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
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
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
