have been sent home to English and
+Scottish mourners; they are the luggage of chance men who happened
+along, and outfitted at the old post before going farther. But the
+company's men were there before them, had penetrated the region
+farther and earlier, and there they are to-day, carrying on the fur
+trade under conditions strongly resembling those their predecessors once
+encountered at posts that are now towns in farming regions, and where
+now the locomotive and the steamer are familiar vehicles. Moreover, the
+status of the company in British Columbia is its status all the way
+across the North from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
+
+To me the most interesting and picturesque life to be found in North
+America, at least north of Mexico, is that which is occasioned by this
+principal phase of the company's operations. In and around the fur trade
+is found the most notable relic of the white man's earliest life on this
+continent. Our wild life in this country is, happily, gone. The
+frontiersman is more difficult to find than the frontier, the cowboy has
+become a laborer almost like any other, our Indians are as the animals
+in our parks, and there is little of our country that is not threaded by
+railroads or wagon-ways. But in new or western Canada this is not so. A
+vast extent of it north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which hugs our
+border, has been explored only as to its waterways, its valleys, or its
+open plains, and where it has been traversed much of it remains as
+Nature and her near of kin, the red men, had it of old. On the streams
+canoes are the vehicles of travel and of commerce; in the forests
+"trails" lead from trading-post to trading-post, the people are Indians,
+half-breeds, and Esquimaux, who live by hunting and fishing as their
+forebears did; the Hudson Bay posts are the seats of white population;
+the post factors are the magistrates.
+
+All this is changing with a rapidity which history will liken to the
+sliding of scenes before the lens of a magic-lantern. Miners are
+crushing the foot-hills on either side of the Rocky Mountains, farmers
+and cattle-men have advanced far northward on the prairie and on the
+plains in narrow lines, and railroads are pushing hither and thither.
+Soon the limits of the inhospitable zone this side of the Arctic Sea,
+and of the marshy, weakly-wooded country on either side of Hudson Bay
+will circumscribe the fur-trader's field, except in so far as there may
+remain equally permanent hunting-grounds in Labrador and in the
+mountains of British Columbia. Therefore now, when the Hudson Bay
+Company is laying the foundations of widely different interests, is the
+time for halting the old original view that stood in the stereopticon
+for centuries, that we may see what it revealed, and will still show far
+longer than it takes for us to view it.
+
+The Hudson Bay Company's agents were not the first hunters and
+fur-traders in British America, ancient as was their foundation. The
+French, from the Canadas, preceded them no one knows how many years,
+though it is said that it was as early as 1627 that Louis XIII.
+chartered a company of the same sort and for the same aims as the
+English company. Whatever came of that corporation I do not know, but by
+the time the Englishmen established themselves on Hudson Bay, individual
+Frenchmen and half-breeds had penetrated the country still farther west.
+They were of hardy, adventurous stock, and they loved the free roving
+life of the trapper and hunter. Fitted out by the merchants of Canada,
+they would pursue the waterways which there cut up the wilderness in
+every direction, their canoes laden with goods to tempt the savages, and
+their guns or traps forming part of their burden. They would be gone the
+greater part of a year, and always returned with a store of furs to be
+converted into money, which was, in turn, dissipated in the cities with
+devil-may-care jollity. These were the _coureurs du bois_, and theirs
+was the stock from which came the _voyageurs_ of the next era, and the
+half-breeds, who joined the service of the rival fur companies, and who,
+by-the-way, reddened the history of the North-west territories with the
+little bloodshed that mars it.
+
+Charles II. of England was made to believe that wonders in the way of
+discovery and trade would result from a grant of the Hudson Bay
+territory to certain friends and petitioners. An experimental voyage was
+made with good results in 1668, and in 1670 the King granted the charter
+to what he styled "the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England
+trading into Hudson's Bay, one body corporate and politique, in deed and
+in name, really and fully forever, for Us, Our heirs, and Successors."
+It was indeed a royal and a wholesale charter, for the King declared,
+"We have given, granted, and confirmed unto said Governor and Company
+sole trade and commerce of those Seas, Streights, Bays, Rivers, Lakes,
+Creeks, and Sounds, in whatsoever latitude they shall be, that lie
+within the entrance of the Streights commonly called Hudson's, together
+with all the Lands, Countries, and Territories upon the coasts and
+confines of the Seas, etc., . . . not already actually possessed by or
+granted to any of our subjects, or possessed by the subjects of any
+other Christian Prince or State, with the fishing of all sorts of Fish,
+Whales, Sturgeons, and all other Royal Fishes, . . . . together with the
+Royalty of the Sea upon the Coasts within the limits aforesaid, and all
+Mines Royal, as well discovered as not discovered, of Gold, Silver,
+Gems, and Precious Stones, . . . . and that the said lands be henceforth
+reckoned and reputed as one of Our Plantations or Colonies in America
+called Rupert's Land." For this gift of an empire the corporation was to
+pay yearly to the king, his heirs and successors, two elks and two black
+beavers whenever and as often as he, his heirs, or his successors "shall
+happen to enter into the said countries." The company was empowered to
+man ships of war, to create an armed force for security and defence, to
+make peace or war with any people that were not Christians, and to seize
+any British or other subject who traded in their territory. The King
+named his cousin, Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, to be first
+governor, and it was in his honor that the new territory got its name of
+Rupert's Land.
+
+In the company were the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lords Arlington
+and Ashley, and several knights and baronets, Sir Philip Carteret among
+them. There were also five esquires, or gentlemen, and John Portman,
+"citizen and goldsmith." They adopted the witty sentence, "_Pro pelle
+cutem_" (A skin for a skin), as their motto, and established as their
+coat of arms a fox sejant as the crest, and a shield showing four
+beavers in the quarters, and the cross of St. George, the whole upheld
+by two stags.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEAR TRAP]
+
+The "adventurers" quickly established forts on the shores of Hudson Bay,
+and began trading with the Indians, with such success that it was
+rumored they made from twenty-five to fifty per cent. profit every year.
+But they exhibited all of that timidity which capital is ever said to
+possess. They were nothing like as enterprising as the French _coureurs
+du bois_. In a hundred years they were no deeper in the country then at
+first, excepting as they extended their little system of forts or
+"factories" up and down and on either side of Hudson and James bays. In
+view of their profits, perhaps this lack of enterprise is not to be
+wondered at. On the other hand, their charter was given as a reward for
+the efforts they had made, and were to make, to find "the Northwest
+passage to the Southern seas." In this quest they made less of a trial
+than in the getting of furs; how much less we shall see. But the company
+had no lack of brave and hardy followers. At first many of the men at
+the factories were from the Orkney Islands, and those islands remained
+until recent times the recruiting-source for this service. This was
+because the Orkney men were inured to a rigorous climate, and to a diet
+largely composed of fish. They were subject to less of a change in the
+company's service than must have been endured by men from almost any
+part of England.
+
+I am going, later, to ask the reader to visit Rupert's Land when the
+company had shaken off its timidity, overcome its obstacles, and dotted
+all British America with its posts and forts. Then we shall see the
+interiors of the forts, view the strange yet not always hard or uncouth
+life of the company's factors and clerks, and glance along the trails
+and watercourses, mainly unchanged to-day, to note the work and
+surroundings of the Indians, the _voyageurs_, and the rest who inhabit
+that region. But, fortunately, I can first show, at least roughly, much
+that is interesting about the company's growth and methods a century and
+a half ago. The information is gotten from some English Parliamentary
+papers forming a report of a committee of the House of Commons in 1749.
+
+Arthur Dobbs and others petitioned Parliament to give them either the
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company or a similar charter. It seems that
+England had offered L20,000 reward to whosoever should find the
+bothersome passage to the Southern seas _via_ this northern route, and
+that these petitioners had sent out two ships for that purpose. They
+said that when others had done no more than this in Charles II.'s time,
+that monarch had given them "the greatest privileges as lords
+proprietors" of the Hudson Bay territory, and that those recipients of
+royal favor were bounden to attempt the discovery of the desired
+passage. Instead of this, they not only failed to search effectually or
+in earnest for the passage, but they had rather endeavored to conceal
+the same, and to obstruct the discovery thereof by others. They had not
+possessed or occupied any of the lands granted to them, or extended
+their trade, or made any plantations or settlements, or permitted other
+British subjects to plant, settle, or trade there. They had established
+only four factories and one small trading-house; yet they had connived
+at or allowed the French to encroach, settle, and trade within their
+limits, to the great detriment and loss of Great Britain. The
+petitioners argued that the Hudson Bay charter was monopolistic, and
+therefore void, and at any rate it had been forfeited "by non-user or
+abuser."
+
+In the course of the hearing upon both sides, the "voyages upon
+discovery," according to the company's own showing, were not undertaken
+until the corporation had been in existence nearly fifty years, and then
+the search had only been prosecuted during eighteen years, and with only
+ten expeditions. Two ships sent out from England never reached the bay,
+but those which succeeded, and were then ready for adventurous cruising,
+made exploratory voyages that lasted only between one month and ten
+weeks, so that, as we are accustomed to judge such expeditions, they
+seem farcical and mere pretences. Yet their largest ship was only of 190
+tons burden, and the others were a third smaller--vessels like our small
+coasting schooners. The most particular instructions to the captains
+were to trade with all natives, and persuade them to kill whales,
+sea-horses, and seals; and, subordinately and incidentally, "by God's
+permission," to find out the Strait of Annian, a fanciful sheet of
+water, with tales of which that irresponsible Greek sea-tramp, Juan de
+Fuca, had disturbed all Christendom, saying that it led between a great
+island in the Pacific (Vancouver) and the main-land into the inland
+lakes. To the factors at their forts the company sent such lukewarm
+messages as, "and if you can by any means find out any discovery or
+matter to the northward or elsewhere in the company's interest or
+advantage, do not fail to let us know every year."
+
+The attitude of the company towards discovery suggests a Dogberry at its
+head, bidding his servants to "comprehend" the North-west passage, but
+should they fail, to thank God they were rid of a villain. In truth,
+they were traders pure and simple, and were making great profits with
+little trouble and expense.
+
+[Illustration: HUSKIE DOGS FIGHTING]
+
+They brought from England about L4000 worth of powder, shot, guns,
+fire-steels, flints, gun-worms, powder-horns, pistols, hatchets, sword
+blades, awl blades, ice-chisels, files, kettles, fish-hooks, net-lines,
+burning-glasses, looking-glasses, tobacco, brandy, goggles, gloves,
+hats, lace, needles, thread, thimbles, breeches, vermilion, worsted
+sashes, blankets, flannels, red feathers, buttons, beads, and "shirts,
+shoes, and stockens." They spent, in keeping up their posts and ships,
+about L15,000, and in return they brought to England castorum,
+whale-fins, whale-oil, deer-horns, goose-quills, bed-feathers, and
+skins--in all of a value of about L26,000 per annum. I have taken the
+average for several years in that period of the company's history, and
+it is in our money as if they spent $90,000 and got back $130,000, and
+this is their own showing under such circumstances as to make it the
+course of wisdom not to boast of their profits. They had three times
+trebled their stock and otherwise increased it, so that having been
+10,500 shares at the outset, it was now 103,950 shares.
+
+And now that we have seen how natural it was that they should not then
+bother with exploration and discovery, in view of the remuneration that
+came for simply sitting in their forts and buying furs, let me pause to
+repeat what one of their wisest men said casually, between the whiffs of
+a meditative cigar, last summer: "The search for the north pole must
+soon be taken up in earnest," said he. "Man has paused in the
+undertaking because other fields where his needs were more pressing, and
+where effort was more certain to be rewarded with success, had been
+neglected. This is no longer the fact, and geographers and other
+students of the subject all agree that the north pole must next be
+sought and found. Speaking only on my own account and from my knowledge,
+I assert that whenever any government is in earnest in this desire, it
+will employ the men of this fur service, and they will find the pole.
+The company has posts far within the arctic circle, and they are manned
+by men peculiarly and exactly fitted for the adventure. They are hardy,
+acutely intelligent, self-reliant, accustomed to the climate, and all
+that it engenders and demands. They are on the spot ready to start at
+the earliest moment in the season, and they have with them all that they
+will need on the expedition. They would do nothing hurriedly or rashly;
+they would know what they were about as no other white men would--and
+they would get there."
+
+I mention this not merely for the novelty of the suggestion and the
+interest it may excite, but because it contributes to the reader's
+understanding of the scope and character of the work of the company. It
+is not merely Western and among Indians, it is hyperborean and among
+Esquimaux. But would it not be passing strange if, beyond all that
+England has gained from the careless gift of an empire to a few
+favorites by Charles II., she should yet possess the honor and glory of
+a grand discovery due to the natural results of that action?
+
+To return to the Parliamentary inquiry into the company's affairs 140
+years ago. If it served no other purpose, it drew for us of this day an
+outline picture of the first forts and their inmates and customs. Being
+printed in the form our language took in that day, when a gun was a
+"musquet" and a stockade was a "palisadoe," we fancy we can see the
+bumptious governors--as they then called the factors or agents--swelling
+about in knee-breeches and cocked hats and colored waistcoats, and
+relying, through their fear of the savages, upon the little putty-pipe
+cannon that they speak of as "swivels." These were ostentatiously
+planted before their quarters, and in front of these again were massive
+double doors, such as we still make of steel for our bank safes, but,
+when made of wood, use only for our refrigerators. The views we get of
+the company's "servants"--which is to say, mechanics and laborers--are
+all of trembling varlets, and the testimony is full of hints of petty
+sharp practice towards the red man, suggestive of the artful ways of our
+own Hollanders, who bought beaver-skins by the weight of their feet, and
+then pressed down upon the scales with all their might.
+
+[Illustration: PAINTING THE ROBE]
+
+The witnesses had mainly been at one time in the employ of the company,
+and they made the point against it that it imported all its bread (_i.e._,
+grain) from England, and neither encouraged planting nor cultivated
+the soil for itself. But there were several who said that even in August
+they found the soil still frozen at a depth of two and a half or three
+feet. Not a man in the service was allowed to trade with the natives
+outside the forts, or even to speak with them. One fellow was put in
+irons for going into an Indian's tent; and there was a witness who had
+"heard a Governor say he would whip a Man without Tryal; and that the
+severest Punishment is a Dozen of Lashes." Of course there was no
+instructing the savages in either English or the Christian religion; and
+we read that, though there were twenty-eight Europeans in one factory,
+"witness never heard Sermon or Prayers there, nor ever heard of any such
+Thing either before his Time or since." Hunters who offered their
+services got one-half what they shot or trapped, and the captains of
+vessels kept in the bay were allowed. "25 _l. per cent._" for all the
+whalebone they got.
+
+One witness said: "The method of trade is by a standard set by the
+Governors. They never lower it, but often double it, so that where the
+Standard directs 1 Skin to be taken they generally take Two." Another
+said he "had been ordered to shorten the measure for Powder, which ought
+to be a Pound, and that within these 10 Years had been reduced an Ounce
+or Two." "The Indians made a Noise sometimes, and the Company gave them
+their Furs again." A book-keeper lately in the service said that the
+company's measures for powder were short, and yet even such measures
+were not filled above half full. Profits thus made were distinguished as
+"the overplus trade," and signified what skins were got more than were
+paid for, but he could not say whether such gains went to the company or
+to the governor. (As a matter of fact, the factors or governors shared
+in the company's profits, and were interested in swelling them in every
+way they could.)
+
+There was much news of how the French traders got the small furs of
+martens, foxes, and cats, by intercepting the Indians, and leaving them
+to carry only the coarse furs to the company's forts. A witness "had
+seen the Indians come down in fine _French_ cloaths, with as much Lace
+as he ever saw upon any Cloaths whatsoever. He believed if the Company
+would give as much for the Furs as the _French_, the _Indians_ would
+bring them down;" but the French asked only thirty marten-skins for a
+gun, whereas the company's standard was from thirty-six to forty such
+skins. Then, again, the company's plan (unchanged to-day) was to take
+the Indian's furs, and then, being possessed of them, to begin the
+barter.
+
+This shouldering the common grief upon the French was not merely the
+result of the chronic English antipathy to their ancient and their
+lively foes. The French were swarming all around the outer limits of the
+company's field, taking first choice of the furs, and even beginning to
+set up posts of their own. Canada was French soil, and peopled by as
+hardy and adventurous a class as inhabited any part of America. The
+_coureurs du bois_ and the _bois-brules_ (half-breeds), whose success
+afterwards led to the formation of rival companies, had begun a mosquito
+warfare, by canoeing the waters that led to Hudson Bay, and had
+penetrated 1000 miles farther west than the English. One Thomas Barnett,
+a smith, said that the French intercepted the Indians, forcing them to
+trade, "when they take what they please, giving them Toys in Exchange;
+and fright them into Compliance by Tricks of Sleight of Hand; from
+whence the _Indians_ conclude them to be Conjurers; and if the _French_
+did not compel the _Indians_ to trade, they would certainly bring all
+the Goods to the _English_."
+
+This must have seemed to the direct, practical English trading mind a
+wretched business, and worthy only of Johnny Crapeau, to worst the noble
+Briton by monkeyish acts of conjuring. It stirred the soul of one
+witness, who said that the way to meet it was "by sending some _English_
+with a little Brandy." A gallon to certain chiefs and a gallon and a
+half to others would certainly induce the natives to come down and
+trade, he thought.
+
+But while the testimony of the English was valuable as far as it went,
+which was mainly concerning trade, it was as nothing regarding the life
+of the natives compared with that of one Joseph La France, of
+Missili-Mackinack (Mackinaw), a traveller, hunter, and trader. He had
+been sent as a child to Quebec to learn French, and in later years had
+been from Lake Nipissing to Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes, the
+Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ouinipigue (Winnipeg) or Red River, and
+to Hudson Bay. He told his tales to Arthur Dobbs, who made a book of
+them, and part of that became an appendix to the committee's report. La
+France said:
+
+    "That the high price on _European_ Goods discourages the Natives
+    so much, that if it were not that they are under a Necessity of
+    having Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets, and other Iron Tools for
+    their Hunting, and Tobacco, Brandy, and some Paint for Luxury,
+    they would not go down to the Factory with what they now carry.
+    They leave great numbers of Furs and Skins behind them. A good
+    Hunter among the _Indians_ can kill 600 Beavers in a season, and
+    carry down but 100" (because their canoes were small); "the rest
+    he uses at home, or hangs them upon Branches of Trees upon the
+    Death of their Children, as an Offering to them; or use them for
+    Bedding and Coverings: they sometimes burn off the Fur, and
+    roast the Beavers, like Pigs, upon any Entertainments; and they
+    often let them rot, having no further Use of them. The Beavers,
+    he says, are of Three Colours--the Brown-reddish Colour, the
+    Black, and the White. The Black is most valued by the Company,
+    and in _England_; the White, though most valued in _Canada_, is
+    blown upon by the Company's Factors at the Bay, they not
+    allowing so much for these as for the others; and therefore the
+    _Indians_ use them at home, or burn off the Hair, when they
+    roast the Beavers, like Pigs, at an Entertainment when they
+    feast together. The Beavers are delicious Food, but the Tongue
+    and Tail the most delicious Parts of the whole. They multiply
+    very fast, and if they can empty a Pond, and take the whole
+    Lodge, they generally leave a Pair to breed, so that they are
+    fully stocked again in Two or Three Years. The _American_ Oxen,
+    or Beeves, he says, have a large Bunch upon their backs, which
+    is by far the most delicious Part of them for Food, it being all
+    as sweet as Marrow, juicy and rich, and weighs several Pounds.
+
+    "The Natives are so discouraged in their Trade with the Company
+    that no Peltry is worth the Carriage; and the finest Furs are
+    sold for very little. They gave but a Pound of Gunpowder for 4
+    Beavers, a Fathom of Tobacco for 7 Beavers, a Pound of Shot for
+    1, an Ell of coarse Cloth for 15, a Blanket for 12, Two
+    Fish-hooks or Three Flints for 1; a Gun for 25, a Pistol for 10,
+    a common Hat with white Lace, 7; an Ax, 4; a Billhook, 1; a
+    Gallon of Brandy, 4; a chequer'd Shirt, 7; all of which are sold
+    at a monstrous Profit, even to 2000 _per Cent_. Notwithstanding
+    this discouragement, he computed that there were brought to the
+    Factory in 1742, in all, 50,000 Beavers and above 9000 Martens.
+
+    "The smaller Game, got by Traps or Snares, are generally the
+    Employment of the Women and Children; such as the Martens,
+    Squirrels, Cats, Ermines, &c. The Elks, Stags, Rein-Deer, Bears,
+    Tygers, wild Beeves, Wolves, Foxes, Beavers, Otters, Corcajeu,
+    &c., are the employment of the Men. The _Indians_, when they
+    kill any Game for Food, leave it where they kill it, and send
+    their wives next Day to carry it home. They go home in a direct
+    Line, never missing their way, by observations they make of the
+    Course they take upon their going out. The Trees all bend
+    towards the South, and the Branches on that Side are larger and
+    stronger than on the North Side; as also the Moss upon the
+    Trees. To let their Wives know how to come at the killed Game,
+    they from Place to Place break off Branches and lay them in the
+    Road, pointing them the Way they should go, and sometimes Moss;
+    so that they never miss finding it.
+
+    "In Winter, when they go abroad, which they must do in all
+    Weathers, before they dress, they rub themselves all over with
+    Bears Greaze or Oil of Beavers, which does not freeze; and also
+    rub all the Fur of their Beaver Coats, and then put them on;
+    they have also a kind of Boots or Stockings of Beaver's Skin,
+    well oiled, with the Fur inwards; and above them they have an
+    oiled Skin laced about their Feet, which keeps out the Cold, and
+    also Water; and by this means they never freeze, nor suffer
+    anything by Cold. In Summer, also, when they go naked, they rub
+    themselves with these Oils or Grease, and expose themselves to
+    the Sun without being scorched, their Skins always being kept
+    soft and supple by it; nor do any Flies, Bugs, or Musketoes, or
+    any noxious Insect, ever molest them. When they want to get rid
+    of it, they go into the Water, and rub themselves all over with
+    Mud or Clay, and let it dry upon them, and then rub it off; but
+    whenever they are free from the Oil, the Flies and Musketoes
+    immediately attack them, and oblige them again to anoint
+    themselves. They are much afraid of the wild Humble Bee, they
+    going naked in Summer, that they avoid them as much as they can.
+    They use no Milk from the time they are weaned, and they all
+    hate to taste Cheese, having taken up an Opinion that it is made
+    of Dead Men's Fat. They love Prunes and Raisins, and will give a
+    Beaver-skin for Twelve of them, to carry to their Children; and
+    also for a Trump or Jew's Harp. The Women have all fine Voices,
+    but have never heard any Musical Instrument. They are very fond
+    of all Kinds of Pictures or Prints, giving a Beaver for the
+    least Print; and all Toys are like Jewels to them."
+
+He reported that "the _Indians_ west of Hudson's Bay live an erratic
+Life, and can have no Benefit by tame Fowl or Cattle. They seldom stay
+above a Fortnight in a Place, unless they find Plenty of Game. After
+having built their Hut, they disperse to get Game for their Food, and
+meet again at Night after having killed enough to maintain them for that
+Day. When they find Scarcity of Game, they remove a League or Two
+farther; and thus they traverse through woody Countries and Bogs, scarce
+missing One Day, Winter or Summer, fair or foul, in the greatest Storms
+of Snow."
+
+It has been often said that the great Peace River, which rises in
+British Columbia and flows through a pass in the Rocky Mountains into
+the northern plains, was named "the Unchaga," or Peace, "because" (to
+quote Captain W. F. Butler) "of the stubborn resistance offered by the
+all-conquering Crees, which induced that warlike tribe to make peace on
+the banks of the river, and leave at rest the beaver-hunters"--that is,
+the Beaver tribe--upon the river's banks. There is a sentence in La
+France's story that intimates a more probable and lasting reason for the
+name. He says that some Indians in the southern centre of Canada sent
+frequently to the Indians along some river near the mountains "with
+presents, to confirm the peace with them." The story is shadowy, of
+course, and yet La France, in the same narrative, gave other information
+which proved to be correct, and none which proved ridiculous. We know
+that there were "all-conquering" Crees, but there were also inferior
+ones called the Swampies, and there were others of only intermediate
+valor. As for the Beavers, Captain Butler himself offers other proof of
+their mettle besides their "stubborn resistance." He says that on one
+occasion a young Beaver chief shot the dog of another brave in the
+Beaver camp. A hundred bows were instantly drawn, and ere night eighty
+of the best men of the tribe lay dead. There was a parley, and it was
+resolved that the chief who slew the dog should leave the tribe, and
+take his friends with him. A century later a Beaver Indian, travelling
+with a white man, heard his own tongue spoken by men among the Blackfeet
+near our border. They were the Sarcis, descendants of the exiled band of
+Beavers. They had become the must reckless and valorous members of the
+warlike Blackfeet confederacy.
+
+[Illustration: COUREUR DU BOIS]
+
+La France said that the nations who "go up the river" with presents, to
+confirm the peace with certain Indians, were three months in going, and
+that the Indians in question live beyond a range of mountains beyond
+the Assiniboins (a plains tribe). Then he goes on to say that still
+farther beyond those Indians "are nations who have not the use of
+firearms, by which many of them are made slaves and sold"--to the
+Assiniboins and others. These are plainly the Pacific coast Indians. And
+even so long ago as that (about 1740), half a century before Mackenzie
+and Vancouver met on the Pacific coast, La France had told the story of
+an Indian who had gone at the head of a band of thirty braves and their
+families to make war on the Flatheads "on the Western Ocean of America."
+They were from autumn until the next April in making the journey, and
+they "saw many Black Fish spouting up in the sea." It was a case of what
+the Irish call "spoiling for a fight," for they had to journey 1500
+miles to meet "enemies" whom they never had seen, and who were peaceful,
+and inhabited more or less permanent villages. The plainsmen got more
+than they sought. They attacked a village, were outnumbered, and lost
+half their force, besides having several of their men wounded. On the
+way back all except the man who told the story died of fatigue and
+famine.
+
+The journeys which Indians made in their wildest period were tremendous.
+Far up in the wilderness of British America there are legends of visits
+by the Iroquois. The Blackfeet believe that their progenitors roamed as
+far south as Mexico for horses, and the Crees of the plains evinced a
+correct knowledge of the country that lay beyond the Rocky Mountains in
+their conversations with the first whites who traded with them. Yet
+those white men, the founders of an organized fur trade, clung to the
+scene of their first operations for more than one hundred years, while
+the bravest of their more enterprising rivals in the Northwest Company
+only reached the Pacific, with the aid of eight Iroquois braves, 120
+years after the English king chartered the senior company! The French
+were the true Yankees of that country. They and their half-breeds were
+always in the van as explorers and traders, and as early as 1731 M.
+Varennes de la Verandrye, licensed by the Canadian Government as a
+trader, penetrated the West as far as the Rockies, leading Sir Alexander
+Mackenzie to that extent by more than sixty years.
+
+But to return to the first serious trouble the Hudson Bay Company met.
+The investigation of its affairs by Parliament produced nothing more
+than the picture I have presented. The committee reported that if the
+original charter bred a monopoly, it would not help matters to give the
+same privileges to others. As the questioned legality of the charter was
+not competently adjudicated upon, they would not allow another company
+to invade the premises of the older one.
+
+At this time the great company still hugged the shores of the bay,
+fearing the Indians, the half-breeds, and the French. Their posts were
+only six in all, and were mainly fortified with palisaded enclosures,
+with howitzers and swivels, and with men trained to the use of guns.
+Moose Fort and the East Main factory were on either side of James Bay,
+Forts Albany, York, and Prince of Wales followed up the west coast, and
+Henley was the southernmost and most inland of all, being on Moose
+River, a tributary of James Bay. The French at first traded beyond the
+field of Hudson Bay operations, and their castles were their canoes. But
+when their great profits and familiarity with the trade tempted the
+thrifty French capitalists and enterprising Scotch merchants of Montreal
+into the formation of the rival Northwest Trading Company in 1783,
+fixed trading-posts began to be established all over the Prince Rupert's
+Land, and even beyond the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia. By 1818
+there were about forty Northwest posts as against about two dozen Hudson
+Bay factories. The new company not only disputed but ignored the
+chartered rights of the old company, holding that the charter had not
+been sanctioned by Parliament, and was in every way unconstitutional as
+creative of a monopoly. Their French partners and _engages_ shared this
+feeling, especially as the French crown had been first in the field with
+a royal charter. Growing bolder and bolder, the Northwest Company
+resolved to drive the Hudson Bay Company to a legal test of their
+rights, and so in 1803-4 they established a Northwest fort under the
+eyes of the old company on the shores of Hudson Bay, and fitted out
+ships to trade with the natives in the strait. But the Englishmen did
+not accept the challenge; for the truth was they had their own doubts of
+the strength of their charter.
+
+[Illustration: A FUR-TRADER IN THE COUNCIL TEPEE]
+
+They pursued a different and for them an equally bold course. That
+hard-headed old nobleman the fifth Earl of Selkirk came uppermost in the
+company as the engineer of a plan of colonization. There was plenty of
+land, and some wholesale evictions of Highlanders in Sutherlandshire,
+Scotland, had rendered a great force of hardy men homeless. Selkirk saw
+in this situation a chance to play a long but certainly triumphant game
+with his rivals. His plan was to plant a colony which should produce
+grain and horses and men for the old company, saving the importation
+of all three, and building up not only a nursery for men to match the
+_coureurs du bois_, but a stronghold and a seat of a future government
+in the Hudson Bay interest. Thus was ushered in a new and important era
+in Canadian history. It was the opening of that part of Canada; by a
+loop-hole rather than a door, to be sure.
+
+Lord Selkirk's was a practical soul. On one occasion in animadverting
+against the Northwest Company he spoke of them contemptuously as
+fur-traders, yet he was the chief of all fur-traders, and had been known
+to barter with an Indian himself at one of the forts for a fur. He held
+up the opposition to the scorn of the world as profiting upon the
+weakness of the Indians by giving them alcohol, yet he ordered
+distilleries set up in his colony afterwards, saying, "We grant the
+trade is iniquitous, but if we don't carry it on others will; so we may
+as well put the guineas in our own pockets." But he was the man of the
+moment, if not for it. His scheme of colonization was born of
+desperation on one side and distress on the other. It was pursued amid
+terrible hardship, and against incessant violence. It was consummated
+through bloodshed. The story is as interesting as it is important. The
+facts are obtained mainly from "Papers relating to the Red River
+Settlement, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, July 12,
+1819." Lord Selkirk owned 40,000 of the L105,000 (or shares) of the
+Hudson Bay Company; therefore, since 25,000 were held by women and
+children, he held half of all that carried votes. He got from the
+company a grant of a large tract around what is now Winnipeg, to form
+an agricultural settlement for supplying the company's posts with
+provisions. We have seen how little disposed its officers were to open
+the land to settlers, or to test its agricultural capacities. No one,
+therefore, will wonder that when this grant was made several members of
+the governing committee resigned. But a queer development of the moment
+was a strong opposition from holders of Hudson Bay stock who were also
+owners in that company's great rival, the Northwest Company. Since the
+enemy persisted in prospering at the expense of the old company, the
+moneyed men of the senior corporation had taken stock of their rivals.
+These doubly interested persons were also in London, so that the
+Northwest Company was no longer purely Canadian. The opponents within
+the Hudson Bay Company declared civilization to be at all times
+unfavorable to the fur trade, and the Northwest people argued that the
+colony would form a nursery for servants of the Bay Company, enabling
+them to oppose the Northwest Company more effectually, as well as
+affording such facilities for new-comers as must destroy their own
+monopoly. The Northwest Company denied the legality of the charter
+rights of the Hudson Bay Company because Parliament had not confirmed
+Charles II.'s charter.
+
+[Illustration: BUFFALO MEAT FOR THE POST]
+
+The colonists came, and were met by Miles McDonnell, an ex-captain of
+Canadian volunteers, as Lord Selkirk's agent. The immigrants landed on
+the shore of Hudson Bay, and passed a forlorn winter. They met some of
+the Northwest Company's people under Alexander McDonnell, a cousin
+and brother-in-law to Miles McDonnell. Although Captain Miles read the
+grant to Selkirk in token of his sole right to the land, the settlers
+were hospitably received and well treated by the Northwest people. The
+settlers reached the place of colonization in August, 1812. This place
+is what was known as Fort Garry until Winnipeg was built. It was at
+first called "the Forks of the Red River," because the Assiniboin there
+joined the Red. Lord Selkirk outlined his policy at the time in a letter
+in which he bade Miles McDonnell give the Northwest people solemn
+warning that the lands were Hudson Bay property, and they must remove
+from them; that they must not fish, and that if they did their nets were
+to be seized, their buildings were to be destroyed, and they were to be
+treated "as you would poachers in England."
+
+The trouble began at once. Miles accused Alexander of trying to inveigle
+colonists away from him. He trained his men in the use of guns, and
+uniformed a number of them. He forbade the exportation of any supplies
+from the country, and when some Northwest men came to get buffalo meat
+they had hung on racks in the open air, according to the custom of the
+country, he sent armed men to send the others away. He intercepted a
+band of Northwest canoe-men, stationing men with guns and with two
+field-pieces on the river; and he sent to a Northwest post lower down
+the river demanding the provisions stored there, which, when they were
+refused, were taken by force, the door being smashed in. For this a
+Hudson Bay clerk was arrested, and Captain Miles's men went to the
+rescue. Two armed forces met, but happily slaughter was averted. Miles
+McDonnell justified his course on the ground that the colonists were
+distressed by need of food. It transpired at the time that one of his
+men while making cartridges for a cannon remarked that he was making
+them "for those ---- Northwest rascals. They have run too long, and
+shall run no longer." After this Captain Miles ordered the stoppage of
+all buffalo-hunting on horseback, as the practice kept the buffalo at a
+distance, and drove them into the Sioux country, where the local Indians
+dared not go.
+
+But though Captain McDonnell was aggressive and vexatious, the Northwest
+Company's people, who had begun the mischief, even in London, were not
+now passive. They relied on setting the half-breeds and Indians against
+the colonists. They urged that the colonists had stolen Indian real
+estate in settling on the land, and that in time every Indian would
+starve as a consequence. At the forty-fifth annual meeting of the
+Northwest Company's officers, August, 1814, Alexander McDonnell said,
+"Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some, by
+fair or foul means--a most desirable object, if it can be accomplished;
+so here is at it with all my heart and energy." In October, 1814,
+Captain McDonnell ordered the Northwest Company to remove from the
+territory within six months.
+
+[Illustration: THE INDIAN HUNTER OF 1750]
+
+The Indians, first and last, were the friends of the colonists. They
+were befriended by the whites, and in turn they gave them succor when
+famine fell upon them. Many of Captain Miles McDonnell's orders were in
+their interest, and they knew it. Katawabetay, a chief, was tempted with
+a big prize to destroy the settlement. He refused. On the opening of
+navigation in 1815 chiefs were bidden from the country around to visit
+the Northwest factors, and were by them asked to destroy the colony. Not
+only did they decline, but they hastened to Captain Miles McDonnell to
+acquaint him with the plot. Duncan Cameron now appears foremost among
+the Northwest Company's agents, being in charge of that company's post
+on the Red River, in the Selkirk grant. He told the chiefs that if they
+took the part of the colonists "their camp-fires should be totally
+extinguished." When Cameron caught one of his own servants doing a
+trifling service for Captain Miles McDonnell, he sent him upon a journey
+for which every _engage_ of the Northwest Company bound himself liable
+in joining the company; that was to make the trip to Montreal, a voyage
+held _in terrorem_ over every servant of the corporation. More than
+that, he confiscated four horses and a wagon belonging to this man, and
+charged him on the company's books with the sum of 800 livres for an
+Indian squaw, whom the man had been told he was to have as his slave for
+a present.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTER HANGING DEER OUT OF THE REACH OF WOLVES]
+
+But though the Indians held aloof from the great and cruel conspiracy,
+the half-breeds readily joined in it. They treated Captain McDonnell's
+orders with contempt, and arrested one of the Hudson Bay men as a spy
+upon their hunting with horses. There lived along the Red River, near
+the colony, about thirty Canadians and seventy half-breeds, born of
+Indian squaws and the servants or officers of the Northwest Company.
+One-quarter of the number of "breeds" could read and write, and were fit
+to serve as clerks; the rest were literally half savage, and were
+employed as hunters, canoe-men, "packers" (freighters), and guides. They
+were naturally inclined to side with the Northwest Company, and in time
+that corporation sowed dissension among the colonists themselves,
+picturing to them exaggerated danger from the Indians, and offering them
+free passage to Canada. They paid at least one of the leading
+colonists L100 for furthering discontent in the settlement, and four
+deserters from the colony stole all the Hudson Bay field-pieces, iron
+swivels, and the howitzer. There was constant irritation and friction
+between the factions. In an affray far up at Isle-a-la-Crosse a man was
+killed on either side. Half-breeds came past the colony singing
+war-songs, and notices were posted around Fort Garry reading, "Peace
+with all the world except in Red River." The Northwest people demanded
+the surrender of Captain McDonnell that he might be tried on their
+charges, and on June 11, 1815, a band of men fired on the colonial
+buildings. The captain afterwards surrendered himself, and the remnant
+of the colony, thirteen families, went to the head of Lake Winnipeg. The
+half-breeds burned the buildings, and divided the horses and effects.
+
+But in the autumn all came back with Colin Robertson, of the Bay
+Company, and twenty clerks and servants. These were joined by Governor
+Robert Semple, who brought 160 settlers from Scotland. Semple was a man
+of consequence at home, a great traveller, and the author of a book on
+travels in Spain.[2] But he came in no conciliatory mood, and the foment
+was kept up. The Northwest Company tried to starve the colonists, and
+Governor Semple destroyed the enemy's fort below Fort Garry. Then came
+the end--a decisive battle and massacre.
+
+Sixty-five men on horses, and with some carts, were sent by Alexander
+McDonnell, of the Northwest Company, up the river towards the colony.
+They were led by Cuthbert Grant, and included six Canadians, four
+Indians, and fifty-four half-breeds. It was afterwards said they went on
+innocent business, but every man was armed, and the "breeds" were naked,
+and painted all over to look like Indians. They got their paint of the
+Northwest officers. Moreover, there had been rumors that the colonists
+were to be driven away, and that "the land was to be drenched with
+blood." It was on June 19, 1816, that runners notified the colony that
+the others were coming. Semple was at Fort Douglas, near Fort Garry.
+When apprised of the close approach of his assailants, the Governor
+seems not to have appreciated his danger, for he said, "We must go and
+meet those people; let twenty men follow me." He put on his cocked hat
+and sash, his pistols, and shouldered his double-barrelled
+fowling-piece. The others carried a wretched lot of guns--some with the
+locks gone, and many that were useless. It was marshy ground, and they
+straggled on in loose order. They met an old soldier who had served in
+the army at home, and who said the enemy was very numerous, and that the
+Governor had better bring along his two field-pieces.
+
+"No, no," said the Governor; "there is no occasion. I am only going to
+speak to them."
+
+Nevertheless, after a moment's reflection, he did send back for one of
+the great guns, saying it was well to have it in case of need. They
+halted a short time for the cannon, and then perceived the Northwest
+party pressing towards them on their horses. By a common impulse the
+Governor and his followers began a retreat, walking backwards, and at
+the same time spreading out a single line to present a longer front. The
+enemy continued to advance at a hand-gallop. From out among them rode a
+Canadian named Boucher, the rest forming a half-moon behind him. Waving
+his hand in an insolent way to the Governor, Boucher called out, "What
+do you want?"
+
+[Illustration: MAKING THE SNOW-SHOE]
+
+"What do _you_ want?" said Governor Semple.
+
+"We want our fort," said Boucher, meaning the fort Semple had destroyed.
+
+"Go to your fort," said the Governor.
+
+"Why did you destroy our fort, you rascal?" Boucher demanded.
+
+"Scoundrel, do you tell me so?" the Governor replied, and ordered the
+man's arrest.
+
+Some say he caught at Boucher's gun. But Boucher slipped off his horse,
+and on the instant a gun was fired, and a Hudson Bay clerk fell dead.
+Another shot wounded Governor Semple, and he called to his followers.
+
+"Do what you can to take care of yourselves."
+
+Then there was a volley from the Northwest force, and with the clearing
+of the smoke it looked as though all the Governor's party were killed or
+wounded. Instead of taking care of themselves, they had rallied around
+their wounded leader. Captain Rogers, of the Governor's party, who had
+fallen, rose to his feet, and ran towards the enemy crying for mercy in
+English and broken French, when Thomas McKay, a "breed" and Northwest
+clerk, shot him through the head, another cutting his body open with a
+knife.
+
+Cuthbert Grant (who, it was charged, had shot Governor Semple) now went
+to the Governor, while the others despatched the wounded.
+
+Semple said, "Are you not Mr. Grant?"
+
+"Yes," said the other.
+
+"I am not mortally wounded," said the Governor, "and if you could get me
+conveyed to the fort, I think I should live."
+
+But when Grant left his side an Indian named Ma-chi-ca-taou shot him,
+some say through the breast, and some have it that he put a pistol to
+the Governor's head. Grant could not stop the savages. The bloodshed had
+crazed them. They slaughtered all the wounded, and, worse yet, they
+terribly maltreated the bodies. Twenty-two Hudson Bay men were killed,
+and one on the other side was wounded.
+
+There is a story that Alexander McDonnell shouted for joy when he heard
+the news of the massacre. One witness, who did not hear him shout,
+reports that he exclaimed to his friends: "_Sacre nom de Dieu! Bonnes
+nouvelles; vingt-deux Anglais tues!_" (----! Good news; twenty-two
+English slain!) It was afterwards alleged that the slaughter was
+approved by every officer of the Northwest Company whose comments were
+recorded.
+
+It is a saying up in that country that twenty-six out of the sixty-five
+in the attacking party died violent deaths. The record is only valuable
+as indicating the nature and perils of the lives the hunters and
+half-breeds led. First, a Frenchman dropped dead while crossing the ice
+on the river, his son was stabbed by a comrade, his wife was shot, and
+his children were burned; "Big Head," his brother, was shot by an
+Indian; Coutonohais dropped dead at a dance; Battosh was mysteriously
+shot; Lavigne was drowned; Fraser was run through the body by a
+Frenchman in Paris; Baptiste Moralle, while drunk, was thrown into a
+fire by inebriated companions and burned to death; another died drunk on
+a roadway; another was wounded by the bursting of his gun; small-pox
+took the eleventh; Duplicis was empaled upon a hay-fork, on which he
+jumped from a hay-stack; Parisien was shot, by a person unknown, in a
+buffalo-hunt; another lost his arm by carelessness; Gardapie, "the
+brave," was scalped and shot by the Sioux; so was Vallee;
+Ka-te-tee-goose was scalped and cut in pieces by the Gros-Ventres;
+Pe-me-can-toss was thrown in a hole by his people; and another Indian
+and his wife and children were killed by lightning. Yet another was
+gored to death by a buffalo. The rest of the twenty-six died by being
+frozen, by drowning, by drunkenness, or by shameful disease.
+
+It is when things are at their worst that they begin to mend, says a
+silly old proverb; but when history is studied these desperate
+situations often seem part of the mending, not of themselves, but of the
+broken cause of progress. There was a little halt here in Canada, as we
+shall see, but the seed of settlement had been planted, and thenceforth
+continued to grow. Lord Selkirk came with all speed, reaching Canada in
+1817. It was now an English colony, and when he asked for a body-guard,
+the Government gave him two sergeants and twelve soldiers of the
+Regiment de Meuron. He made these the nucleus of a considerable force of
+Swiss and Germans who had formerly served in that regiment, and he
+pursued a triumphal progress to what he called his territory of
+Assiniboin, capturing all the Northwest Company's forts on the route,
+imprisoning the officers, and sending to jail in Canada all the
+accessaries to the massacre, on charges of arson, murder, robbery, and
+"high misdemeanors." Such was the prejudice against the Hudson Bay
+Company and the regard for the home corporation that nearly all were
+acquitted, and suits for very heavy damages were lodged against him.
+
+[Illustration: A HUDSON BAY MAN (QUARTER-BREED)]
+
+Selkirk sought to treat with the Indians for his land, which they said
+belonged to the Chippeways and the Crees. Five chiefs were found whose
+right to treat was acknowledged by all. On July 18, 1817, they deeded
+the territory to the King, "for the benefit of Lord Selkirk," giving him
+a strip two miles wide on either side of the Red River from Lake
+Winnipeg to Red Lake, north of the United States boundary, and along the
+Assiniboin from Fort Garry to the Muskrat River, as well as within two
+circles of six miles radius around Fort Garry and Pembina, now in
+Dakota. Indians do not know what miles are; they measure distance by the
+movement of the sun while on a journey. They determined two miles in
+this case to be "as far as you can see daylight under a horse's belly on
+the level prairie." On account of Selkirk's liberality they dubbed him
+"the silver chief." He agreed to give them for the land 200 pounds of
+tobacco a year. He named his settlement Kildonan, after that place in
+Helmsdale, Sutherlandshire, Scotland. He died in 1821, and in 1836 the
+Hudson Bay Company bought the land back from his heirs for L84,000. The
+Swiss and Germans of his regiment remained, and many retired servants of
+the company bought and settled there, forming the aristocracy of the
+place--a queer aristocracy to our minds, for many of the women were
+Indian squaws, and the children were "breeds."
+
+Through the perseverance and tact of the Right Hon. Edward Ellice, to
+whom the Government had appealed, all differences between the two great
+fur-trading companies were adjusted, and in 1821 a coalition was formed.
+At Ellice's suggestion the giant combination then got from Parliament
+exclusive privileges beyond the waters that flow into Hudson Bay, over
+the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific, for a term of twenty years.
+These extra privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were renewed for
+twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so far as British Columbia
+(then New Caledonia) was concerned, in 1858. That territory then became
+a crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which had taken on a
+colonial character at the time of the California gold fever (1849), were
+united in 1866. The extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore
+not again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of the Canadian
+union, whatever presumptive rights the Hudson Bay Company got under
+Charles II.'s charter were vacated in consideration of a payment by
+Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one-twentieth of all surveyed lands within
+the fertile belt, and 50,000 acres surrounding the company's posts. It
+is estimated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 of acres, worth
+$20,000,000, exclusive of all town sites.
+
+Thus we reach the present condition of the company, more than 220 years
+old, maintaining 200 central posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and
+trading in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Massett, on Queen Charlotte
+Island, in the Pacific; and deep within the Arctic Circle in the north.
+The company was newly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at
+L20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it has paid back
+L7 in every L20, reducing its capital to L1,300,000. The stock, however,
+is quoted at its original value. The supreme control of the company is
+vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five directors, elected by
+the stockholders in London. They delegate their powers to an executive
+resident in this country, who was until lately called the "Governor of
+Rupert's Land," but now is styled the chief commissioner, and is in
+absolute charge of the company and all its operations. His term of
+office is unlimited. The present head of the corporation, or governor,
+is Sir Donald A. Smith, one of the foremost spirits in Canada, who
+worked his way up from a clerkship in the company. The business of the
+company is managed on the outfit system, the most old-fogyish, yet by
+its officers declared to be the most perfect, plan in use by any
+corporation. The method is to charge against each post all the supplies
+that are sent to it between June 1st and June 1st each year, and then to
+set against this the product of each post in furs and in cash received.
+It used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a given year,
+but, owing to improved means of transportation, this is now done in two
+years.
+
+[Illustration: THE COUREUR DU BOIS AND THE SAVAGE]
+
+Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts of the Hudson Bay
+territory you find at least one free-trader's shop set up in rivalry
+with the old company's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses for
+the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are partly, general country
+stores. There can be no doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to
+the fur trade from the stand-point of the future. The great company can
+afford to miss a dividend, and can lose at some points while gaining at
+others, but the free-traders must profit in every district. The
+consequence is such a reckless destruction of game that the plan adopted
+by us for our seal-fisheries--the leasehold system--is envied and
+advocated in Canada. A greater proportion of trapping and an utter
+unconcern for the destruction of the game at all ages are now
+ravaging the wilderness. Many districts return as many furs as they ever
+yielded, but the quantity is kept up at fearful cost by the
+extermination of the game. On the other hand, the fortified wall of
+posts that opposed the development of Canada, and sent the surplus
+population of Europe to the United States, is rid of its palisades and
+field-pieces, and the main strongholds of the ancient company and its
+rivals have become cities. The old fort on Vancouver Island is now
+Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace
+River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side;
+Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the
+site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.
+
+But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as
+the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become
+cities is in no man's thought or ken. And the communication between the
+centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, more nearly like
+what it was in the old, old days than most of my readers would imagine.
+My Indian guides were battling with their paddles against the mad
+current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, one day last summer, and I
+was only a few hours away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great
+lake, when we came to a portage, and might have imagined from what we
+saw that time had pushed the hands back on the dial of eternity at least
+a century.
+
+Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the brigade that was being
+sent with supplies to a post far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A
+cumbrous, big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a sail,
+and a square-cut bateau had brought the men and goods to the "carry."
+The men were half-breeds as of old, and had brought along their women
+and children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we espied on a bluff
+close by; a typical camp, with the blankets hung on the bushes, the
+slatternly women and half-naked children squatting or running about, and
+smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive off mosquitoes and
+flies. The men were in groups below on the trail, at the water-side end
+of which were the boats' cargoes of shingles and flour and bacon and
+shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, in rawhide. They were
+dark-skinned, short, spare men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the
+crew, and with longish coarse black hair and straggling beards. Each man
+carried a tump-line, or long stout strap, which he tied in such a way
+around what he meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted over
+the crown of his head. Thus they "packed" the goods over the portage,
+their heads sustaining the loads, and their backs merely steadying them.
+When one had thrown his burden into place, he trotted off up the trail
+with springing feet, though the freight was packed so that 100 pounds
+should form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, and then all the
+others tried to pack as much, and most succeeded. All agreed that one,
+the smallest and least muscular-looking one among them, could pack 400
+pounds.
+
+As the men gathered around their "smudge" to talk with my party, it was
+seen that of all the parts of the picturesque costume of the _voyageur_
+or _bois-brule_ of old--the capote, the striped shirt, the
+pipe-tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and moccasins--only the
+red worsted belt and the moccasins have been retained. These men could
+recall the day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, got no
+tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, lifting one package, and
+then throwing a second one atop of it without assistance. Now they carry
+only 100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food given to them.
+
+We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the York boat coming
+down from the north with last winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to
+lift the curtain from before the great fur country beyond them, to give
+a glimpse of the habits and conditions that prevail throughout a
+majestic territory where the rivers and lakes are the only roads, and
+canoes and dog-sleds are the only vehicles.
+
+[Footnote 2: I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a
+grandnephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero.
+He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic
+happenings. He wrote ten books: records at travel and one novel. His
+parents were passengers on an English vessel which was captured by the
+Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where he was born on
+February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years of age when he was
+slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows him to have been a man
+of striking and handsome appearance.]
+
+
+
+
+  VII
+
+  "TALKING MUSQUASH"
+
+  Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company
+
+
+The most sensational bit of "musquash talk" in more than a quarter of a
+century among the Hudson Bay Company's employes was started the other
+day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the governor of the great trading
+company, sent a type-written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw had
+gone to the trading-shop at Moose Factory and asked for a bustle and a
+box of face-powder in exchange for a beaver-skin, the suggestion of
+changing conditions in the fur trade would have been trifling compared
+with the sense of instability to which this appearance of
+machine-writing gave rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a
+wrench civilization would have gotten if the world had laid down its
+goose-quills and taken up the type-writer all in one day. And that is
+precisely what Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had served to
+convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie had satisfied Sir George
+Simpson; and, in our own time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord
+Kimberley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted table in the
+board-room of the company in London, quill pens were the only ones at
+hand. But Sir Donald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it
+contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in the offices at
+Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a protest against illegible manual
+chirography such as had been received from many factories in the
+wilderness. Talking business in the fur trade has always been called
+"talking musquash" (musk-rat), and after that letter came the turn taken
+by that form of talk suggested a general fear that from the Arctic to
+our border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Islands the canvassers
+for competing machines will be "racing" in all the posts, each to prove
+that his instrument can pound out more words in a minute than any
+other--in those posts where life has hitherto been taken so gently that
+when one day a factor heard that the battle of Waterloo had been fought
+and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the best trade gun in the
+storehouse and went out and fired it into the pulseless woods, although
+it was two years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World had long
+known the greater news that Napoleon was caged in St. Helena. The only
+reassuring note in the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the
+subject of candles is reached. The Governor and committee in London
+still pursue their deliberations by candlelight.
+
+But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of no avail for the
+old factors to make the point that Sir Donald found no greater trouble
+in reading their writing than they encountered when one of his missives
+had to be deciphered by them. The truth is that the tide of immigration
+which their ancient monopoly first shunted into the United States is
+now sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more than its
+face. Not only are the factors aware that the new rule confining them to
+share in the profits of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders
+far greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but a great many
+of them now find village life around their old forts, and railroads
+close at hand, and Law setting up its officers at their doors, so that
+in a great part of the territory the romance of the old life, and their
+authority as well, has fled.
+
+[Illustration: TALKING MUSQUASH]
+
+Less than four years ago I had passed by Qu'Appelle without visiting it,
+but last summer I resolved not to make the mistake again, for it was the
+last stockaded fort that could be studied without a tiresome and costly
+journey into the far north. It is on the Fishing Lakes, just beyond
+Manitoba. But on my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had just
+taken down the stockade in the spring, and that he did not know of a
+remaining "palisadoe" in all the company's system except one, which,
+curiously enough, had just been ordered to be put up around Fort
+Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern British Columbia, where some
+turbulent Indians have been very troublesome, and where whatever
+civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer than our own. This one
+example of the survival of original conditions is far more eloquent of
+their endurance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. It is true
+that there has come a tremendous change in the status and spirit of the
+company. It is true that its officers are but newly bending to external
+authority, and that settlers have poured into the south with such
+demands for food, clothes, tools, and weapons as to create within the
+old corporation one of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to-day,
+as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company remains the greatest
+fur-trading association that exists.
+
+The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated reaches from ocean to ocean
+without suffering invasion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic
+Sea is a grand belt wherein time has made no impress since the first
+factory was put up there. There and around it is a region, nearly
+two-thirds the size of the United States, which is as if our country
+were meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average distance of five
+days apart, with no other means of communication than canoe or dog
+train, and with not above a thousand white men in it, and not as many
+pure-blooded white women as you will find registered at a first-class
+New York hotel on an ordinary day. The company employs between fifteen
+hundred and two thousand white men, and I am assuming that half of them
+are in the fur country.
+
+We know that for nearly a century the company clung to the shores of
+Hudson Bay. It will be interesting to peep into one of its forts as they
+were at that time; it will be amazing to see what a country that
+bay-shore territory was and is. There and over a vast territory three
+seasons come in four months--spring in June, summer in July and August,
+and autumn in September. During the long winter the earth is blanketed
+deep in snow, and the water is locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and
+smaller birds abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in
+America, but they either give place to or share the summer with
+mosquitoes, black-flies, and "bull-dogs" (_tabanus_) without number,
+rest, or mercy. For the land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so
+wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated platforms around
+the buildings for the men to walk upon. Infrequent bunches of small
+pines and a litter of stunted swamp-willows dot the level waste, the
+only considerable timber being found upon the banks of the rivers. There
+is a wide belt called the Arctic Barrens all along the north, but below
+that, at some distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada
+bridge across the region north of the prairie and the plains, and cross
+the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox
+descends almost to meet the moose and deer, and on the near slope of the
+Rockies the wood-buffalo--larger, darker, and fiercer than the bison of
+the plains, but very like him--still roams as far south as where the
+buffalo ran highest in the days when he existed.
+
+Through all this northern country the cold in winter registers 40 deg., and
+even 50 deg., below zero, and the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in
+camp may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their winter's store
+of dried meat and frozen fish out-of-doors on racks all winter (and so
+they do down close to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only
+twice a year at the utmost; and when supplies have run out at the posts,
+we have heard of their boiling the parchment sheets they use instead of
+glass in their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of
+beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is so precious that
+such recourse could only be had when the horses and dogs had been eaten.
+As to the value of the beaver, the reader who never has purchased any
+for his wife may judge what it must be by knowing that the company has
+long imported buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways around
+Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be tempted, as of old, to make
+thongs and moccasins of the beaver; for their deer are poor, with skins
+full of worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and fine.
+
+But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in fact, common to
+all the fur territory, winter is the delightful season for the traders;
+around the bay it is the only endurable season. The winged pests of
+which I have spoken are by no means confined to the tide-soaked region
+close to the great inland sea. The whole country is as wet as that
+orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on
+the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange
+with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the
+illustration is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all sizes,
+the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make
+waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a
+vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fishing and
+hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. The "bull-dog" is a
+terror reserved for especial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect
+world, as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but carrying a
+red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in human flesh, will make the
+victim jump a foot from the ground, though there is no after-pain or
+itching or swelling from the thrust.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP]
+
+Having seen the country, let us turn to the forts. Some of them really
+were forts, in so far as palisades and sentry towers and double doors
+and guns can make a fort, and one twenty miles below Winnipeg was a
+stone fort. It is still standing. When the company ruled the territory
+as its landlord, the defended posts were on the plains among the bad
+Indians, and on the Hudson Bay shore, where vessels of foreign nations
+might be expected. In the forests, on the lakes and rivers, the
+character and behavior of the fish-eating Indians did not warrant
+armament. The stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stockade was of
+timber, of about such a height that a man might look over it on tiptoe.
+It had towers at the corners, and York Fort had a great "lookout" tower
+within the enclosure. Within the barricade were the company's buildings,
+making altogether such a picture as New York presented when the Dutch
+founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except that we had a church and
+a stadt-house in our enclosure. The Hudson Bay buildings were sometimes
+arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in the shape of a letter H,
+with the factor's house connecting the two other parts of the character.
+The factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were many smaller
+ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunters, and other non-commissioned
+men. A long, low, whitewashed log-house was apt to be the clerks' house,
+and other large buildings were the stores where merchandise was kept,
+the fur-houses where the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the
+Indian trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. A
+powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a stable or a boat-house
+for canoes completed the post. All the houses had double doors and
+windows, and wherever the men lived there was a tremendous stove set up
+to battle with the cold.
+
+The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bachelors' quarters.
+Each man had a little bedroom containing his chest, a chair, and a bed,
+with the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated papers or not,
+according to each man's taste. The big room or hall, where all met in
+the long nights and on off days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its
+whitewashed or timbered walls went, but the table in the middle was
+littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, and pens and ink, and all
+around stood (or rested on hooks overhead) guns, foils, and
+fishing-rods. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there was no work in at least
+one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine o'clock, dinner at one
+o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. The food varied in different places.
+All over the prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were kept, and
+men grew to like it very much, though it was nothing but dried buffalo
+beef pounded and mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmican they
+also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, and that was the greatest
+delicacy, except moose muffle (the nose of the moose), in all the
+territory. In the woods and lake country there were venison and moose as
+well as beaver--which is very good eating--and many sorts of birds, but
+in that region dried fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or
+white-fish nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows hunted and
+fished and smoked and drank and listened to the songs of the _voyageurs_
+and the yarns of the "breeds" and Indians. For the rest there was plenty
+of work to do.
+
+They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in that respect there has
+been a sad change, for all the people, white, red, and crossed, dressed
+picturesquely. You could always distinguish a Hudson Bay man by his
+capote of light blue cloth with brass buttons. In winter they wore as
+much as a Quebec carter. They wore leather coats lined with flannel,
+edged with fur, and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went around
+their waists, their breeches were of smoked buckskin, reaching down to
+three pairs of blanket socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth
+leggins up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung from their
+necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped a shawl of Scotch plaid around
+their necks and shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap with
+ear-pieces.
+
+[Illustration: SETTING A MINK-TRAP]
+
+The French Canadians and "breeds," who were the _voyageurs_ and hunters,
+made a gay appearance. They used to wear the company's regulation light
+blue capotes, or coats, in winter, with flannel shirts, either red or
+blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at the knee with bead-work. They
+all wore gaudy worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings--covered
+with gayly-fringed leggins--fancy moccasins, and tuques, or
+feather-decked hats or caps bound with tinsel bands. In mild weather
+their costume was formed of a blue striped cotton shirt, corduroys, blue
+cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the inevitable sash or worsted
+belt, and moccasins. Every hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his
+neck, and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also as a pipe. As
+late as 1862, Viscount Milton and W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book,
+_The North-west Passage by Land_, in the following graphic language:
+
+    "The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay
+    sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded
+    garters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed)
+    women were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly
+    embroidered leggings and white moccasins of cariboo-skin
+    beautifully worked with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and
+    moose hair."
+
+The trading-room at an open post was--and is now--like a cross-roads
+store, having its shelves laden with every imaginable article that
+Indians like and hunters need--clothes, blankets, files, scalp-knives,
+gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, needles, scissors,
+knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, powder, and shot. An Indian who came
+in with furs threw them down, and when they were counted received the
+right number of castors--little pieces of wood which served as
+money--with which, after the hours of reflection an Indian spends at
+such a time, he bought what he wanted.
+
+But there was a wide difference between such a trading-room and one in
+the plains country, or where there were dangerous Indians--such as some
+of the Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, Sioux,
+Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places the Indians were let in
+only one or two at a time, the goods were hidden so as not to excite
+their cupidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross of iron,
+whose spaces were only large enough to pass a blanket, what they wanted
+was given to them. That is all done away with now, except it be in
+northern British Columbia, where the Indians have been turbulent.
+
+Farther on we shall perhaps see a band of Indians on their way to trade
+at a post. Their custom is to wait until the first signs of spring, and
+then to pack up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of the
+last of the snow and ice for the journey. They hunt from November to
+May; but the trapping and shooting of bears go on until the 15th of
+June, for those animals do not come from their winter dens until May
+begins. They come to the posts in their best attire, and in the old days
+that formed as strong a contrast to their present dress as their leather
+tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Ballantyne, who wrote a
+book about his service with the great fur company, says merely that they
+were painted, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in Lewis
+and Clarke's journal we read description after description of the brave
+costuming of these color-and-ornament-loving people. Take the Sioux, for
+instance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft of hair, and
+feathers hung from that. Instead of the universal blanket of to-day,
+their main garment was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and
+the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with figures of beasts
+and queer designs, and fringed with porcupine quills. They wore the fur
+side out only in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a shirt of
+dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under which the ends of a
+breech-clout of cloth, blanket stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore
+leggins of dressed antelope hide with scalp-locks fringing the seams,
+and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. They had necklaces of the
+teeth or claws of wild beasts, and each carried a fire-bag, a quiver,
+and a brightly painted shield, giving up the quiver and shield when guns
+came into use.
+
+The Indians who came to trade were admitted to the store precisely as
+voters are to the polls under the Australian system--one by one. They
+had to leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, each Indian had
+to surrender his knife before he got his tin cup.
+
+[Illustration: WOOD INDIANS COME TO TRADE]
+
+The company made great use of the Iroquois, and considered them the best
+boatmen in Canada. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company,
+employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific Ocean by way of the
+Peace and Fraser rivers, and when the greatest of Hudson Bay
+executives, Sir George Simpson, travelled, Iroquois always propelled
+him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian employes--a blue,
+gray, or blanket capote, very loose, and reaching below the knee, with a
+red worsted belt around the waist, a cotton shirt, no trousers, but
+artfully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, and moccasins over
+blanket socks. In winter they wore buckskin coats lined with flannel,
+and mittens were given to them. We have seen how the half-breeds were
+dressed. They were long employed at women's work in the forts, at making
+clothing and at mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer-skin
+coats, etc., were made by them. They were also the washer-women.
+
+Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old days, or thought he did.
+He had a wife and servants and babies, and when a visitor came, which
+was not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, he entertained
+like a lord. At first the factors used to send to London, to the head
+office, for a wife, to be added to the annual consignment of goods, and
+there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys for the sweethearts
+they left there. But in time the rule came to be that they married
+Indian squaws. In doing this, not even the first among them acted
+blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent companions of the Northwest
+and X. Y. companies began the custom, and the French _voyageurs_ and
+_coureurs du bois_ had mated with Indian women before there was a Hudson
+Bay Company. These rough and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of
+half-breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early day to
+settle near the trading-posts. Sometimes they established what might be
+called villages, but were really close imitations of Indian camps,
+composed of a cluster of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a swarm
+of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee was the fireplace, beneath
+the flue formed by the open top of the habitation, and around it were
+the beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable copper
+kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or moss bags, the women and
+dogs, the gun and paddle, and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging
+overhead in the smoke. This has not changed to-day; indeed, very little
+that I shall speak of has altered in the true or far fur country. The
+camps exist yet. They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more
+dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder to get; that is
+all.
+
+[Illustration: A VOYAGEUR OR CANOE-MAN OF GREAT SLAVE LAKE]
+
+The Europeans saw that these women were docile, or were kept in order
+easily by floggings with the tent poles; that they were faithful and
+industrious, as a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing--from
+their point of view, of course. Therefore it came to pass that these
+were the most frequent alliances in and out of the posts in all that
+country. The consequences of this custom were so peculiar and important
+that I must ask leave to pause and consider them. In Canada we see that
+the white man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother in the
+truest sense. The old _coureurs_ of Norman and Breton stock, loving a
+wild, free life, and in complete sympathy with the Indian, bought or
+took the squaws to wife, learned the Indian dialects, and shared their
+food and adventures with the tribes. As more and more entered the
+wilderness, and at last came to be supported, in camps and at posts and
+as _voyageurs_, by the competing fur companies, there grew up a class of
+half-breeds who spoke English and French, married Indians, and were as
+much at home with the savages as with the whites. From this stock the
+Hudson Bay men have had a better choice of wives for more than a
+century. But when these "breeds" were turbulent and murderous--first in
+the attacks on Selkirk's colony, and next during the Riel rebellion--the
+Indians remained quiet. They defined their position when, in 1819, they
+were tempted with great bribes to massacre the Red River colonists.
+"No," said they; "the colonists are our friends." The men who sought to
+excite them to murder were the officers of the Northwest Company, who
+bought furs of them, to be sure, but the colonists had shared with the
+Indians in poverty and plenty, giving now and taking then. All were
+alike to the red men--friends, white men, and of the race that had taken
+so many of their women to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to
+tell them what was being planned against them, and not from that day to
+this has an Indian band taken the war-path against the Canadians. I have
+read General Custer's theory that the United States had to do with
+meat-eating Indians, whereas the Canadian tribes are largely
+fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 references to the better Indian
+policy of Canada; but I can see no difference in the two policies, and
+between the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that Canada had the
+Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other fierce tribes of buffalo-hunters. It
+is in the slow, close-growing acquaintance between the two races, and in
+the just policy of the Hudson Bay men towards the Indians, that I see
+the reason for Canada's enviable experience with her red men.
+
+[Illustration: IN A STIFF CURRENT]
+
+But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble with the Indians in recent
+years, and one serious affair grew out of the relations between the
+company's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette even among
+savages, and this was ignored up at old Fort St. Johns, on the Peace
+River, with the result that the Indians slaughtered the people there and
+burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that region, and after
+they had massacred the men in charge, they met a boat-load of white men
+coming up the river with goods. To them they turned their guns also, and
+only four escaped. It was up in that country likewise--just this side
+of the Rocky Mountains, where the plains begin to be forested--that a
+silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and said to him,
+"Before you come back to this post again, your wife and child will be
+dead." He spoke hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose
+happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked into the fort the
+next spring and shot the clerk without a word.
+
+To-day the posts are little village-like collections of buildings,
+usually showing white against a green background in the prettiest way
+imaginable; for, as a rule, they cluster on the lower bank of a river,
+or the lower near shore of a lake. There are not clerks enough in most
+of them to render a clerks' house necessary, for at the little posts
+half-breeds are seen to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule,
+there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house and the factor's
+house, the canoe-house and the stable, with a barn where gardening is
+done, as is often the case when soil and climate permit. Often the
+fur-house and store are combined, the furs being laid in the upper story
+over the shop. There is always a flag-staff, of course. This and the
+flag, with the letters "H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunters'
+saying that the initials stood for "Here before Christ," because, no
+matter how far away from the frontier a man might go, in regions he
+fancied no white man had been, that flag and those letters stared him in
+the face. You will often find that the factor, rid of all the ancient
+timidity that called for "palisadoes and swivels," lives on the high
+upper bank above the store. The usual half-breed or Indian village is
+seldom farther than a couple of miles away, on the same water. The
+factor is still, as he always has been, responsible only to himself for
+the discipline and management of his post, and therefore among the
+factories we will find all sorts of homes--homes where a piano and the
+magazines are prized, and daughters educated abroad shed the lustre of
+refinement upon their surroundings, homes where no woman rules, and
+homes of the French half-breed type, which we shall see is a very
+different mould from that of the two sorts of British half-breed that
+are numerous. There never was a rule by which to gauge a post. In one
+you found religion valued and missionaries welcomed, while in others
+there never was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum met the rum of
+the free-traders, and in others no rum was bartered away. To-day, in
+this latter respect, the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be given
+or sold to the red man.
+
+When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hidden away in forest,
+mountain chain, or plain, or arctic barren, seeing the same very few
+faces year in and year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine once
+a year when the winter's furs are brought in, and once a year when the
+mail-packet arrives--when one thinks of their isolation, and lack of
+most of those influences which we in our walks prize the highest, the
+reason for their choosing that company's service seems almost
+mysterious. Yet they will tell you there is a fascination in it. This
+could be understood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians were
+concerned, for they inherited the liking; and, after all, though most of
+them are only laborers, no other laborers are so free, and none spice
+life with so much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men of
+ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy responsible positions,
+and at better salaries. However, from the outset the rule has been that
+they have become as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and
+sailors always have of theirs. They have usually retired from it
+reluctantly, and some, having gone home to Europe, have begged leave to
+return.
+
+The company has always been managed upon something like a military
+basis. Perhaps the original necessity for forts and men trained to the
+use of arms suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with the rest.
+The lowest rank in the service is that of the laborer, who may happen to
+fish or hunt at times, but is employed--or enlisted, as the fact is, for
+a term of years--to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a porter or gardener,
+and labor generally about the post. The interpreter was usually a
+promoted laborer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians and whites
+alike, met each other half-way in the matter of language. The highest
+non-commissioned rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large
+posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small outposts, and we read
+that they were "on terms of equality with gentlemen." To-day the service
+has lost these fine points, and the laborers and commissioned officers
+are sharply separated. The so-called "gentleman" begins as a prentice
+clerk, and after a few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to
+the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through the grades of chief
+trader, factor, and chief factor, to the office of chief commissioner,
+or resident American manager, chosen by the London board, and having
+full powers delegated to him. A clerk--or "clark," as the rank is
+called--may never touch a pen. He may be a trader. Then again he may be
+truly an accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, and that
+entitles him to a minimum guarantee, with a conditional extra income
+based on the profits of the fur trade. Men get promotions through the
+chief commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather than
+seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are salaried for a term of
+years, the original pension fund and system having been broken up.
+
+Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the company, made his way
+to the highest post from the place of a prentice clerk. He came from
+Scotland as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to be sent
+to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as much out of both the world
+and contact with the heart of the company as it is possible to be. The
+military system was felt in that instance; but every man who accepts a
+commission engages to hold himself in readiness to go cheerfully to the
+north pole, or anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Charlotte
+Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's parts no obstacle is more
+than a temporary impediment. Though he stayed something like seventeen
+years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there was work to do, and
+in his own time he read and studied voraciously. When the Riel
+rebellion--the first one--disturbed the country's peace, he appeared on
+the scene as commissioner for the Government. Next he became chief
+commissioner for the Hudson Bay Company. After a time he resigned that
+office to go on the board in London, and thence he stepped easily to the
+governorship. His parents, whose home was in Morayshire, Scotland, gave
+him at his birth, in 1821, not only a constitution of iron, but that
+shrewdness which is only Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable
+fore-sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex situations as to
+amaze his associates.
+
+[Illustration: VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE]
+
+Of course his career is almost as singular as his gifts, and the
+governorship can scarcely be said to be the goal of the general
+ambition, for it has been most apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary
+promotion in the company is very slow, and it follows that most men live
+out their existence between the rank of clerk and that of chief factor.
+There are 200 central posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the
+officers are continually travelling from one to another, some in their
+districts, and the chief or supervising ones over vast reaches of
+country. In winter, when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a
+rule, and it has been nothing for a man to trudge 1000 miles in that way
+on a winter's journey. Roderick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the
+world up in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable explorer,
+and made most of his journeys on snow-shoes. He explored the Peel, the
+Liard, and the Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went far
+within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the most northerly post of
+the company. By the regular packet from Calgary, near our border, to the
+northernmost post is a 3000-mile journey. Macfarlane was fond of the
+study of ornithology, and classified and catalogued all the birds that
+reach the frozen regions.
+
+I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hudson Bay who reads his
+daily newspaper every morning with his coffee--but of course such an
+instance is a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set of the
+London _Times_ sent to him by each winter's packet, and each morning the
+paper of that date in the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his
+servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the press, and spread
+by the factor's plate. Thus he gets for half an hour each day a taste of
+his old habit and life at home.
+
+There was another factor who developed artistic capacity, and spent his
+leisure at drawing and painting. He did so well that he ventured many
+sketches for the illustrated papers of London, some of which were
+published.
+
+The half-breed has developed with the age and growth of Canada. There
+are now half-breeds and half-breeds, and some of them are titled, and
+others hold high official places. It occurred to an English lord not
+long ago, while he was being entertained in a Government house in one of
+the parts of newer Canada, to inquire of his host, "What are these
+half-breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one looks like." His
+host took the nobleman's breath away by his reply. "I am one," said he.
+There is no one who has travelled much in western Canada who has not now
+and then been entertained in homes where either the man or woman of the
+household was of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a high
+degree of refinement and the most polished manners. Usually one needs
+the information that such persons possess such blood. After that the
+peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the subject of such
+gossip attest the truthfulness of the assertion. There is no rule for
+measuring the character and quality of this plastic, receptive, and
+often very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one may say
+broadly that the social position and attainments of these people have
+been greatly influenced by the nationality of their fathers. For
+instance, the French _habitants_ and woodsmen far, far too often sank to
+the level of their wives when they married Indian women. Light-hearted,
+careless, unambitious, and drifting to the wilderness because of the
+absence of restraint there; illiterate, of coarse origin, fond of
+whiskey and gambling--they threw off superiority to the Indian, and
+evaded responsibility and concern in home management. Of course this is
+not a rule, but a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and English
+forced their wives up to their own standards. Their own home training,
+respect for more than the forms of religion, their love of home and of a
+permanent patch of ground of their own--all these had their effect, and
+that has been to rear half-breed children in proud and comfortable
+homes, to send them to mix with the children of cultivated persons in
+old communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition and cultivation
+for an equal start in the journey of life. Possessing such foundation
+for it, the equality has happily never been denied to them in Canada.
+
+[Illustration: VOYAGEURS IN CAMP FOR THE NIGHT]
+
+To-day the service is very little more inviting than in the olden time.
+The loneliness and removal from the touch of civilization remain
+throughout a vast region; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe remain;
+the dangers of flood and frost are undiminished. Unfortunately, among
+the changes made by time, one is that which robs the present factor's
+surroundings of a great part of that which was most picturesque. Of all
+the prettinesses of the Indian costuming one sees now only a trace here
+and there in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and tepee, and in
+some only the moccasin, remain. The birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe
+are the main reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been
+impressed into parts of the service, and most of the descendants of the
+old-time _voyageur_ preserve only his worsted belt, his knife, and his
+cap and moccasins at the utmost. In places the _engage_ has become a
+mere deck-hand. His scarlet paddle has rotted away; he no longer awakens
+the echoes of forest or canyon with _chansons_ that died in the throats
+of a generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of intertribal war
+and of a precarious foothold among fierce and turbulent bands have
+nearly vanished; but there was a spice in them that added to the
+fascination of the service.
+
+The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of the Hudson Bay
+outfit. One does not need to go very deep into western Canada to meet
+with them. As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on Lake
+Superior, the only roads into the north are the rivers and lakes,
+traversed by canoes in summer and sleds in winter. The dogs are of a
+peculiar breed, and are called "huskies"--undoubtedly a corruption of
+the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer resemblance to the wolf than
+any of our domesticated dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that
+scavenger of the wilderness in their nature as well as their looks.
+To-day their females, if tied and left in the forest, will often attest
+companionship with its denizens by bringing forth litters of wolfish
+progeny. Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with whom the
+experiment is tried, for the wolves will be apt to bring food to them as
+long as they are thus neglected by man. They are often as large as the
+ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are shorter, and even more
+hairy, and the hair along their necks, from their shoulders to their
+skulls, stands erect in a thick, bristling mass. They have the long
+snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves, and their cry is a
+yelp rather than a bark. Like wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at
+sunrise and at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful animals,
+setting their own numbers against one, and they will kill cows, or even
+children, if they get the chance. They are disciplined only when at
+work, and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and industrious
+as to plainly show that though their nature is savage and wolfish, they
+could be reclaimed by domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them
+are. As it is, in their packs, their battles among themselves are
+terrible, and they are dangerous when loose. In some districts it is the
+custom to turn them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes,
+leaving them to hunger or feast according as the supply of dead fish
+thrown upon the shore is small or plentiful. When they are kept in dog
+quarters they are simply penned up and fed during the summer, so that
+the savage side of their nature gets full play during long periods. Fish
+is their principal diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their
+winter food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a wolf or an
+Indian, a "husky" gets along without food when there is not any, and
+will eat his own weight of it when it is plenty.
+
+A typical dog-sled is very like a toboggan. It is formed of two thin
+pieces of oak or birch lashed together with buckskin thongs and turned
+up high in front. It is usually about nine feet in length by sixteen
+inches wide. A leather cord is run along the outer edges for fastening
+whatever may be put upon the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are
+harnessed to such sleds, but the usual number is four. Traces, collars,
+and backbands form the harness, and the dogs are hitched one before the
+other. Very often the collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells,
+and sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with beads, tassels,
+fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore-goer, is always the best in the
+team. The dog next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is
+named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful animals are treated
+harshly, if not brutally. It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who
+cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three
+profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever
+has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself,
+as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian
+obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the
+driver, or mock-passenger, runs behind the dogs. The main function of
+the sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent-covers,
+blankets, food, and the like. The men run along with or behind the dogs,
+on snow-shoes, and when the dogs make better time than horses are able
+to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over daily distances of
+from 20 to 35 miles, according to the condition of the ice or snow, and
+that many a journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this way, and
+some of 2000 miles, the test of human endurance is as great as that of
+canine grit.
+
+Men travelling "light," with extra sleds for the freight, and men on
+short journeys often ride in the sleds, which in such cases are fitted
+up as "carioles" for the purpose. I have heard an unauthenticated
+account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove themselves, disciplining
+refractory or lazy dogs by simply pulling them in beside or over the
+dash-board, and holding them down by the neck while they thrashed them.
+A story is told of a worthy bishop who complained of the slow progress
+his sled was making, and was told that it was useless to complain, as
+the dogs would not work unless they were roundly and incessantly cursed.
+After a time the bishop gave his driver absolution for the profanity
+needed for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth sped over the
+snow at a gallop, every stroke of the half-breed's long and cruel whip
+being sent home with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times with
+peltings with sharp-edged bits of ice. Kane, the explorer, made an
+average of 57 miles a day behind these shaggy little brutes. Milton and
+Cheadle, in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 140 miles
+in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of Rupert's Land told me he had
+covered 20 miles in a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day,
+without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fatigue. The best time
+is made on hard snow and ice, of course, and when the conditions suit,
+the drivers whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs more
+easily. In view of what they do, it is no wonder that many of the
+Northern Indians, upon first seeing horses, named them simply "big dog."
+But to me the performances of the drivers are the more wonderful. It was
+a white youth, son of a factor, who ran behind the bishop's dogs in
+the spurt of 40 miles by daylight that I mention. The men who do such
+work explain that the "lope" of the dogs is peculiarly suited to the
+dog-trot of a human being.
+
+[Illustration: "HUSKIE" DOGS ON THE FROZEN HIGHWAY]
+
+A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or of a chief factor
+racing through a great district, will now be intelligible. If he is
+riding, he fancies that princes and lords would envy him could they see
+his luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of the best pattern--a
+little suggestive of a burial casket, to be sure, in its shape, but
+gaudily painted, and so full of soft warm furs that the man within is
+enveloped like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Perhaps there are Russian bells
+on the collars of the dogs, and their harness is "Frenchified" with
+bead-work and tassels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp and
+invigorating, and before him the lake or stream over which he rides is a
+sheet of virgin snow--not nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot
+love nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful ermine fringed and
+embroidered with dark evergreen, and that in turn flecked at every point
+with snow, as if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with his
+driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping
+over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle
+the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by
+the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If
+silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of
+foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer
+hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To
+him these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegraphers, and as
+important as stock quotations to the pallid men of Wall Street.
+
+Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. Time was that his
+predecessors would have stopped to discuss the situation and its
+dangers, for the sight of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and
+the question came, were these friendly or fierce? But now the sled
+hurries on. It is only an Indian or half-breed hunter minding his traps,
+of which he may have a sufficient number to give him a circuit of ten or
+more miles away from and back to his lodge or village. He is approached
+and hailed by the driver, and with some pretty name very often--one that
+may mean in English "hawk flying across the sky when the sun is
+setting," or "blazing sun," or whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a
+village is the next object of interest; not a village in our sense of
+the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peeping above the brush
+beside the water, the eye being led to them by the signs of slothful
+disorder close by--the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty
+tattered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam bath, such as
+Indians resort to when tired or sick or uncommonly dirty, the worn-out
+snow-shoes hung on a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat
+here and there. A dog rushes down to the water-side barking
+furiously--an Indian dog of the currish type of paupers' dogs the world
+around--and this stirs the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who
+are addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by some poetic names,
+albeit poetic license is sometimes strained to form names not at all
+pretty to polite senses, "All Stomach" being that of one dusky princess,
+and serving to indicate the lengths to which poesy may lead the
+untrammelled mind.
+
+The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be journeying in the West and
+be a lover of nature, heaven send that his face be turned towards the
+sunset! Then, be the sky anything but completely storm-draped, he will
+see a sight so glorious that eloquence becomes a naked suppliant for
+alms beyond the gift of language when set to describe it. A few clouds
+are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on celestial dyes,
+and one sees, above the vanished sun, a blaze of golden yellow thinned
+into a tone that is luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and
+breasts of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards the zenith into a
+rose tone that has body at the base, but pales at top into a mere blush.
+This I have seen night after night on the lakes and the plains and on
+the mountains. But as the glory of it beckons the traveller ever towards
+itself, so the farther he follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be
+his reward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters are more and
+more enriched, until, at the Pacific, even San Francisco's shabby
+sand-hills stir poetry and reverence in the soul by their borrowed
+magnificence.
+
+The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, and while the "breed"
+falls to at the laborious but quick and simple work, the factor either
+helps or smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would have set his
+man to bobbing for jack-fish or lake trout, or would have stopped a
+while to bag a partridge, or might have bought whatever of this sort the
+trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one, this meal would be
+of bacon and bread or dried meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as
+would bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem ethereal and
+delicious in the wilderness, particularly if made half an inch thick,
+saturated with grease, well browned, and eaten while at the temperature
+and consistency of molten lava.
+
+[Illustration: THE FACTOR'S FANCY TOBOGGAN]
+
+The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is cleared for a fire,
+wood and brush are cut, and the deft laborer starts the flame in a
+tent-like pyramid of kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This
+tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has constructed and led up
+to a conflagration of logs as thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with
+a backlog and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the hottest part
+to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The dogs will have needed
+disciplining long before this, and if the driver be like many of his
+kind, and works himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one
+and send his teeth together through its hide after he has beaten it
+until he is tired. The point of order having thus been raised and
+carried, the shaggy, often handsome, animals will be minded to forget
+their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on their haunches, with
+their intelligent faces towards the fire, will watch the cooking
+intently. The pocket-knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to
+be the only table implement in use at the meal. Canada had reached the
+possession of seigniorial mansions of great character before any
+other knife was brought to table, though the ladies used costly blades
+set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the axe ranks the knife in
+the wilderness, but he who has a knife can make and furnish his own
+table--and his house also, for that matter.
+
+Supper over, and a glass of grog having been put down, with water from
+the hole in the ice whence the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten,
+the night's rest is begun. The method for this varies. As good men as
+ever walked have asked nothing more cosey than a snug warm trough in the
+snow and a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will call for a
+shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the furs out of the sled for his
+covering. If nicer yet, he may order a low hollow chamber of three sides
+of banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks and cross-poles,
+with canvas thrown over it. Every man to his quality, of course, and
+that of the servant calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as
+soundly as if he were Santa Claus and only stirred once a year. Then
+will fall upon what seems the whole world the mighty hush of the
+wilderness, broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the cry of a
+wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on the lake, or the snoring of
+the men and dogs. But if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The
+magic shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up over that
+North country, sending its shifting lights weaving across the firmament
+with a tremulous brilliancy and energy we in this country get but pale
+hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flashing and palpitating
+incessantly, the rose-tinted waves and luminous white bars leap across
+the sky or dart up and down it in manner so fantastic and so forceful,
+even despite their shadowy thinness, that travellers have fancied
+themselves deaf to some seraphic sound that they believed such commotion
+must produce.
+
+An incident of this typical journey I am describing would, at more than
+one season, be a meeting with some band of Indians going to a post with
+furs for barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their quarry in
+the spring and early summer, some may come at any time. The procession
+may be only that of a family or of the two or more families that live
+together or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one group, is certain
+to be stalking ahead, carrying nothing but his gun. Then come the women,
+laden like pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the furs and
+drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog may bear a balanced load on his
+back, but the squaw is certain to have a spine-warping burden of meat
+and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever personal property of
+any and every sort she and her liege lord own. Children who can walk
+have to do so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and a half or
+two years old is on her back, while a newborn infant, swaddled in
+blanket stuff, and bagged and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the
+load on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a band of these
+pauperized savages form it would be difficult to imagine. On the plains
+they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women
+and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two running loose, the
+lordly men riding free, straggling curs a plenty, babies in arms, babies
+swaddled, and toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at its
+exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, distorted pots and
+pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, in all eloquently suggestive of an
+eviction in the slums of a great city.
+
+I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out of the necessity of
+truth-telling. The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the
+subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find
+him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race
+have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the
+continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is,
+as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and
+turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from
+freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make
+us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile; taught, aye, forced
+to beg, mocked at by a religion he cannot understand, from the mouths of
+men who apparently will not understand him; debauched with rum,
+despoiled by the lust of white men in every form that lust can take. Ah,
+it is a sickening story. Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern
+wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who have been in such
+pitiful stress for food and covering that the Hudson Bay Company has
+kept them alive with advances of provisions and blankets winter after
+winter. They are Indians who in their strength never gave the
+Government the concern it now fails to show for their weakness. The
+great fur company has thus added generosity to its long career of just
+dealing with these poor adult children; for it is a fact that though the
+company has made what profit it might, it has not, in a century at
+least, cheated the Indians, or made false representations to them, or
+lost their good-will and respect by any feature of its policy towards
+them. Its relation to them has been paternal, and they owe none of their
+degradation to it.
+
+[Illustration: HALT OF A YORK BOAT BRIGADE FOR THE NIGHT]
+
+I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the posts. There are two
+other arrivals of great consequence--the coming of the supplies, and of
+the winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions and trade goods
+being put up in bales in the great mercantile storehouse of the company
+in Winnipeg--a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue ladies' bazaar
+and one of our wholesale grocers' shops--and I have seen such weights of
+canned vegetables and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other
+luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is good living on high
+days and holidays if not always. The stores are packed in parcels
+averaging sixty pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them
+convenient for handling on the portages--"for packing them over the
+carries," as our traders used to say. It is in following these supplies
+that we become most keenly sensible of the changes time has wrought in
+the methods of the company. The day was, away back in the era of the
+Northwest Company, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa
+from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy _voyageurs_ in picturesque
+costumes, wielding scarlet paddles, and stirring the forests with their
+happy songs. The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the centre of
+the trade moved from old Fort William, close to where Port Arthur now is
+on Lake Superior, up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. Then
+the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, more picturesque than
+ever, and manning the great York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept
+in a long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, and thence by a
+marvellous water route all the way to the Rockies and the Arctic,
+sending off freight for side districts at fixed points along the course.
+The main factories on this line, maintained as such for more than a
+century, bear names whose very mention stirs the blood of one who knows
+the romantic, picturesque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old
+company when it was the landlord (in part, and in part monopolist) of a
+territory that cut into our Northwest and Alaska, and swept from
+Labrador to Vancouver Island. Northward and westward, by waters emptying
+into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats worked through a region
+embroidered with sheets and ways of water. The system that was next
+entered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends and bulges with
+lakes and straits like a ribbon all curved and knotted. Thus, at a great
+portage, the divide was reached and crossed; and so the waters flowing
+to the Arctic, and one--the Peace River--rising beyond the Rockies, were
+met and travelled. This was the way and the method until after the
+Canadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winnipeg route is of
+subordinate importance, and feeds only the region near the west side of
+Hudson Bay. The Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in
+Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton railroad. From Edmonton the
+goods go by cart to Athabasca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat,
+which takes them northward until some rapids are met, and avoided by the
+use of a singular combination of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow
+progress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and thence they
+follow the Athabasca, through Athabasca Lake, and so on up to a second
+rapids, on the Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts carry
+them across a sixteen-mile portage to a screw steamer, which finishes
+the 3000-mile journey to the North. Of course the shorter branch routes,
+distributing the goods on either side of the main track, are still
+traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in the old way, but with shabby
+accessories of costume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come to a
+portage, produce their tomplines, and "pack" the goods to the next
+waterway. By means of these "lines" they carry great weights, resting on
+their backs, but supported from their skulls, over which the strong
+straps are passed.
+
+The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in the depth of the
+season, goes to all the posts by dog train. The letters and papers are
+packed in great boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind which
+the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes and pelting and cursing
+the dogs. A more direct course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has
+usually been followed by this packet; but it is thought that the route
+_via_ Edmonton and Athabasca Landing will serve better yet, so that
+another change may be made. This is a small exhibition as compared with
+the brigade that takes the supplies, or those others that come plashing
+down the streams and across the country with the furs every year. But
+only fancy how eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for! It
+is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of all North America. It
+cuts a tiny trail, and here and there lesser black dots move off from it
+to cut still slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and
+lesser posts; but we may be sure that if human eyes could see so far,
+all those of the white men in all that vast tangled system of trading
+centres would be watching the little caravan, until at last each pair
+fell upon the expected missives from the throbbing world this side of
+the border.
+
+
+
+
+  VIII
+
+  CANADA'S EL DORADO
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There is on this continent a territory of imperial extent which is one
+of the Canadian sisterhood of States, and yet of which small account has
+been taken by those who discuss either the most advantageous relations
+of trade or that closer intimacy so often referred to as a possibility
+in the future of our country and its northern neighbor. Although British
+Columbia is advancing in rank among the provinces of the Dominion by
+reason of its abundant natural resources, it is not remarkable that we
+read and hear little concerning it. The people in it are few, and the
+knowledge of it is even less in proportion. It is but partially
+explored, and for what can be learned of it one must catch up
+information piecemeal from blue-books, the pamphlets of scientists, from
+tales of adventure, and from the less trustworthy literature composed to
+attract travellers and settlers.
+
+It would severely strain the slender facts to make a sizable pamphlet of
+the history of British Columbia. A wandering and imaginative Greek
+called Juan de Fuca told his people that he had discovered a passage
+from ocean to ocean between this continent and a great island in the
+Pacific. Sent there to seize and fortify it, he disappeared--at least
+from history. This was about 1592. In 1778 Captain Cook roughly surveyed
+the coast, and in 1792 Captain Vancouver, who as a boy had been with
+Cook on two voyages, examined the sound between the island and the
+main-land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the main water
+system of the interior. He gave to the strait at the entrance the
+nickname of the Greek, and in the following year received the transfer
+of authority over the country from the Spanish commissioner Bodega of
+Quadra, then established there. The two put aside false modesty, and
+named the great island "the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." At the time
+the English sailor was there it chanced that he met that hardy old
+homespun baronet Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross
+the continent, making the astonishing journey in a canoe manned by
+Iroquois Indians. The main-land became known as New Caledonia. It took
+its present name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, got its
+name from the ship _Columbia_, of Boston, Captain Gray, which entered
+its mouth in 1792, long after the Spaniards had known the stream and
+called it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The region passed into
+the hands of the fur-traders. Vancouver Island became a crown colony in
+1849, and British Columbia followed in 1858. They were united in 1866,
+and joined the Canadian confederation in 1871. Three years later the
+province exceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in the value of
+its exports, and also showed an excess of exports over imports. It has a
+Lieutenant-governor and Legislative assembly, and is represented at
+Ottawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its people have been more
+closely related to ours in business than those of any other province,
+and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the
+larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as
+a holiday.
+
+British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the
+combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the
+Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is
+larger than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire joined
+together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to
+be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery
+halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this
+necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be,
+and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the
+popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its
+present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and
+yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies
+beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of latitude
+has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent
+civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American
+Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes
+despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of
+perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the
+same parallels of latitude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we
+shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two shores
+of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California
+from Massachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world
+we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as
+England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the
+interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New
+England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching
+claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.
+
+British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and averages 400 miles in
+width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast
+earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In
+fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges,
+the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the
+Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose
+upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the
+main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of
+the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our
+North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700
+miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the
+Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser
+agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral
+possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the
+case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the
+territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered
+marketable.
+
+The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies,
+but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth.
+Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors,"
+have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity.
+But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high
+plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow
+fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the
+Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following
+the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows
+less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by
+valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and
+watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing
+land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the
+north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts
+of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the
+Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of
+the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the Pacific,
+lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets,
+which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islands, and receive the
+discharge of almost as many streams and rivers--a wondrously beautiful
+region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish
+exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of
+mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are
+parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have
+found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of
+metals, whose value industry has not yet established.
+
+It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white
+inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It
+is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field
+and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the
+miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the
+immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild,
+and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours
+the traveller sees, across the majestic canyon of the Fraser, the
+neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of
+the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony,
+for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the
+Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles
+away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian
+village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most
+part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys
+covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascades, turbulent streams,
+and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now
+he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an
+Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a
+canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily
+west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.
+
+But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power
+to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part,
+lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-grass valleys in the south he would
+see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man.
+A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country,
+where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been
+taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and
+there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash
+of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of
+an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale,
+and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of
+Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of
+larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near
+Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo
+(lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close
+together, he would see more than half the population of the province.
+
+[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA]
+
+Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the
+territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay
+Company, where the endless forests and multitudinous lakes and streams
+are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost
+one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only
+true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the
+fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either
+washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that
+penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but
+companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then,
+hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else
+there is a can for between-times!
+
+A very strange sight that my supposititious traveller would pause long
+to look at would be the herds of wild horses that defy the Queen, her
+laws, and her subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands of
+them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin country, on either side
+of the Fraser, north of Washington State. They were originally of good
+stock, but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable grass, and
+spoil every horse turned out to graze. The newspapers aver that the
+Government must soon be called upon to devise means for ridding the
+valleys of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which promise
+well for future stock-raising and agricultural operations. There are
+plenty such. The Nicola Valley has been settled twenty years, and there
+are many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good land, but rather
+high for grain, and needs irrigation. The snowfall varies greatly in all
+these valleys, but in ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well
+with four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, a valley eight
+to ten miles wide, ranching began a quarter of a century ago, during the
+gold excitement. The "cow-men" raise grain for themselves there. This
+valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Valley is lower, and is only from
+two to five miles wide, but both are of similar character, of very great
+length, and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. The greater
+part of the Okanagon does not need irrigating. A beautiful country is
+the Kettle River region, along the boundary between the Columbia and the
+Okanagon. It is narrow, but flat and smooth on the bottom, and the land
+is very fine. Bunch-grass covers the hills around it for a distance of
+from four hundred to five hundred feet, and there timber begins. It is
+only in occasional years that the Kettle River Valley needs water. In
+the Spallumcheen Valley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer,
+and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use there. These are
+mere notes of a few among almost innumerable valleys that are clothed
+with bunch-grass, and that often possess the characteristics of
+beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, possibly in most of
+them. I have notes of the successful growth of peaches, and of the
+growth of almond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, both
+in the Okanagon country.
+
+The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to those who are fond of
+the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, prairie-chicken, and partridges abound
+in them. In all probability there is no similar extent of country that
+equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, in the winter of 1888,
+between six and eight tons of deer-skins were shipped by local traders,
+the result of legitimate hunting. But the forests and mountains are as
+they were when the white man first saw them, and though the beaver and
+sea-otter, the marten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the
+rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest of the game is
+most plentiful. On the Rockies and on the Coast Range the mountain-goat,
+most difficult of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant
+yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so common, but the
+hunting thereof is usually successful if good guides are obtained. The
+cougar, the grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and
+brown bears are very numerous. Elk are going the way of the
+"big-horn"--are preceding that creature, in fact. Pheasants (imported),
+grouse, quail, and water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the
+river and lake fishing is such as is not approached in any other part of
+the Dominion. The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big
+game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone
+the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province
+is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth
+will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing
+eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances,
+their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere
+can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, king of all the beasts,
+which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest,
+and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom
+turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that
+gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the
+others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is
+the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.
+
+From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained
+the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station.
+It makes a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and is as
+follows: Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, badger, foxes (silver,
+cross, and red), fishers, martens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea
+or land), panther, raccoon, wolves (black, gray, and coyote),
+black-tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of an ox, and
+found on the hills of Vancouver Island), caribou or reindeer, hares,
+mountain-goat, big-horn (or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies),
+wood-buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from the bison,
+but larger), geese, swans, and duck.
+
+The British Columbian Indians are of such unprepossessing appearance
+that one hears with comparative equanimity of their numbering only
+20,000 in all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing principally to the
+vices of their women. They are, for the most part, canoe Indians, in the
+interior as well as on the coast, and they are (as one might suppose a
+nation of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those limbs small
+and inclined to bow. On the other hand, their exercise with the paddle
+has given them a disproportionate development of their shoulders and
+chests, so that, being too large above and too small below, their
+appearance is very peculiar. They are fish-eaters the year around; and
+though some, like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike and
+turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in the interior. It was
+the meat-eating Indian who made war a vocation and self-torture a
+dissipation. The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These short
+squat British Columbian natives are very dark-skinned, and have
+physiognomies so different from those of the Indians east of the Rockies
+that the study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into
+extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a contention which I
+prefer to avoid. It is not guessing to say that their high check-bones
+and flat faces make them resemble the Chinese. That is true to such a
+degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, and meeting alternate
+Chinamen and Siwash, it is not always easy to say which is which, unless
+one proceeds upon the assumption that if a man looks clean he is apt to
+be a Chinaman, whereas if he is dirty and ragged he is most likely to be
+a Siwash.
+
+You will find that seven in ten among the more intelligent British
+Columbians conclude these Indians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese
+current is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted Japanese junks
+to these shores. When the first traders visited the neighborhood of the
+mouth of the Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the vestiges
+of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of a junk was met with, and
+12,000 pounds of this wax was found on her. Whalers are said to have
+frequently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in the eastern
+Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 1834 remnants of a junk with
+three Japanese and a cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of
+Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should excuse even a
+rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a reflection upon the Japanese, for
+these Indians are so far from pretty that all who see them agree with
+Captain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that "if they are of the
+Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians change their type the better."
+
+[Illustration: THE TSCHUMMUM, OR TOOL USED IN MAKING CANOES]
+
+The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their dugouts do not always
+come off second best in racing with the boats of white men. With a
+primitive yet ingeniously made tool, like an adze, in the construction
+of which a blade is tied fast to a bent handle of bone, these natives
+laboriously pick out the heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer
+sides into the form of a boat. When the log is properly hollowed, they
+fill it with water, and then drop in stones which they have heated in a
+fire. Thus they steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and fit
+in the crossbars which keep it strong and preserve its shape. These
+dugouts are sometimes sixty feet long, and are used for whaling and long
+voyages in rough seas. They are capable of carrying tons of the salmon
+or oolachan or herring, of which these people, who live as their fathers
+did, catch sufficient in a few days for their maintenance throughout a
+whole year. One gets an idea of the swarms of fish that infest those
+waters by the knowledge that before nets were used the herring and the
+oolachan, or candle-fish were swept into these boats by an implement
+formed by studding a ten-foot pole with spikes or nails. This was swept
+among the fish in the water, and the boats were speedily filled with the
+creatures that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea-otter, otter,
+beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou or moose) were and still are
+the chief resources of most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and
+the peltry to the Hudson Bay Company, and ate what parts or surplus they
+did not sell. Now they work in the canneries or fish for them in summer,
+and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, while they still
+fish and sell furs, and while some are yet as their fathers were, nearly
+all the coast Indians are semi-civilized. They have at least the white
+man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have churches; they live in
+houses; they work in canneries. What little there was that was
+picturesque about them has vanished only a few degrees faster than their
+own extinction as a pure race, and they are now a lot of longshoremen.
+What Mr. Duncan did for them in Metlakahtla--especially in housing the
+families separately--has not been arrived at even in the reservation at
+Victoria, where one may still see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses
+they prefer, ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight
+families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for which no one can
+hold the white man responsible.
+
+They are a tractable people, and take as kindly to the rudiments of
+civilization, to work, and to co-operation with the whites as the plains
+Indian does to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically but not
+mentally inferior to the plainsman. They carve bowls and spoons of stone
+and bone, and their heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however
+grotesque they may be. They still make them, but they oftener carve
+little ones for white people, just as they make more silver bracelets
+for sale than for wear. They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar
+bark into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In a word,
+they were more prone to work at the outset than most Indians, so that
+the present longshore career of most of them is not greatly to be
+wondered at.
+
+To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or
+journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the
+mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes
+impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the
+majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded
+food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not
+well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since
+then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them
+terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scenery which all
+travellers in the province remember. From the railroad they may be seen
+along the Fraser, each grave apparently having a shed built over it, and
+a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. They had various burial
+customs, but a majority buried their dead in this way, with
+queerly-carved or painted sticks above them, where the cross now
+testifies to the work at the "missions." Some Indians marked a man's
+burial-place with his canoe and his gun; some still box their dead and
+leave the boxes on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. Among
+the southern tribes a man's horse was often killed, and its skin decked
+the man's grave; while in the far north it was the custom among the
+Stickeens to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when he died.
+The Indians along the Skeena River cremated their dead, and sometimes
+hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem pole. The Hydahs, the fierce
+natives of certain of the islands, have given up cremation, but they
+used to believe that if they did not burn a man's body their enemies
+would make charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, and
+monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was due to the difference in
+the worldly wealth of the Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and
+the woodsmen could only afford one apiece.
+
+To return to their canoes, which most distinguish them. When a dugout is
+hollowed and steamed, a prow and stern are added of separate wood. The
+prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies the boat. It is in
+form like the breast, neck, and bill of a bird, but the head is intended
+to represent that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth is cut
+into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are painted on the sides; bands
+of gay paint are put upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat
+is then painted red or black, with an ornamental line of another color
+along the edge or gunwale. The sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat,
+and propel it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, with
+their fierce heads uplifted before their long, slender bodies, appear
+like great serpents or nondescript marine monsters, yet they are pretty
+and graceful withal. While still holding aloof from the ethnologists'
+contention, I yet may add that a bookseller in Victoria came into the
+possession of a packet of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in
+the interior of China, and on my first visit to the province, nearly
+four years ago, I found, in looking through these views, several Chinese
+boats which were strangely and remarkably like the dugouts of the
+provincial Indians. They were too small in the pictures for it to be
+possible to decide whether they were built up or dug out, but in general
+they were of the same external appearance, and each one bore the
+upraised animal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I could see one
+block away from the bookseller's shop in Victoria. But such are not the
+canoes used by the Indians of the interior. From the Kootenay near our
+border to the Cassiar in the far north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be
+the general native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a sort of
+scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dugouts made of cotton-wood logs.
+They are narrower than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the
+birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, and fit for the
+most dangerous and deft work in threading the rapids which everywhere
+cut up the navigation of the streams of the province into separated
+reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes upon a journey in this
+province, likens these canoes to horse-troughs, but those I saw in the
+Kootenay country were of the shape of those cigars that are pointed at
+both ends.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST OF THE SALMON RUN, FRASER RIVER]
+
+Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or China or Japan, I do not
+know. My only quest for special information of that character proved
+disappointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is said to have
+studied such matters more deeply and to more purpose than all the
+others, but those who referred me to him cautioned me that he was
+eccentric.
+
+"You don't know where these Indians came from, eh?" the _savant_ replied
+to my first question. "Do you know how oyster-shells got on top of the
+Rocky Mountains? You don't, eh? Well, I know a woman who went to a
+dentist's yesterday to have eighteen teeth pulled. Do you know why women
+prefer artificial teeth to those which God has given them? You don't,
+eh? Why, man, you don't know anything."
+
+While we were--or he was--conversing, a laboring-man who carried a
+sickle came to the open door, and was asked what he wanted.
+
+"I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he.
+
+"Thistles?" said the _savant_, disturbed at the interruption. "---- the
+thistles! We are talking about Indians."
+
+Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had left the subject of
+thistles uppermost in the _savant's_ mind, and the conversation took so
+erratic a turn that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard into
+_Tristram Shandy_.
+
+"About thistles," said the _savant_, laying a gentle hand upon my knee.
+"Do you know that they are the Scotchmen's totems? Many years ago a
+Scotchman, sundered from his native land, must needs set up his totem, a
+thistle, here in this country; and now, sir, the thistle is such a curse
+that I am haled up twice a year and fined for having them in my yard."
+
+But nearly enough has been here said of the native population. Though
+the Indians boast dozens of tribal names, and almost every island on the
+coast and village in the interior seems the home of a separate tribe,
+they will be found much alike--dirty, greasy, sore-eyed, short-legged,
+and with their unkempt hair cut squarely off, as if a pot had been
+upturned over it to guide the operation. The British Columbians do not
+bother about their tribal divisions, but use the old traders' Chinook
+terms, and call every male a "siwash" and every woman a "klootchman."
+
+Since the highest Canadian authority upon the subject predicts that the
+northern half of the Cordilleran ranges will admit of as high a
+metalliferous development as that of the southern half in our Pacific
+States, it is important to review what has been done in mining, and what
+is thought of the future of that industry in the province. It may almost
+be said that the history of gold-mining there is the history of British
+Columbia. Victoria, the capital, was a Hudson Bay post established in
+1843, and Vancouver, Queen Charlotte's, and the other islands, as well
+as the main-land, were of interest to only a few white men as parts of a
+great fur-trading field with a small Indian population. The first nugget
+of gold was found at what is now called Gold Harbor, on the west coast
+of the Queen Charlotte Islands, by an Indian woman, in 1851. A part of
+it, weighing four or five ounces, was taken by the Indians to Fort
+Simpson and sold. The Hudson Bay Company, which has done a little in
+every line of business in its day, sent a brigantine to the spot, and
+found a quartz vein traceable eighty feet, and yielding a high
+percentage of gold. Blasting was begun, and the vessel was loaded with
+ore; but she was lost on the return voyage. An American vessel, ashore
+at Esquimault, near Victoria, was purchased, renamed the _Recovery_, and
+sent to Gold Harbor with thirty miners, who worked the vein until the
+vessel was loaded and sent to England. News of the mine travelled, and
+in another year a small fleet of vessels came up from San Francisco; but
+the supply was seen to be very limited, and after $20,000 in all had
+been taken out, the field was abandoned.
+
+In 1855 gold was found by a Hudson Bay Company's employe at Fort
+Colville, now in Washington State, near the boundary. Some Thompson
+River (B. C.) Indians who went to Walla Walla spread a report there
+that gold, like that discovered at Colville, was to be found in the
+valley of the Thompson. A party of Canadians and half-breeds went to the
+region referred to, and found placers nine miles above the mouth of the
+river. By 1858 the news and the authentication of it stirred the miners
+of California, and an astonishing invasion of the virgin province began.
+It is said that in the spring of 1858 more than twenty thousand persons
+reached Victoria from San Francisco by sea, distending the little
+fur-trading post of a few hundred inhabitants into what would even now
+be called a considerable city; a city of canvas, however. Simultaneously
+a third as many miners made their way to the new province on land. But
+the land was covered with mountains and dense forests, the only route to
+its interior for them was the violent, almost boiling, Fraser River, and
+there was nothing on which the lives of this horde of men could be
+sustained. By the end of the year out of nearly thirty thousand
+adventurers only a tenth part remained. Those who did stay worked the
+river bars of the lower Fraser until in five months they had shipped
+from Victoria more than half a million dollars' worth of gold. From a
+historical point of view it is a peculiar coincidence that in 1859, when
+the attention of the world was thus first attracted to this new country,
+the charter of the Hudson Bay Company expired, and the territory passed
+from its control to become like any other crown colony.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN SALMON-FISHING IN THE THRASHER]
+
+In 1860 the gold-miners, seeking the source of the "flour" gold they
+found in such abundance in the bed of the river, pursued their search
+into the heart and almost the centre of that forbidding and unbroken
+territory. The Quesnel River became the seat of their operations. Two
+years later came another extraordinary immigration. This was not
+surprising, for 1500 miners had in one year (1861) taken out $2,000,000
+in gold-dust from certain creeks in what is called the Cariboo District,
+and one can imagine (if one does not remember) what fabulous tales were
+based upon this fact. The second stampede was of persons from all over
+the world, but chiefly from England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
+After that there were new "finds" almost every year, and the miners
+worked gradually northward until, about 1874, they had travelled through
+the province, in at one end and out at the other, and were working the
+tributaries of the Yukon River in the north, beyond the 60th parallel.
+Mr. Dawson estimates that the total yield of gold between 1858 and 1888
+was $54,108,804; the average number of miners employed each year was
+2775, and the average earnings per man per year were $622.
+
+In his report, published by order of Parliament, Mr. Dawson says that
+while gold is so generally distributed over the province that scarcely a
+stream of any importance fails to show at least "colors" of the metal,
+the principal discoveries clearly indicate that the most important
+mining districts are in the systems of mountains and high plateaus lying
+to the south-west of the Rocky Mountains and parallel in direction with
+them.
+
+This mountain system next to and south-west of the Rockies is called,
+for convenience, the Gold Range, but it comprises a complex belt "of
+several more or less distinct and partly overlapping ranges"--the
+Purcell, Selkirk, and Columbia ranges in the south, and in the north the
+Cariboo, Omenica, and Cassiar ranges. "This series or system
+constitutes the most important metalliferous belt of the province. The
+richest gold fields are closely related to it, and discoveries of
+metalliferous lodes are reported in abundance from all parts of it which
+have been explored. The deposits already made known are very varied in
+character, including highly argentiferous galenas and other silver ores
+and auriferous quartz veins." This same authority asserts that the Gold
+Range is continued by the Cabinet, Coeur d'Alene, and Bitter Root
+mountains in our country. While there is no single well-developed gold
+field as in California, the extent of territory of a character to
+occasion a hopeful search for gold is greater in the province than in
+California. The average man of business to whom visitors speak of the
+mining prospects of the province is apt to declare that all that has
+been lacking is the discovery of one grand mine and the enlistment of
+capital (from the United States, they generally say) to work it. Mr.
+Dawson speaks to the same point, and incidentally accounts for the
+retarded development in his statement that one noteworthy difference
+between practically the entire area of the province and that of the
+Pacific States has been occasioned by the spread and movement of ice
+over the province during the glacial period. This produced changes in
+the distribution of surface materials and directions of drainage,
+concealed beneath "drifts" the indications to which prospectors farther
+south are used to trust, and by other means obscured the outcrops of
+veins which would otherwise be well marked. The dense woods, the broken
+navigation of the rivers, in detached reaches, the distance from the
+coast of the richest districts, and the cost of labor supplies and
+machinery--all these are additional and weighty reasons for the slowness
+of development. But this was true of the past and is not of the present,
+at least so far as southern British Columbia is concerned. Railroads are
+reaching up into it from our country and down from the transcontinental
+Canadian Railway, and capital, both Canadian and American, is rapidly
+swelling an already heavy investment in many new and promising mines.
+Here it is silver-mining that is achieving importance.
+
+[Illustration: GOING TO THE POTLATCH--BIG CANOE, NORTH-WEST COAST]
+
+Other ores are found in the province. The iron which has been located or
+worked is principally on the islands--Queen Charlotte, Vancouver,
+Texada, and the Walker group. Most of the ores are magnetites, and that
+which alone has been worked--on Texada Island--is of excellent quality.
+The output of copper from the province is likely soon to become
+considerable. Masses of it have been found from time to time in various
+parts of the province--in the Vancouver series of islands, on the
+main-land coast, and in the interior. Its constant and rich association
+with silver shows lead to be abundant in the country, but it needs the
+development of transport facilities to give it value. Platinum is more
+likely to attain importance as a product in this than in any other part
+of North America. On the coast the granites are of such quality and
+occur in such abundance as to lead to the belief that their quarrying
+will one day be an important source of income, and there are marbles,
+sandstones, and ornamental stones of which the same may be said.
+
+One of the most valuable products of the province is coal, the essential
+in which our Pacific coast States are the poorest. The white man's
+attention was first attracted to this coal in 1835 by some Indians who
+brought lumps of it from Vancouver Island to the Hudson Bay post on the
+main-land, at Milbank Sound. The _Beaver_, the first steamship that
+stirred the waters of the Pacific, reached the province in 1836, and
+used coal that was found in outcroppings on the island beach. Thirteen
+years later the great trading company brought out a Scotch coal-miner to
+look into the character and extent of the coal find, and he was followed
+by other miners and the necessary apparatus for prosecuting the inquiry.
+In the mean time the present chief source of supply at Nanaimo, seventy
+miles from Victoria and about opposite Vancouver, was discovered, and in
+1852 mining was begun in earnest. From the very outset the chief market
+for the coal was found to be San Francisco.
+
+The original mines are now owned by the Vancouver Coal-mining and Land
+Company. Near them are the Wellington Mines, which began to be worked in
+1871. Both have continued in active operation from their foundation, and
+with a constantly and rapidly growing output. A third source of supply
+has very recently been established with local and American capital in
+what is called the Comox District, back of Baynes Sound, farther north
+than Nanaimo, on the eastern side of Vancouver Island. These new works
+are called the Union Mines, and, if the predictions of my informants
+prove true, will produce an output equal to that of the older Nanaimo
+collieries combined. In 1884 the coal shipped from Nanaimo amounted to
+1000 tons for every day of the year, and in 1889 the total shipment had
+reached 500,000 tons. As to the character of the coal, I quote again
+from Mr. Dawson's report on the minerals of British Columbia, published
+by the Dominion Government:
+
+    "Rocks of cretaceous age are developed over a considerable area
+    in British Columbia, often in very great thickness, and fuels
+    occur in them in important quantity in at least two distinct
+    stages, of which the lower and older includes the coal measures
+    of the Queen Charlotte Islands and those of Quatsino Sound on
+    Vancouver Island, with those of Crow Nest Pass in the Rocky
+    Mountains; the upper, the coal measures of Nanaimo and Comox,
+    and probably also those of Suquash and other localities. The
+    lower rocks hold both anthracite and bituminous coal in the
+    Queen Charlotte Islands, but elsewhere contain bituminous coal
+    only. The upper have so far been found to yield bituminous coal
+    only. The fuels of the tertiary rocks are, generally speaking,
+    lignites, but include also various fuels intermediate between
+    these and true coals, which in a few places become true
+    bituminous coals."
+
+It is thought to be more than likely that the Comox District may prove
+far more productive than the Nanaimo region. It is estimated that
+productive measures underlie at least 300 square miles in the Comox
+District, exclusive of what may extend beyond the shore. The Nanaimo
+area is estimated at 200 square miles, and the product is no better
+than, if it equals, that of the Comox District.
+
+Specimens of good coal have been found on the main-land in the region of
+the upper Skeena River, on the British Columbia water-shed of the
+Rockies near Crow Nest Pass, and in the country adjacent to the Peace
+River in the eastern part of the province. Anthracite which compares
+favorably with that of Pennsylvania has been found at Cowgitz, Queen
+Charlotte Islands. In 1871 a mining company began work upon this coal,
+but abandoned it, owing to difficulties that were encountered. It is now
+believed that these miners did not prove the product to be of an
+unprofitable character, and that farther exploration is fully justified
+by what is known of the field. Of inferior forms of coal there is every
+indication of an abundance on the main-land of the province. "The
+tertiary or Laramie coal measures of Puget Sound and Bellingham Bay" (in
+the United States) "are continuous north of the international boundary,
+and must underlie nearly 18,000 square miles of the low country about
+the estuary of the Fraser and in the lower part of its valley." It is
+quite possible, since the better coals of Nanaimo and Comox are in
+demand in the San Francisco market, even at their high price and with
+the duty added, that these lignite fields may be worked for local
+consumption.
+
+Already the value of the fish caught in the British Columbian waters is
+estimated at $5,000,000 a year, and yet the industry is rather at its
+birth than in its infancy. All the waters in and near the province
+fairly swarm with fish. The rivers teem with them, the straits and
+fiords and gulfs abound with them, the ocean beyond is freighted with an
+incalculable weight of living food, which must soon be distributed among
+the homes of the civilized world. The principal varieties of fish are
+the salmon, cod, shad, white-fish, bass, flounder, skate, sole, halibut,
+sturgeon, oolachan, herring, trout, haddock, smelts, anchovies,
+dog-fish, perch, sardines, oysters, crayfish shrimps, crabs, and
+mussels. Of other denizens of the water, the whale, sea-otter, and seal
+prove rich prey for those who search for them.
+
+[Illustration: THE SALMON CACHE]
+
+The main salmon rivers are the Fraser, Skeena, and Nasse rivers, but the
+fish also swarm in the inlets into which smaller streams empty. The
+Nimkish, on Vancouver Island, is also a salmon stream. Setting aside
+the stories of water so thick with salmon that a man might walk upon
+their backs, as well as that tale of the stage-coach which was upset by
+salmon banking themselves against it when it was crossing a
+fording-place, there still exist absolutely trustworthy accounts of
+swarms which at their height cause the largest rivers to seem alive with
+these fish. In such cases the ripple of their back fins frets the entire
+surface of the stream. I have seen photographs that show the fish in
+incredible numbers, side by side, like logs in a raft, and I have the
+word of a responsible man for the statement that he has gotten all the
+salmon needed for a small camp, day after day, by walking to the edge of
+a river and jerking the fish out with a common poker.
+
+There are about sixteen canneries on the Fraser, six on the Skeena,
+three on the Nasse, and three scattered in other waters--River Inlet and
+Alert Bay. The total canning in 1889 was 414,294 cases, each of 48
+one-pound tins. The fish are sold to Europe, Australia, and eastern
+Canada. The American market takes the Columbia River Salmon. Around
+$1,000,000 is invested in the vessels, nets, trawls, canneries,
+oil-factories, and freezing and salting stations used in this industry
+in British Columbia, and about 5500 men are employed. "There is no
+difficulty in catching the fish," says a local historian, "for in some
+streams they are so crowded that they can readily be picked out of the
+water by hand." However, gill-nets are found to be preferable, and the
+fish are caught in these, which are stretched across the streams, and
+handled by men in flat-bottomed boats. The fish are loaded into scows
+and transported to the canneries, usually frame structures built upon
+piles close to the shores of the rivers. In the canneries the tins are
+made, and, as a rule, saw-mills near by produce the wood for the
+manufacture of the packing-cases. The fish are cleaned, rid of their
+heads and tails, and then chopped up and loaded into the tins by
+Chinamen and Indian women. The tins are then boiled, soldered, tested,
+packed, and shipped away. The industry is rapidly extending, and fresh
+salmon are now being shipped, frozen, to the markets of eastern America
+and England. My figures for 1889 (obtained from the Victoria _Times_)
+are in all likelihood under the mark for the season of 1890. The coast
+is made ragged by inlets, and into nearly every one a watercourse
+empties. All the larger streams are the haven of salmon in the spawning
+season, and in time the principal ones will be the bases of canning
+operations.
+
+The Dominion Government has founded a salmon hatchery on the Fraser,
+above New Westminster. It is under the supervision of Thomas Mowat,
+Inspector of Fisheries, and millions of small fry are now annually
+turned into the great river. Whether the unexampled run of 1889 was in
+any part due to this process cannot be said, but certainly the salmon
+are not diminishing in numbers. It was feared that the refuse from the
+canneries would injure the "runs" of live fish, but it is now believed
+that there is a profit to be derived from treating the refuse for oil
+and guano, so that it is more likely to be saved than thrown back into
+the streams in the near future.
+
+The oolachan, or candle-fish, is a valuable product of these waters,
+chiefly of the Fraser and Nasse rivers. They are said to be delicious
+when fresh, smoked, or salted, and I have it on the authority of the
+little pamphlet "British Columbia," handed me by a government official,
+that "their oil is considered superior to cod-liver oil, or any other
+fish-oil known." It is said that this oil is whitish, and of the
+consistency of thin lard. It is used as food by the natives, and is an
+article of barter between the coast Indians and the tribes of the
+interior. There is so much of it in a candle-fish of ordinary size that
+when one of them is dried, it will burn like a candle. It is the custom
+of the natives on the coast to catch the fish in immense numbers in
+purse-nets. They then boil them in iron-bottomed bins, straining the
+product in willow baskets, and running the oil into cedar boxes holding
+fifteen gallons each. The Nasse River candle-fish are the best. They
+begin running in March, and continue to come by the million for a period
+of several weeks.
+
+Codfish are supposed to be very plentiful, and to frequent extensive
+banks at sea, but these shoals have not been explored or charted by the
+Government, and private enterprise will not attempt the work. Similar
+banks off the Alaska coast are already the resorts of California
+fishermen, who drive a prosperous trade in salting large catches there.
+The skil, or black cod, formerly known as the "coal-fish," is a splendid
+deep-water product. These cod weigh from eight to twenty pounds, and
+used to be caught by the Indians with hook and line. Already white men
+are driving the Indians out by superior methods. Trawls of 300 hooks are
+used, and the fish are found to be plentiful, especially off the west
+coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The fish is described as superior
+to the cod of Newfoundland in both oil and meat. The general market is
+not yet accustomed to it, but such a ready sale is found for what are
+caught that the number of vessels engaged in this fishing increases year
+by year. It is evident that the catch of skil will soon be an important
+source of revenue to the province.
+
+[Illustration: AN IDEAL OF THE COAST]
+
+Herring are said to be plentiful, but no fleet is yet fitted out for
+them. Halibut are numerous and common. They are often of very great
+size. Sturgeon are found in the Fraser, whither they chase the salmon.
+One weighing 1400 pounds was exhibited in Victoria a few years ago, and
+those that weigh more than half as much are not unfrequently captured.
+The following is a report of the yield and value of the fisheries of the
+province for 1889:
+
+  +--------------------------+------------+-----------------+
+  |      Kind of Fish.       | Quantity.  |    Value.       |
+  |                          |            |                 |
+  +--------------------------+------------+-----------------+
+  |                          |            |                 |
+  | Salmon in cans      lbs. | 20,122,128 |  $2,414,655 36  |
+  |    "   fresh        lbs. |  2,187,000 |     218,700 00  |
+  |    "   salted      bbls. |      3,749 |      37,460 00  |
+  |    "   smoked       lbs. |     12,900 |       2,580 00  |
+  | Sturgeon, fresh          |    318,600 |      15,930 00  |
+  | Halibut,    "            |    605,050 |      30,152 50  |
+  | Herring,    "            |    190,000 |       9,500 00  |
+  |   "    smoked            |     33,000 |       3,300 00  |
+  | Oolachans,  "            |     82,500 |       8,250 00  |
+  |   "     fresh            |      6,700 |       1,340 00  |
+  |   "    salted      bbls. |        380 |       3,800 00  |
+  | Trout, fresh        lbs. |     14,025 |       1,402 50  |
+  | Fish, assorted           |    322,725 |      16,136 25  |
+  | Smelts, fresh            |     52,100 |       3,126 00  |
+  | Rock cod                 |     39,250 |       1,962 50  |
+  | Skil, salted       bbls. |      1,560 |      18,720 00  |
+  | Fooshqua, fresh          |    268,350 |      13,417 50  |
+  | Fur seal-skins       No. |     33,570 |     335,700 00  |
+  | Hair    "             "  |      7,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Sea-otter skins       "  |        115 |      11,500 00  |
+  | Fish oil           gals. |    141,420 |      70,710 00  |
+  | Oysters            sacks |      3,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Clams                 "  |      3,500 |       6,125 00  |
+  | Mussels               "  |        250 |         500 00  |
+  | Crabs                No. |    175,000 |       5,250 00  |
+  | Abelones           boxes |        100 |         500 00  |
+  | Isinglass           lbs. |      5,000 |       1,750 00  |
+  +--------------------------+------------+                 |
+  | Estimated fish consumed in province   |     100,000 00  |
+  | Shrimps, prawns, etc.                 |       5,000 00  |
+  | Estimated consumption by Indians--    |                 |
+  |    Salmon                             |   2,732,500 00  |
+  |    Halibut                            |     190,000 00  |
+  |    Sturgeon and other fish            |     260,000 00  |
+  |    Fish oils                          |      75,000 00  |
+  +---------------------------------------+-----------------+
+  |        Approximate yield              |  $6,605,467 61  |
+  +---------------------------------------+-----------------+
+
+When it is considered that this is the showing of one of the newest
+communities on the continent, numbering only the population of what we
+would call a small city, suffering for want of capital and nearly all
+that capital brings with it, there is no longer occasion for surprise
+at the provincial boast that they possess far more extensive and richer
+fishing-fields than any on the Atlantic coast. Time and enterprise will
+surely test this assertion, but it is already evident that there is a
+vast revenue to be wrested from those waters.
+
+I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded $236,000 in 1887, and
+may yet be decided to be exclusively an American and not a British
+Columbian source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the extraction of
+oil from herrings and from dog-fish and whales, all of which are small
+channels of revenue.
+
+I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a civil engineer of
+high repute who has explored the greater part of southern British
+Columbia--at least in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and
+mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not to place too high a
+value upon the printed matter put forth in praise of any new country, I
+was especially pleased to obtain this man's practical impressions
+concerning the store and quality and kinds of timber the province
+contains. He said, not to use his own words, that timber is found all
+the way back from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most
+plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of those mountains and on
+the west slope of the Coast Range. The very largest trees are between
+the Coast Range and the coast. The country between the Rocky Mountains
+and the Coast Range is dry by comparison with the parts where the timber
+thrives best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between the
+Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tamaracks reach six and eight
+feet in diameter, and attain a height of 200 feet not infrequently.
+There are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though not very
+many) in this region. There is very little leaf-wood, and no hard-wood.
+Maples are found, to be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than
+trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves westward the same
+timber prevails, but it grows shorter and smaller until the low coast
+country is reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests occur
+again. This coast region is largely a flat country, but there are not
+many miles of it.
+
+To this rule, as here laid down, there are some notable exceptions. One
+particular tree, called there the bull-pine--it is the pine of Lake
+Superior and the East--grows to great size all over the province. It is
+a common thing to find the trunks of these trees measuring four feet in
+diameter, or nearly thirteen feet in circumference. It is not especially
+valuable for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short-lived when
+exposed to the weather, and is therefore not in demand for railroad
+work; but for the ordinary uses to which builders put timber it answers
+very well.
+
+[Illustration: THE POTLATCH]
+
+There is a maple which attains great size at the coast, and which, when
+dressed, closely resembles bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the
+vine-maple. The trees are found with a diameter of two-and-a-half to
+three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above forty or fifty feet. The
+wood is crooked. It runs very badly. This, of course, is what gives it
+the beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner or later,
+find a ready market for it. There is plenty of hemlock in the province,
+but it is nothing like so large as that which is found in the East, and
+its bark is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for nothing
+larger than railway ties, and the trees grow in such inaccessible
+places, half-way up the mountains, that it is for the most part
+unprofitable to handle it. The red cedars--the wood of which is consumed
+in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes--are also small. On the
+other hand, the white cedar reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet
+of thickness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraordinary to
+find these cedars reaching 200 feet above the ground, and one was cut at
+Port Moody, in clearing the way for the railroad, that had a length of
+310 feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the wood of these
+trees is what is consumed, and usually the trunks, hollow and empty,
+stand grimly in their places after the fire would otherwise have been
+forgotten. These great tubes are often of such dimensions that men put
+windows and doors in them and use them for dwellings. In the valleys are
+immense numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood species, white
+birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but they are not estimated in the
+forest wealth of the province, because of the expense that marketing
+them would entail.
+
+This fact concerning the small timber indicates at once the primitive
+character of the country, and the vast wealth it possesses in what might
+be called heroic timber--that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way
+to market even from out that unopened wilderness. It was the opinion of
+the engineer to whom I have referred that timber land which does not
+attract the second glance of a prospector in British Columbia would be
+considered of the first importance in Maine and New Brunswick. To put it
+in another way, river-side timber land which in those countries would
+fetch fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British Columbia
+would not be taken up. In time it may be cut, undoubtedly it must be,
+when new railroads alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even
+roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests.
+
+A great business is carried on in the shipment of ninety-foot and
+one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to the great car-building works of
+our country and Canada. They are used in the massive bottom frames of
+palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reached in this industry
+is not in the size of the logs, but in the capacities of the saw-mills,
+and in the possibilities of transportation by rail, for these logs
+require three cars to support their length. Except for the valleys, the
+whole vast country is enormously rich in this timber, the mountains
+(excepting the Rockies) being clothed with it from their bases to their
+tops. Vancouver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. It
+bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it has the oak-tree,
+and does not possess the tamarack. The Vancouver Island oaks do not
+exceed two or two-and-a-half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir (our
+Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, especially on the north
+end of the island. In the old offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at
+Vancouver are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across,
+showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was forty feet in
+circumference. Tens of thousands of these firs are from eight to ten
+feet in diameter at the bottom.
+
+Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, the wood of which
+is not very valuable; Englemann's spruce, which is very like white
+spruce, and is very abundant; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in
+diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow cypress;
+crab-apple, occurring as a small tree or shrub; western birch, common in
+the Columbia region; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Vancouver
+Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abundance and of large size in
+the Peace River and upper Fraser regions; dogwood, arbutus, and several
+minor trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance in various
+districts or all over the province are the following: hazel, red elder,
+willow, barberry, wild red cherry, blackberry, yellow plum,
+choke-cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, bearberry, currant, and snowberry,
+mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mulberry, and blueberry.
+
+I would have liked to write at length concerning the enterprising cities
+of the province, but, after all, they may be trusted to make themselves
+known. It is the region behind them which most interests mankind, and
+the Government has begun, none too promptly, a series of expeditions for
+exploiting it. As for the cities, the chief among them and the capital,
+Victoria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its business district
+wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive appearance, and its detached
+dwellings--all of frame, and of the distinctive type which marks the
+houses of the California towns--are surrounded by gardens. It has a
+beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few years it will have spread
+to Esquimault, now less than two miles distant. This is now the seat of
+a British admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose water is of
+a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At Esquimault are government
+offices, churches, schools, hotels, stores, a naval "canteen," and a
+dry-dock 450 feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its entrance.
+The electric street railroad of Victoria was extended to Esquimault in
+the autumn of 1890. Of the climate of Victoria Lord Lorne said, "It is
+softer and more constant than that of the south of England."
+
+Vancouver, the principal city of the main-land, is slightly smaller than
+Victoria, but did not begin to displace the forest until 1886. After
+that every house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it boasts a
+hotel comparable in most important respects with any in Canada, many
+noble business buildings of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches,
+a really great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a notable
+system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The Canadian Pacific Railway
+terminates here, and so does the line of steamers for China and Japan.
+The city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an arm of Burrard
+Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights, and shows no sign of halting its
+hitherto rapid growth. Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still
+smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more than naming.
+
+In the original settlements in that territory a peculiar institution
+occasioned gala times for the red men now and then. This was the
+"potlatch," a thing to us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is
+begotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its meaning. It is a
+feast and merrymaking at the expense of some man who has earned or saved
+what he deems considerable wealth, and who desires to distribute every
+iota of it at once in edibles and drinkables among the people of his
+tribe or village. He does this because he aspires to a chieftainship, or
+merely for the credit of a "potlatch"--a high distinction. Indians have
+been known to throw away such a sum of money that their "potlatch" has
+been given in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have been
+both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and ornaments have been
+distributed in addition to the feast.
+
+The custom has a new significance now. It is the white man who is to
+enjoy a greater than all previous potlatches in that region. The
+treasure has been garnered during the ages by time or nature or
+whatsoever you may call the host, and the province itself is offered as
+the feast.
+
+
+
+
+  IX
+
+  DAN DUNN'S OUTFIT
+
+
+At Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in British Columbia, a
+small white steamboat, built on the spot, and exposing a single great
+paddle-wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her still few
+trips through a wilderness that, but for her presence, would be as
+completely primitive as almost any in North America. Her route lay down
+the Columbia River a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles to a
+point called Sproat's Landing, where some rapids interrupt navigation.
+The main load upon the steamer's deck was of steel rails for a railroad
+that was building into a new mining region in what is called the
+Kootenay District, just north of our Washington and Idaho. The sister
+range to the Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the new
+highway, which would then connect the valley of the Columbia with the
+Kootenay River. There was a temptation beyond the mere chance to join
+the first throng that pushed open a gateway and began the breaking of a
+trail in a brand-new country. There was to be witnessed the propulsion
+of civilization beyond old confines by steam-power, and this required
+railroad building in the Rockies, where that science finds its most
+formidable problems. And around and through all that was being done
+pressed a new population, made up of many of the elements that produced
+our old-time border life, and gave birth to some of the most picturesque
+and exciting chapters in American History.
+
+It should be understood that here in the very heart of British Columbia
+only the watercourses have been travelled, and there was neither a
+settlement nor a house along the Columbia in that great reach of its
+valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific Railway, except at
+the landing at which this boat stopped.
+
+Over all the varying scene, as the boat ploughed along, hung a mighty
+silence; for almost the only life on the deep wooded sides of the
+mountains was that of stealthy game. At only two points were any human
+beings lodged, and these were wood-choppers who supplied the fuel for
+the steamer--a Chinaman in one place, and two or three white men farther
+on. In this part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens in two
+long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more than two miles wide and
+twenty to thirty miles in length. Their prodigious towering walls are
+densely wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. The forest
+growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance crowds it beyond the edge of
+the grand stream in the fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose
+roots are bedded in the soft mass of centuries of forest debris.
+
+Early in the journey the clerk of the steamer told me that wild animals
+were frequently seen crossing the river ahead of the vessel; bear, he
+said, and deer and elk and porcupine. When I left him to go to my
+state-room and dress for the rough journey ahead of me, he came to my
+door, calling in excited tones for me to come out on the deck. "There's
+a big bear ahead!" he cried, and as he spoke I saw the black head of the
+animal cleaving the quiet water close to the nearer shore. Presently
+Bruin's feet touched the bottom, and he bounded into the bush and
+disappeared.
+
+The scenery was superb all the day, but at sundown nature began to revel
+in a series of the most splendid and spectacular effects. For an hour a
+haze had clothed the more distant mountains as with a transparent veil,
+rendering the view dream-like and soft beyond description. But as the
+sun sank to the summit of the uplifted horizon it began to lavish the
+most intense colors upon all the objects in view. The snowy peaks turned
+to gaudy prisms as of crystal, the wooded summits became impurpled, the
+nearer hills turned a deep green, and the tranquil lake assumed a bright
+pea-color. Above all else, the sky was gorgeous. Around its western edge
+it took on a rose-red blush that blended at the zenith with a deep blue,
+in which were floating little clouds of amber and of flame-lit pearl.
+
+A moonless night soon closed around the boat, and in the morning we were
+at Sproat's Landing, a place two months old. The village consisted of a
+tiny cluster of frame-houses and tents perched on the edge of the steep
+bank of the Columbia. One building was the office and storehouse of the
+projected railroad, two others were general trading stores, one was the
+hotel, and the other habitations were mainly tents.
+
+I firmly believe there never was a hotel like the hostlery there. In a
+general way its design was an adaptation of the plan of a hen-coop.
+Possibly a box made of gridirons suggests more clearly the principle of
+its construction. It was two stories high, and contained about a baker's
+dozen of rooms, the main one being the bar-room, of course. After the
+framework had been finished, there was perhaps half enough "slab" lumber
+to sheathe the outside of the house, and this had been made to serve for
+exterior and interior walls, and the floors and ceilings besides. The
+consequence was that a flock of gigantic canaries might have been kept
+in it with propriety, but as a place of abode for human beings it
+compared closely with the Brooklyn Bridge.
+
+[Illustration: AN INDIAN CANOE ON THE COLUMBIA]
+
+They have in our West many very frail hotels that the people call
+"telephone houses," because a tenant can hear in every room whatever is
+spoken in any part of the building; but in this house one could stand
+in any room and see into all the others. A clergyman and his wife
+stopped in it on the night before I arrived, and the good woman stayed
+up until nearly daylight, pinning papers on the walls and laying them on
+the floor until she covered a corner in which to prepare for bed.
+
+I hired a room and stored my traps in it, but I slept in one of the
+engineers' tents, and met with a very comical adventure. The tent
+contained two cots, and a bench on which the engineer, who occupied one
+of the beds, had heaped his clothing. Supposing him to be asleep, I
+undressed quietly, blew out the candle, and popped into my bed. As I did
+so one pair of its legs broke down, and it naturally occurred to me, at
+almost the same instant, that the bench was of about the proper height
+to raise the fallen end of the cot to the right level.
+
+"Broke down, eh?" said my companion--a man, by-the-way, whose face I
+have never yet seen.
+
+"Yes," I replied. "Can I put your clothing on the floor and make use of
+that bench?"
+
+"Aye, that you can."
+
+So out of bed I leaped, put his apparel in a heap on the floor, and ran
+the bench under my bed. It proved to be a neat substitute for the broken
+legs, and I was quickly under the covers again and ready for sleep.
+
+The engineer's voice roused me.
+
+"That's what I call the beauty of a head-piece," he said. Presently he
+repeated the remark.
+
+"Are you speaking to me?" I asked.
+
+"Yes; I'm saying that's what I call the beauty of a head-piece. It's
+wonderful; and many's the day and night I'll think of it, if I live.
+What do I mean? Why, I mean that that is what makes you Americans such a
+great people--it's the beauty of having head-pieces on your shoulders.
+It's so easy to think quick if you've got something to think with. Here
+you are, and your bed breaks down. What would I do? Probably nothing.
+I'd think what a beastly scrape it was, and I'd keep on thinking till I
+went to sleep. What do you do? Why, as quick as a flash you says,
+'Hello, here's a go!' 'May I have the bench?' says you. 'Yes,' says I.
+Out of bed you go, and you clap the bench under the bed, and there you
+are, as right as a trivet. That's the beauty of a head-piece, and that's
+what makes America the wonderful country she is."
+
+Never was a more sincere compliment paid to my country, and I am glad I
+obtained it so easily.
+
+There was a barber pole in front of the house, set up by a "prospector"
+who had run out of funds (and everything else except hope), and who,
+like all his kind, had stopped to "make a few dollars" wherewith to
+outfit again and continue his search for gold. He noted the local need
+of a barber, and instantly became one by purchasing a razor on credit,
+and painting a pole while waiting for custom. He was a jocular fellow--a
+born New Yorker, by-the-way.
+
+"Don't shave me close," said I.
+
+"Close?" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest victim I've slashed yet if
+I get off any of your beard at all. How's the razor?"
+
+"All right."
+
+"Oh no, it ain't," said he; "you're setting your nerves to stand it,
+so's not to be called a tender-foot. I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend
+bar when I bumped up agin this place. If you could see the blood
+streaming down your face you'd faint."
+
+In spite of his self-depreciation, he performed as artistic and painless
+an operation as I ever sat through.
+
+While I was being shaved the loungers in the barber-shop entered into a
+conversation that revealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the
+deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen cackled out-of-doors,
+and the loungers fell to questioning one another as to which hen had
+laid an egg.
+
+"It must be the black one," said the barber.
+
+"Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky's cackle," said a more
+deliberate and careful speaker.
+
+"'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled un," ventured a third.
+
+"She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber.
+
+"Could it be the bantam?" another inquired.
+
+Thus they discussed with earnestness this most interesting event of the
+morning, until a young man darted into the room with his eyes lighted by
+excitement.
+
+"Say, Bill," said he, almost breathlessly, "that's the speckled hen
+a-cackling, by thunder! She's laid an egg, I guess."
+
+[Illustration: "YOU'RE SETTING YOUR NERVES TO STAND IT"]
+
+In Sproat's Landing we saw the nucleus of a railroad terminal point. The
+queer hotel was but little more peculiar than many of the people who
+gathered on the single street on pay-day to spend their hard-earned
+money upon a great deal of illicit whiskey and a few rude necessaries
+from the limited stock on sale in the stores. There never had been any
+grave disorder there, yet the floating population was as motley a
+collection of the riffraff of the border as one could well imagine, and
+there was only one policeman to enforce the law in a territory the size
+of Rhode Island. He was quite as remarkable in his way as any other
+development of that embryotic civilization. His name was Jack Kirkup,
+and all who knew him spoke of him as being physically the most superb
+example of manhood in the Dominion. Six feet and three inches in height,
+with the chest, neck, and limbs of a giant, his three hundred pounds of
+weight were so exactly his complement as to give him the symmetry of an
+Apollo. He was good-looking, with the beauty of a round-faced,
+good-natured boy, and his thick hair fell in a cluster of ringlets over
+his forehead and upon his neck. No knight of Arthur's circle can have
+been more picturesque a figure in the forest than this "Jack." He was as
+neat as a dandy. He wore high boots and corduroy knickerbockers, a
+flannel shirt and a sack-coat, and rode his big bay horse with the ease
+and grace of a Skobeleff. He smoked like a fire of green brush, but had
+never tasted liquor in his life. In a dozen years he had slept more
+frequently in the open air, upon pebble beds or in trenches in the snow,
+than upon ordinary bedding, and he exhibited, in his graceful movements,
+his sparkling eyes and ruddy cheeks, his massive frame and his
+imperturbable good-nature, a degree of health and vigor that would seem
+insolent to the average New Yorker. Now that the railroad was building,
+he kept ever on the trail, along what was called "the right of
+way"--going from camp to camp to "jump" whiskey peddlers and gamblers
+and to quell disorder--except on pay-day, once a month, when he stayed
+at Sproat's Landing.
+
+[Illustration: JACK KIRKUP, THE MOUNTAIN SHERIFF]
+
+The echoes of his fearless behavior and lively adventures rang in every
+gathering. The general tenor of the stories was to the effect that he
+usually gave one warning to evil-doers, and if they did not heed that he
+"cleaned them out." He carried a revolver, but never had used it. Even
+when the most notorious gambler on our border had crossed over into
+"Jack's" bailiwick the policeman depended upon his fists. He had met the
+gambler and had "advised" him to take the cars next day. The gambler, in
+reply, had suggested that both would get along more quietly if each
+minded his own affairs, whereupon Kirkup had said, "You hear me: take
+the cars out of here to-morrow." The little community (it was Donald, B.
+C., a very rough place at the time) held its breathing for twenty-four
+hours, and at the approach of train-time was on tiptoe with strained
+anxiety. At twenty minutes before the hour the policeman, amiable and
+easy-going as ever in appearance, began a tour of the houses. It was in
+a tavern that he found the gambler.
+
+"You must take the train," said he.
+
+"You can't make me," replied the gambler.
+
+There were no more words. In two minutes the giant was carrying the limp
+body of the ruffian to a wagon, in which he drove him to the jail. There
+he washed the blood off the gambler's face and tidied his collar and
+scarf. From there the couple walked to the cars, where they parted
+amicably.
+
+"I had to be a little rough," said Kirkup to the loungers at the
+station, "because he was armed like a pin-cushion, and I didn't want to
+have to kill him."
+
+We made the journey from Sproat's Landing to the Kootenay River upon a
+sorry quartet of pack-horses that were at other times employed to carry
+provisions and material to the construction camps. They were of the kind
+of horses known all over the West as "cayuses." The word is the name of
+a once notable tribe of Indians in what is now the State of Washington.
+To these Indians is credited the introduction of this small and peculiar
+breed of horses, but many persons in the West think the horses get the
+nickname because of a humorous fancy begotten of their wildness, and
+suggesting that they are only part horses and part coyotes. But all the
+wildness and the characteristic "bucking" had long since been "packed"
+out of these poor creatures, and they needed the whip frequently to urge
+them upon a slow progress. Kirkup was going his rounds, and accompanied
+us on our journey of less than twenty miles to the Kootenay River. On
+the way one saw every stage in the construction of a railway. The
+process of development was reversed as we travelled, because the work
+had been pushed well along where we started, and was but at its
+commencement where we ended our trip. At the landing half a mile or more
+of the railroad had been completed, even to the addition of a locomotive
+and two gondola cars. Beyond the little strip of rails was a long reach
+of graded road-bed, and so the progress of the work dwindled, until at
+last there was little more than the trail-cutters' path to mark what had
+been determined as the "right of way."
+
+For the sake of clearness, I will first explain the steps that are taken
+at the outset in building a railroad, rather than tell what parts of the
+undertaking we came upon in passing over the various "contracts" that
+were being worked in what appeared a confusing and hap-hazard disorder.
+I have mentioned that one of the houses at the landing was the railroad
+company's storehouse, and that near by were the tents of the surveyors
+or civil engineers. The road was to be a branch of the Canadian Pacific
+system, and these engineers were the first men sent into the country,
+with instructions to survey a line to the new mining region, into which
+men were pouring from the older parts of Canada and from our country. It
+was understood by them that they were to hit upon the most direct and at
+the same time the least expensive route for the railroad to take. They
+went to the scene of their labors by canoes, and carried tents,
+blankets, instruments, and what they called their "grub stakes," which
+is to say, their food. Then they travelled over the ground between their
+two terminal points, and back by another route, and back again by still
+another route, and so back and forth perhaps four and possibly six
+times. In that way alone were they enabled to select the line which
+offered the shortest length and the least obstacles in number and degree
+for the workmen who were to come after them.
+
+[Illustration: ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY]
+
+At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. Stewart, who is famous
+in his profession as the most tireless and intrepid exponent of its
+difficulties in the Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune to
+be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. It is his custom to
+start out with a blanket, some bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to
+be gone for weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have been a
+hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes and requirements, or one
+possessing in any higher degree the quality called endurance. He has
+spent years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding and exploring
+the various passes, the most direct and feasible routes to and from
+them, the valleys between the ranges, and the characteristics of each
+section of the country. In a vast country that has not otherwise been
+one-third explored he has made himself familiar with the full southern
+half. He has not known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen an
+apple growing upon a tree in many years. During his long and
+close-succeeding trips he has run the whole gamut of the adventures
+incident to the lives of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger,
+exposure, peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes from
+frost and storm and flood that Nature unvanquished visits upon those who
+first brave her depths. Such is the work and such are the men that
+figure in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building.
+
+Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone beyond a well-settled
+region can form a more or less just estimate of that which one of these
+professional pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I had
+several "tastes," as the Irish express it, of that very Kootenay Valley.
+I can say conscientiously that I never was in a wilder region. In going
+only a few yards from the railroad "right of way" the difficulties of an
+experienced pedestrianism like my own instantly became tremendous. There
+was a particularly choice spot for fishing at a distance of
+three-quarters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled the
+road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would have strengthened the
+_Pilgrim's Progress_ had he known of such conditions with which to
+surround his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion and unsteady
+bowlders no larger than a man's head the ground was all but covered.
+Among this wreckage trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks
+of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as dense as any I ever
+saw was formed of soft-wood saplings and bushes, so that it was next to
+impossible to move a yard in any direction. It was out of the question
+for anyone to see three yards ahead, and there was often no telling when
+a foot was put down whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon
+a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows here and there were a
+foot deep or were the mouths of fissures that reached to China. I fished
+too long one night, and was obliged to make that journey after dark.
+After ten minutes crowded with falls and false steps, the task seemed so
+hopelessly impossible that I could easily have been induced to turn back
+and risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide.
+
+It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural conditions which the
+railroad men were overcoming that the gradual steps of their progress
+became most interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, after
+the specifications have been drawn up and the contracts signed, are the
+"right-of-way" men. These are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at
+the heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for the road-bed.
+The trail-cutters are guided by the long line of stakes with which the
+engineers have marked the course the road is to take. The trail-men are
+sent out to cut what in general parlance would be called a path, over
+which supplies are to be thereafter carried to the workmen's camps. The
+path they cut must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage along
+it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load will sometimes consist of
+the framework of a kitchen range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a
+five-foot swath through the forest is a trail of serviceable width. The
+trail-cutters fell the trees to right and left, and drag the fallen
+trunks out of the path as they go along, travelling and working between
+a mile and two miles each day, and moving their tents and provisions on
+pack-horses as they advance. They keep reasonably close to the projected
+line of the railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding one
+that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller ravines. Great distortions,
+such as hills or gullies, which the railroad must pass through or over,
+the trail men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose tastes
+are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock at almost any angle, like
+flies of larger growth. This trail, when finished, leads from the
+company's storehouse all along the line, and from that storehouse, on
+the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and tools and clothing,
+powder, dynamite, tents, and living utensils, to be used by the workmen,
+their bosses, and the engineers.
+
+Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the "right-of-way" men. These
+are axemen also. All that they do is to cut the trees down and drag them
+out of the way.
+
+It is when the axemen have cleared the right of way that the first view
+of the railroad in embryo is obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is
+a wide avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little like any
+forest drive that we are accustomed to in the realms of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: FALLING MONARCHS]
+
+Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards the production of an
+even and level thoroughfare, without protuberance or depression, and in
+the course of our ride to Dan Dunn's camp on the Kootenay we saw the
+rapidly developing railroad in each phase of its evolution from the
+rough surface of the wilderness. Now we would come upon a long reach of
+finished road-bed on comparatively level ground all ready for the rails,
+with carpenters at work in little gullies which they were spanning with
+timber trestles. Next we would see a battalion of men and dump-carts
+cutting into a hill of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring
+valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and symmetrical wall of
+earth-work, with sloping sides and level top, to bridge the gap between
+hill and hill. Again, we came upon places where men ran towards us
+shouting that a "blast" was to be fired. Here was what was called
+"rockwork," where some granite rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was
+being blown to flinders with dynamite.
+
+And so, through all these scenes upon the pack-trail, we came at last to
+a white camp of tents hidden in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest,
+and nestling beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water flecked
+with the foam from an eternal battle with a myriad of sunken rocks. It
+was Dunn's headquarters--the construction camp. Evening was falling, and
+the men were clambering down the hill-side trails from their work. There
+was no order in the disposition of the tents, nor had the forest been
+prepared for them. Their white sides rose here and there wherever there
+was a space between the trees, as if so many great white moths had
+settled in a garden. Huge trees had been felled and thrown across
+ravines to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and at the
+river's edge two or three tents seemed to have been pushed over the
+steep bluff to find lodgement on the sandy beach beside the turbulent
+stream.
+
+There were other camps on the line of this work, and it is worth while
+to add a word about their management and the system under which they
+were maintained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be the outfit
+of a contractor. The whole work of building a railroad is let out in
+contracts for portions of five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great
+jobs of seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one piece, it
+is customary for the contractor to divide his task and sublet it. But a
+fairly representative bit of mountain work is that which I found Dan
+Dunn superintending, as the factotum of the contractor who undertook it.
+
+If a contractor acts as "boss" himself, he stays upon the ground; but in
+this case the contractor had other undertakings in hand. Hence the
+presence of Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. Dunn is a man
+of means, and is himself a contractor by profession, who has worked his
+way up from a start as a laborer.
+
+The camp to which we came was a portable city, complete except for its
+lack of women. It had its artisans, its professional men, its store and
+workshops, its seat of government and officers, and its policeman, its
+amusement hall, its work-a-day and social sides. Its main peculiarity
+was that its boss (for it was like an American city in the possession of
+that functionary also) had announced that he was going to move it a
+couple of miles away on the following Sunday. One tent was the
+stableman's, with a capacious "corral" fenced in near by for the keeping
+of the pack horses and mules. His corps of assistants was a large one;
+for, besides the pack-horses that connected the camp with the outer
+world, he had the keeping of all the "grade-horses," so called--those
+which draw the stone and dirt carts and the little dump-cars on the
+false tracks set up on the levels near where "filling" or "cutting" is
+to be done. Another tent was the blacksmith's. He had a "helper," and
+was a busy man, charged with all the tool-sharpening, the care of all
+the horses' feet, and the repairing of all the iron-work of the wagons,
+cars, and dirt-scrapers. Near by was the harness-man's tent, the shop of
+the leather-mender. In the centre of the camp, like a low citadel, rose
+a mound of logs and earth bearing on a sign the single word "Powder,"
+but containing within its great sunken chamber a considerable store of
+various explosives--giant, black, and Judson powder, and dynamite.
+
+[Illustration: DAN DUNN ON HIS WORKS]
+
+More tremendous force is used in railroad blasting than most persons
+imagine. In order to perform a quick job of removing a section of solid
+mountain, the drill-men, after making a bore, say, twenty feet in depth,
+begin what they call "springing" it by exploding little cartridges in
+the bottom of the drill hole until they have produced a considerable
+chamber there. The average amount of explosive for which they thus
+prepare a place is 40 or 50 kegs of giant powder and 10 kegs of black
+powder; but Dunn told me he had seen 280 kegs of black powder and 500
+pounds of dynamite used in a single blast in mountain work.
+
+Another tent was that of the time-keeper. He journeyed twice a day all
+over the work, five miles up and five down. On one journey he noted what
+men were at labor in the forenoon, and on his return he tallied those
+who were entitled to pay for the second half of the day. Such an
+official knows the name of every laborer, and, moreover, he knows the
+pecuniary rating of each man, so that when the workmen stop him to order
+shoes or trousers, blankets, shirts, tobacco, penknives, or what not, he
+decides upon his own responsibility whether they have sufficient money
+coming to them to meet the accommodation.
+
+The "store" was simply another tent. In it was kept a fair supply of the
+articles in constant demand--a supply brought from the headquarters
+store at the other end of the trail, and constantly replenished by the
+pack-horses. This trading-place was in charge of a man called "the
+book-keeper," and he had two or three clerks to assist him. The stock
+was precisely like that of a cross-roads country store in one of our
+older States. Its goods included simple medicines, boots, shoes,
+clothing, cutlery, tobacco, cigars, pipes, hats and caps, blankets,
+thread and needles, and several hundred others among the ten thousand
+necessaries of a modern laborer's life. The only legal tender received
+there took the shape of orders written by the time-keeper, for the man
+in charge of the store was not required to know the ratings of the men
+upon the pay-roll.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPLY TRAIN OVER THE MOUNTAIN]
+
+The doctor's tent was among the rest, but his office might aptly have
+been said to be "in the saddle." He was nominally employed by the
+company, but each man was "docked," or charged, seventy-five cents a
+month for medical services whether he ever needed a doctor or not. When
+I was in the camp there was only one sick man--a rheumatic. He had a
+tent all to himself, and his meals were regularly carried to him. Though
+he was a stranger to every man there, and had worked only one day before
+he surrendered to sickness, a purse of about forty dollars had been
+raised for him among the men, and he was to be "packed" to Sproat's
+Landing on a mule at the company's expense whenever the doctor decreed
+it wise to move him. Of course invalidism of a more serious nature is
+not infrequent where men work in the paths of sliding rocks, beneath
+caving earth, amid falling forest trees, around giant blasts, and with
+heavy tools.
+
+Another one of the tents was that of the "boss packer." He superintended
+the transportation of supplies on the pack-trail. This "job of 200 men,"
+as Dunn styled his camp, employed thirty pack horses and mules. The
+pack-trains consisted of a "bell-horse" and boy, and six horses
+following. Each animal was rated to carry a burden of 400 pounds of dead
+weight, and to require three quarts of meal three times a day.
+
+Another official habitation was the "store-man's" tent. As a rule, there
+is a store-man to every ten miles of construction work; often every camp
+has one. The store-man keeps account of the distribution of the supplies
+of food. He issues requisitions upon the head storehouse of the company,
+and makes out orders for each day's rations from the camp store. The
+cooks are therefore under him, and this fact suggests a mention of the
+principal building in the camp--the mess hall, or "grub tent."
+
+This structure was of a size to accommodate two hundred men at once. Two
+tables ran the length of the unbroken interior--tables made roughly of
+the slabs or outside boards from a saw-mill. The benches were huge
+tree-trunks spiked fast upon stumps. There was a bench on either side of
+each table, and the places for the men were each set with a tin cup and
+a tin pie plate. The bread was heaped high on wooden platters, and all
+the condiments--catsup, vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt--were in cans
+that had once held condensed milk. The cooks worked in an open-ended
+extension at the rear of the great room. The rule is to have one cook
+and two "cookees" to each sixty men.
+
+While I was a new arrival just undergoing introduction, the men, who had
+come in from work, and who had "washed up" in the little creeks and at
+the river bank, began to assemble in the "grub tent" for supper. They
+were especially interesting to me because there was every reason to
+believe that they formed an assembly as typical of the human flotsam of
+the border as ever was gathered on the continent. Very few were what
+might be called born laborers; on the contrary, they were mainly men of
+higher origin who had failed in older civilizations; outlaws from the
+States; men who had hoped for a gold-mine until hope was all but dead;
+men in the first flush of the gold fever; ne'er-do-wells; and here and
+there a working-man by training. They ate as a good many other sorts of
+men do, with great rapidity, little etiquette, and just enough
+unselfishness to pass each other the bread. It was noticeable that they
+seemed to have no time for talking. Certainly they had earned the right
+to be hungry, and the food was good and plentiful.
+
+[Illustration: A SKETCH ON THE WORK]
+
+Dan Dunn's tent was just in front of the mess tent, a few feet away on
+the edge of the river bluff. It was a little "A" tent, with a single cot
+on one side, a wooden chest on the other, and a small table between the
+two at the farther end, opposite the door.
+
+"Are ye looking at my wolverenes?" said he. "There's good men among
+them, and some that ain't so good, and many that's worse. But
+railroading is good enough for most of 'em. It ain't too rich for any
+man's blood, I assure ye."
+
+Over six feet in height, broad-chested, athletic, and carrying not an
+ounce of flesh that could be spared, Dan Dunn's was a striking figure
+even where physical strength was the most serviceable possession of
+every man. From never having given his personal appearance a
+thought--except during a brief period of courtship antecedent to the
+establishment of a home in old Ontario--he had so accustomed himself to
+unrestraint that his habitual attitude was that of a long-bladed
+jack-knife not fully opened. His long spare arms swung limberly before a
+long spare body set upon long spare legs. His costume was one that is
+never described in the advertisements of city clothiers. It consisted of
+a dust-coated slouch felt hat, which a dealer once sold for black, of a
+flannel shirt, of homespun trousers, of socks, and of heavy "brogans."
+In all, his dress was what the aesthetes of Mr. Wilde's day might have
+aptly termed a symphony in dust. His shoes and hat had acquired a
+mud-color, and his shirt and trousers were chosen because they
+originally possessed it. Yet Dan Dunn was distinctly a cleanly man, fond
+of frequent splashing in the camp toilet basins--the Kootenay River and
+its little rushing tributaries. He was not shaven. As a rule he is not,
+and yet at times he is, as it happens. I learned that on Sundays, when
+there was nothing to do except to go fishing, or to walk over to the
+engineer's camp for intellectual society, he felt the unconscious
+impulse of a forgotten training, and put on a coat. He even tied a black
+silk ribbon under his collar on such occasions, and if no one had given
+him a good cigar during the week, he took out his best pipe (which had
+been locked up, because whatever was not under lock and key was certain
+to be stolen in half an hour). Then he felt fitted, as he would say,
+"for a hard day's work at loafing."
+
+[Illustration: THE MESS TENT AT NIGHT]
+
+If you came upon Dan Dunn on Broadway, he would look as awkward as any
+other animal removed from its element; yet on a forest trail not even
+Davy Crockett was handsomer or more picturesque. His face is
+reddish-brown and as hard-skinned as the top of a drum, befitting a man
+who has lived out-of-doors all his life. But it is a finely moulded
+face, instinct with good-nature and some gentleness. The witchery of
+quick Irish humor lurks often in his eyes, but can quickly give place
+on occasion to a firm light, which is best read in connection with the
+broad, strong sweep of his massive under-jaw. There you see his fitness
+to command small armies, even of what he calls "wolverenes." He is
+willing to thrash any man who seems to need the operation, and yet he is
+equally noted for gathering a squad of rough laborers in every camp to
+make them his wards. He collects the money such men earn, and puts it in
+bank, or sends it to their families.
+
+"It does them as much good to let me take it as to chuck it over a
+gin-mill bar," he explained.
+
+As we stood looking into the crowded booth, where the men sat elbow to
+elbow, and all the knife blades were plying to and from all the plates
+and mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed.
+
+"The time has gone by," said he, "when you could keep an outfit on salt
+pork and bacon. It's as far gone as them days when they say the Hudson
+Bay Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. Did ye never
+hear of that? Why, sure, man, 'twas only fifty years ago that when meal
+hours came the bosses of the big trading company would give a workman a
+stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, and tell him he'd have an hour
+to catch his fill. But in railroading nowadays we give them the best
+that's going, and all they want of it--beef, ham, bacon, potatoes, mush,
+beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and game right out of the woods, and
+every sort of vegetable (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well,
+or they wouldn't stay."
+
+He said that the supplies of food are calculated on the basis of
+three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to a man--all the varieties of
+food being proportioned so that the total weight will be
+three-and-a-half pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and for
+small amounts, so as to economize in the number of horses required on
+the pack-trail. The amount to be consumed by the horses is, of course,
+included in the loads. The cost of "packing" food over long distances is
+more considerable than would be supposed. It was estimated that at
+Dunn's camp the freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of
+places farther in the mountains where the cost was double that. Indeed,
+a discussion of the subject brought to light the fact that in remote
+mining camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in bottles up to
+the price of champagne. At one camp on the Kootenay bacon was selling at
+the time I was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried peaches
+fetched forty cents under competition.
+
+As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef and vegetables, with tea
+and coffee and pie. The head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp,
+and therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. Every sort of
+cook drifts into camps like these, and that camp considers itself the
+most fortunate which happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who
+has cooked on a steamboat; but a cook from a lumber camp is rated almost
+as proudly.
+
+[Illustration: "THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS"]
+
+"Ye would not think it," said Dunn, "but some of them men has been bank
+clerks, and there's doctors and teachers among 'em--everything, in fact,
+except preachers. I never knew a preacher to get into a railroad gang.
+The men are always changing--coming and going. We don't have to
+advertise for new hands. The woods is full of men out of a job, and out
+of everything--pockets, elbows, and all. They drift in like peddlers on
+a pay-day. They come here with no more clothing than will wad a gun. The
+most of them will get nothing after two months' work. You see, they're
+mortgaged with their fares against them (thirty to forty dollars for
+them which the railroad brings from the East), and then they have their
+meals to pay for, at five dollars a week while they're here, and on top
+of that is all the clothing and shoes and blankets and tobacco, and
+everything they need--all charged agin them. It's just as well for
+them, for the most of them are too rich if they're a dollar ahead.
+There's few of them can stand the luxury of thirty dollars. When they
+get a stake of them dimensions, the most of them will stay no longer
+after pay-day than John Brown stayed in heaven. The most of them bang it
+all away for drink, and they are sure to come back again, but the
+'prospectors' and chronic tramps only work to get clothes and a flirting
+acquaintance with food, as well as money enough to make an affidavit to,
+and they never come back again at all. Out of 8500 men we had in one big
+work in Canada, 1500 to 2000 knocked off every month. Ninety per cent.
+came back. They had just been away for an old-fashioned drunk."
+
+It would be difficult to draw a parallel between these laborers and any
+class or condition of men in the East. They were of every nationality
+where news of gold-mines, of free settlers' sections, or of quick
+fortunes in the New World had penetrated. I recognized Greeks, Finns,
+Hungarians, Danes, Scotch, English, Irish, and Italians among them. Not
+a man exhibited a coat, and all were tanned brown, and were as spare and
+slender as excessively hard work can make a man. There was not a
+superfluity or an ornament in sight as they walked past me; not a
+necktie, a finger-ring, nor a watch-chain. There were some very
+intelligent faces and one or two fine ones in the band. Two typical
+old-fashioned prospectors especially attracted me. They were evidently
+of gentle birth, but time and exposure had bent them, and silvered their
+long, unkempt locks. Worse than all, it had planted in their faces a
+blended expression of sadness and hope fatigued that was painful to see.
+It is the brand that is on every old prospector's face. A very few of
+the men were young fellows of thirty, or even within the twenties. Their
+youth impelled them to break away from the table earlier than the
+others, and, seizing their rods, to start off for the fishing in the
+river.
+
+But those who thought of active pleasure were few indeed. Theirs was
+killing work, the most severe kind, and performed under the broiling
+sun, that at high mountain altitudes sends the mercury above 100 on
+every summer's day, and makes itself felt as if the rarefied atmosphere
+was no atmosphere at all. After a long day at the drill or the pick or
+shovel in such a climate, it was only natural that the men should, with
+a common impulse, seek first the solace of their pipes, and then of the
+shake-downs in their tents. I did not know until the next morning how
+severely their systems were strained; but it happened at sunrise on that
+day that I was at my ablutions on the edge of the river when Dan Dunn's
+gong turned the silent forest into a bedlam. It was called the
+seven-o'clock alarum, and was rung two hours earlier than that hour, so
+that the men might take two hours after dinner out of the heat of the
+day, "else the sun would kill them," Dunn said. This was apparently his
+device, and he kept up the transparent deception by having every clock
+and watch in the camp set two hours out of time.
+
+With the sounding of the gong the men began to appear outside the little
+tents in which they slept in couples. They came stumbling down the
+bluff to wash in the river, and of all the pitiful sights I ever saw,
+they presented one of the worst; of all the straining and racking and
+exhaustion that ever hard labor gave to men, they exhibited the utmost.
+They were but half awakened, and they moved so painfully and stiffly
+that I imagined I could hear their bones creak. I have seen spavined
+work-horses turned out to die that moved precisely as these men did. It
+was shocking to see them hobble over the rough ground; it was pitiful to
+watch them as they attempted to straighten their stiffened bodies after
+they had been bent double over the water. They gained erectness by slow
+jolts, as if their joints were of iron that had rusted. Of course they
+soon regained whatever elasticity nature had left them, and were
+themselves for the day--an active, muscular force of men. But that early
+morning sight of them was not such a spectacle as a right-minded man
+enjoys seeing his fellows take part in.
+
+
+  THE END
+
+
+
+
+  Interesting Works
+
+  of
+
+  Travel and Exploration.
+
+
+  =Allen's Blue-Grass Region=.
+
+    The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and other Kentucky Articles.
+    By James Lane Allen. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50.
+
+  =Miss Edwards's Egypt=.
+
+    Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers. By Amelia B. Edwards.
+    Profusely Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.
+
+  =Hearn's West Indies=.
+
+    Two Years in the French West Indies. By Lafcadio Hearn.
+    Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 00.
+
+  =Miss Scidmore's Japan=.
+
+    Jinrikisha Days in Japan. By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore.
+    Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 00.
+
+  =Child's South America=.
+
+    Spanish-American Republics. By Theodore Child. Profusely
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+  =Transcriber's Notes:=
+  original hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in
+    the original
+  Page 7, "doctor's workshop" changed to "doctor's workshop."
+  Page 29, "he in vented concerning" changed to "he invented concerning"
+  Page 33, "through why it was" changed to "though why it was"
+  Page 110, "Nine times in-ten" changed to "Nine times in ten"
+  Page 156, "mainland" changed to "main-land" [Ed. for consistency]
+  Page 169, "to get baffalo meat" changed to "to get buffalo meat"
+  Page 238, "that we be come" changed to "that we become"
+  Page 282, "two-and-a half" changed to "two-and-a-half"
+
+
+
+
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On Canada's Frontier, by Julian Ralph
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