In to the Yukon

A good deal of wheat grows west of Winnipeg, as well as south and north and east of it. We were still in wheat land when we awoke yesterday morning, though the now intervening patches of green grass grew larger and larger until the grass covered and dominated everything. And then we had miles and miles of a more rolling country. Here and there began to appear pools of water, ponds, even small lakes and deep sunk streams bordered with rushes and scrub willow and stunted alders.

Every bit of water was alive with wild fowl. Each pool we hurried by was seemingly packed with geese, brant and ducks. All the myriads of the north land water birds seemed to be here gathering and resting preparatory to their long flight to the distant south. Many plover, snipe and some herons and even cranes I noted along the margins of the pools and streams. And this prolific bird life cared but little for the presence of man. Our rushing train did not frighten them, none ever took to wing, too much engrossed were they in their own pursuits.

Through the flat wheat land the farmsteads were few and far between, and the towns only at long intervals. Nor is there here the population seen among the many and thrifty towns and villages of Minnesota and Dakota.

In the grass lands we saw no towns at all, nor made many stops, while herds of cattle began to increase in number; of horses, also, as we drew further and further west and north.

Toward evening, through the long twilight, we entered a hill country, where were a great many cattle and horses, and some Mexican cowboys rounding up the stock ere nightfall.

Here, also, the wilder life of the hills came close upon us. Just as we drew beyond the prairie a large grey wolf had crossed our way. He had no fear of the iron horse; he stood and watched us with evident curiosity, lifting one forepaw as he gazed upon the flying train, not fifty feet away. When we were gone by, he turned and trotted leisurely into the bush.

New buildings with added frequency met our view. Sometimes whole new towns. All this I afterward learned is largely owing to the present American immigration.

At dusk we stopped at the bustling town of Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad Assiniboia River on a long bridge. Here many of our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the largest town in the Northwest Territory – seven or eight thousand inhabitants – and where the Edmonton branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and will soon go three or four hundred miles further through the opening wheat country which the world is now pouring into.

This morning we were following the Silver Bow River, past a long lake which it widens into in the journey of its waters toward Hudson’s Bay; then we were among fir-clad foot-hills, and then, quite suddenly, as the enveloping mist lifted, there were revealed upon either side of us the gigantic, bare, rocky, snow-capped masses of the real Rocky Mountain chain. I have never yet seen as immense and gigantic masses of bare rock, unless it be the Cordillera of Michoacan, in Mexico.

Here we are at a fine modern hotel kept by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. It is cool, even cold, almost. As cold as on Lake Superior, 54 and 56 degrees, and as in St. Paul the days we were there, but here the air is so much drier that one sits by the open window and does not feel the cold.

Among the passengers on our train I fell in with several of those who now make their homes in this booming land – from Winnipeg west and north, all this vast country is now on what is called a boom – a wheat-land boom, a cattle boom, a town boom! One, a vigorous six-footer from Wisconsin, a drummer for an American harvesting machine, has put and isnow putting all the money he can raise into the buying of these northern wheat lands. And there is no finer wheat land in all the world, he said, than the rich, warm Peace River valley, four hundred or five hundred miles north of Edmonton. A Canadian drummer, who had won a medal fighting in South Africa, also told me much of the awakening up here. The Hudson Bay Company had for years kept secret the fatness of this north land, although they and their agents had (for more than a century) raised great wheat harvests on their own hidden-away farms along the distant Peace River, where their mills made it into flour for their own use, and to feed the fur-trapping Indians. But never a word had they or their close-mouthed Scotch servants said about all the richness of which they so well knew. But little by little had the news of these wheat crops leaked out into the world beyond, and little by little, after the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and cession to Canada of their exclusive rights, had the pioneer settlers quietly crept into the hidden country. Now there were many farmers snugly living on their own lands along the Peace River valley and in that neighboring region. Every year there are more of them. They haul their supplies three hundred miles north from Edmonton, or buy direct of the nearest Hudson Bay Post. Soon the railways will be up among them, soon the greatest export of Canadian wheat will come from that now far-away country. And here is where the hustling American comes in. The Canadian has been slow to “catch on.” The dull farmer of Ontario has scoffed at the notion of good wheat land so far north. He preferred to stay at home and raise peas and barley. The French habitan, too, did not take stock in the tales of a land so far from church and kindred. Nor did the Englishman do more than look blandly incredulous at whatever secret tales he might hear. He would just inquire of the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where he always learned that the tale was a joke out of the whole cloth. Not even the bankers of now booming Winnipeg would invest a dollar in buying Government land beyond the already well-defined wheat limits of Manitoba. It was the keen-scented Yankee who caught on. A group of bright men in St. Paul and Minneapolis heard in some way of the possibilities of the far north. They quietly sent their own experienced Minnesota and Dakota farm land experts and practical wheat judges up into Saskatchewan and Assiniboia to look, examine and report. This they did, and then the Americans began to buy direct of the Canadian Government at Ottawa. Their expert investigators also had friends and neighbors who had money, who had made money in farming, and some of them went up. All who went up staid, and sent back word of having got hold of a good thing. The first the world knew, fifty thousand American farmers went in last year, more than two hundred thousand have gone in this year, and the Canadian world and the English world have awakened to the fact that the bulk of the rich wheat lands of the far north are already owned by the American land companies, American banks and American farmers. In St. Paul to-day you can learn more about all this rich far north, and buy its best lands, rather than in Toronto or even in Winnipeg. Now the railroads are also beginning to stir themselves. The Canadian Pacific Railway is to build more north branch lines. The Grand Trunk Pacific is to be built right through the Peace River country to Port Simpson, and everybody is astir to get a chance at the golden future. But the Americans have the cinch. And what is more, they do better and succeed when the Canadians, from Quebec or Ontario, and, above all, the Englishmen, make rank failures. The Americans have been farming on the same sort of land in Minnesota, in Iowa and in the Dakotas. They go into this new land with the same machinery and same methods. They all do well. Many of the Canadians fail, most of the English likewise, and the prospering American buys them out. Now, also, the Americans are beginning to find out that there is much good cattle range in this north land. The American cattle men are coming up with their herds, even with their Mexican cowboys.

No blizzards here, such as freeze and destroy in Montana. No lack of water here the year round. No drouths like those of Texas. Nor is the still, quiet, steady cold of these plains more fatal, not as much so, as the more variable temperatures of the States. Not much snow over these northern plains, rarely more than a foot. The buffalo grass may be always reached through it. The mercury rarely more than fifty below zero, and so dry is the air and so still that no one minds that temperature.

So we have it, that this entire rich wheat-yielding land of the far, far north, that the bulk of these grazing lands, tempered as the winter is by the warm Pacific climate, which here climbs over the rather low barrier of the Rockies, are falling into alert American hands. Even the storekeepers, they tell me, would rather trade with the American – he buys more freely, buys higher-priced machinery and goods; he is better pay in the end. “The Englishman brings out money, but after the first year or two it is gone.” “The American brings some and then keeps making more.” So my Canadian drummer friend tells me, and he gathers his information from the storekeepers in all these northwest towns with whom he deals. “Some even tell me,” he said, “that if it wouldn’t make any disturbance, why they would do better if all this country was part of the States.” So the American is popular here, and he is growing rich, richer than the Canadian and Englishman, and in course of time, I take it, he will even yet the more completely dominate the land. It is strange how the American spirit seems to have an energy and force that tells everywhere, in Canada as well as in Mexico. The information I give you here comes to me from the intelligent fellow-travelers I have chanced to meet, and, I take it, is probably a fair statement.

We are some 4,500 feet above the sea, and the highest summits near us rise to about 10,000 or 11,000 feet. There is none of the somber blackness of the Norwegian rocks, nor the greenness of the Swiss slopes, while the contour of the summits and ridges is much like that of the volcanic, serrated summits of the mountains I saw in Mexico.

THIRD LETTER

BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND SELKIRKS

    Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, B. C.,
    August 19, 1903.

Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We left Banff about 2 P. M., following up the valley of the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The rise was so easy, however, that we were surprised when we actually attained the summit of the divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its waters, part to Hudson’s Bay, part to the Pacific. But the descent toward the west was precipitous. Since leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across plains and prairie, and a night and day up the valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of the ascending grade, but now we were to come down the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Norway, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail’s pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, and descending into gorges and cañons and shadowy valleys until one’s hair nearly stood on end. How on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long passenger and short freight trains up these grades for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; that is, shove them up and make the business pay.

At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a dense forest. The tall Douglas firs stood almost trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant slopes looked as though covered with gigantic coverlets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one height and size. And the slopes were green right up to the snow field’s very edge. Our way wound down the profound cañon of the Kicking Horse River, sometimes sheer precipices below and also above us, the road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept out into the beautiful Wapta Valley, green as emerald, the white snow waters of the river – not white foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters of the streams of Switzerland – roaring and plunging, and spreading out into placid pools. At last we emerged through a gorge and came into the great wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from which the province takes its name. A river, even there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melting snows. Behind us the towering granite masses of the Rocky Mountains – a name whose meaning I never comprehended before – their peaks lost in clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering along it. Here and there were indications of a developing mine upon the mountain slopes. We followed the great river until we passed through a narrow gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its rock masses hard against the western flanks of the Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin its long journey southward through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the second and last mountain chain before we should reach the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic and not subsidized by a government, as in practical effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snowfalls and avalanches, which require many miles of snow-sheds to save the road.

We dined about 8 P. M., in a fine large hotel owned by the railroad company at a station called “Glacier,” for it is right at the foot of one of the most gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists tarry here to see it and climb upon it; Swiss guides being provided by the railway company for these adventures. And then we came down again, all night and half the next day, following the valley of the Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal reaches a few miles from Puget Sound.

The Fraser River is a magnificent stream; as great as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Virginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tempestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, watching their nets or drawing them in. And every rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belonging to some individual Indian or tribe, safe from trespass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands of the river are said to also have been recently discovered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in several places Chinamen industriously panning by the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year is said to be unusually large.

As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more prolific, and the Douglas fir more lofty and imposing. A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down-bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their ungainly trunks above every other living thing about. The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nasturtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. Great was the delight of our trainload of Australians. They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gardener and incessant laying on of water. We came across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. Most have been “home,” to England, and had come across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they marveled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the heats of the Australian continent.

The building and maintaining of this railway has been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to the railway company by the government of the Dominion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the promoters and builders, and the Canadian people now hold the bag – but although as a mere investment it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific. It owns its own telegraph lines, its own cars, sleeping-cars, and rolling stock; it owns and runs ten, a dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the people of the United States that it is so.

The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and picturesque of any section of the mountain chain from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the hustling American has begun to find this out. The great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best patronized by the American visitor, and this year the sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and promise another year even greater numbers. And the Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all – all who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard of the English Colony from China, brought over from Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts promise to become the summering-place of the Oriental Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! How these things bring the world together!

Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheatfields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few days climbing and plunging over and down the wildest, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the continent we live on, and which one of these days the people of the United States will inevitably wholly possess!

And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering through Vancouver’s superb Natural Park, among its gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked harbor of the world. I must not say more about this now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only beginning dimly to comprehend what is the future power of our race and people in the development of this side of the earth.

VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN

    The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,
    August 21, 1903.

We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer “Princess Victoria,” and making the voyage in four hours, – all the way in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. The shores of the mainland high, lofty; – the mountain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope to see one of these salmon stampedes – they often pushing each other high and dry on the shores in their mad eagerness to go on.

Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we consumed seeing the lusty little city.

Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the few extra things needed for the Yukon – among others a bottle of tar and carbolic – a mixture to rub on to offend the yet active mosquito.

Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets the bulk of even this trade.

To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place very English. The capitol building is an imposing structure of granite, surmounted by a successful dome.

FOURTH LETTER

VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY; FJORDS AND FORESTS

    First and Second Day Out,
    August 23, 1903.

We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer “Charmer” from Victoria about ten o’clock A. M. – two hours late – a small boat, packed with passengers. We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel surprises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch up with it.

We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.

Our boat, “City of Seattle,” is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year – less snow than usual falling last winter – that the bulk of the freight “going in” has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.

The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner “going in” for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.

Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon – our chief engineer – and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel – from Pennsylvania – and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.

Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin – whither we are bound – to find work at big pay.

The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them – gold chains and diamonds – of which there are not a few.

From all I can pick up, an immense trade is already developed with Alaska and is still growing with bounds. The United States Government statisticians give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade of the past year. Already three or four lines of steamers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome.

The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You come out of a narrow channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north through the “Gulf of Georgia,” twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water’s edge, the mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.

We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon, and there is more snow on their summits.

You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.

Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet.

    Monday, August 24, 1903.