PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA
CANADA
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
BY
ARTHUR E. COPPING
WITH SIX FULL-PAGE COLOUR PLATES BY
HAROLD COPPING
AND THIRTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS IN
BLACK-AND-WHITE
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO THE
HON. FRANK OLIVER
Minister of the Interior, Canada
CONTENTS
COLOUR PLATES
[Parliament Buildings, Ottawa]
[Quebec from the St. Lawrence: Winter Time]
[The Permanent Exhibition at Toronto: One of the Buildings]
[Sunflowers Growing on the Prairie at Verigin: Food for the Dukhobors]
[A Corner of Montreal Harbour]
[Big Trees in Vancouver, B.C.]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Dufferin Terrace and Lower Town, Quebec]
[The only Slum in Canada: Little Champlain Street, Quebec]
[Asbestos Quarry at Thetford, Quebec Province]
[Farmland Scenery, Ascot, Quebec Province]
[Gathering Maple Syrup in Eastern Canada]
[Tobacco Growing, Quebec Province]
[Typical French-Canadian Family]
[Niagara: Above the Canadian Falls]
[Pumpkins Grown in Quebec Province]
[Market Day in Montreal: Scene in the Jacques Cartier Square]
[The First Step in Farming: “Breaking the Prairie”]
[The Oat Harvest: 80 Bushels to the Acre]
[Wheat Growing in the Eastern Townships: Lending a Hand at Stooking]
[Typical New Town in Saskatchewan, Viewed from the Prairie]
[Encampment of Chief Moskowekum of the Cree Tribe]
[Threshing by Machinery in the Prairie Provinces]
[Sun Dance of Blackfeet Indians]
[Edmonton: Distant View from Strathcona]
[Edmonton: East End of Jasper Avenue]
[Building the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway: The Track-Laying Machine at Work]
[Shawatlans Lake and Falls, Prince Rupert]
[Water Front, Prince Rupert Terminus, G. T. P. Railway]
[Government Buildings, Victoria, B.C.]
[Tourists in Vancouver City, B.C.]
[A Salmon Cannery on Fraser River]
[Chinese Quarter, Vancouver, B.C.]
[Fruit-Picking in British Columbia]
CANADA
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
CHAPTER I
THE DOMINION’S DESTINY
For those who mark the current of events, Canada’s great destiny is written plain. Canada in a few decades must possess more people and more realised wealth than Great Britain. Whether the centre of Imperial control will then cross the Atlantic is a point on which prophecies differ. Memories enshrined in Westminster Abbey will tend to conserve the ancient seat of government. Yet there is weight in the surmise that the logic of numbers will ultimately prevail.
Canada’s future is foretold in the past growth and present might of the United States. The same traditions, the same climate (over areas of chief significance), the same resources, and—most important of all—the same method of expansion, will produce, and are producing, the same result.
The history of the United States is contained in one word—immigration. That country has absorbed myriad migrants from northern regions of the eastern hemisphere; and it has absorbed most of them in recent times. Screw steamships are responsible. The population of the United States was about 17,000,000 when the first regular Atlantic service was founded by Samuel Cunard—the father of modern America. Only seventeen millions—less than the present population of Brazil! Such was the American nation when Charles Dickens visited it. The growth of population has gained in momentum with the increase and improvement of liners. We now have 92,000,000 cousins. Twenty millions—or nearly a quarter of the huge nation—date no farther back than Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The numerical strength of the Republic has more than doubled since the Tichborne trial.
Immigration, of course, rests upon advertising—a process which is far from being as modern as it sounds, the word occurring in the Bible (Numbers xxiv. 14 and Ruth iv. 4). The United States, ever since their foundation, have been sedulously advertised throughout Europe, partly by books and news-sheets, mainly by private correspondence. The prosperous settler writes to relatives and friends in the Old Country, urging them to come out; and such letters are the most potent stimulus that immigration can receive. They constitute advertising in its most convincing form. They represent an ever-expanding force working silently and unseen. I talked of this matter with Mr. J. Obed Smith—an authority—and he had the right word for what takes place. Those who go in advance “beckon” to those who follow. The United States are still receiving about a million immigrants every year—the result of beckoning.
But a change has come over the transatlantic exodus. Previously there was only one destination—now there are two. Down to a few years ago the average person, when he spoke or thought of emigrating, had only the United States in his mind. It was called “going to America.” Nowadays the word emigration, when you see it in print, is apt to suggest Canada. Of course there is no abatement in the great automatic movement that is of cumulative force. The millions who were beckoned to the United States are themselves beckoning other millions. But the thousands who have gone to Canada are also beckoning—and with more reason.
Simultaneously the attractions of the Dominion are being proclaimed through the machinery of publicity. Modern means of stimulating public interest, no less than modern means of quick, safe and cheap transportation, give the present day a great advantage, so far as populating a distant country is concerned, over an era when newspapers cost fourpence and passenger ships were innocent of steam. When the United States were at an early stage of development, and urgently needing people, there was no halfpenny press through which to communicate with the democracy of Europe, for the democracy of Europe had not learnt to read.
Canada was discovered by Canada about fifteen years ago, by the United States a little later, by England—well, England is discovering Canada now. For we are a slow, if sure, people. One day England will discover the British Empire. Meanwhile we are ruled by a generation which was taught at school that Canada is one of our Colonies.
In thinking of Canada the earnest and logical man in the street has been led inevitably into a gigantic misconception. As a matter of fact, without a sense of humour it is difficult to make head or tail of the history of North America. Every schoolboy has been taught that Canada existed before the United States were created. Yet the United States have grown to be a mighty and wealthy nation of 92,000,000 people; while Canada, with a slightly larger area, still has a population of only 8,000,000. Naturally enough, the man in the street concluded there was something wrong somewhere with Canada.
One can, of course, only elucidate the position by stating facts which seem, on the face of them, quaint, not to say funny. As the upshot of a fierce war that took place a century and a quarter ago, part of North America became an independent country, while another part remained in allegiance to the English sovereign; and the curious circumstance has to be noted that, ever since then, Great Britain has been sending out millions of men, not to the country she retained, but to the country she lost. To be strictly accurate, those people were not sent—they went. They succumbed to the spell of the newly arisen United States. As though to heap coals of fire on the heads of those who had revolted from our rule and beaten us in battle, we set to work to make them mighty among the nations of the earth; British contributions to that end heavily outweighing those of other peoples. Meanwhile—there being apparently no end to our self-abnegation—we were content to leave our own part of North America practically unrecruited by emigrants from the British Isles. Nay—the daughter becoming, as would seem, infected by the mother’s magnanimity—our own part of North America made generous contributions to the neighbouring population, it being the strange fact that during the past fifty years 3,250,000 people have gone from Canada to the United States—indigence sparing of its poverty to increase the riches of affluence.
Of those developments, which wear so quixotic an aspect in the retrospect, the explanation lies, of course, in the truism that unity is strength. For nearly a century North America consisted of two sections—the United States and the Ununited Provinces. Union, consolidation, federation—those are the masterful words in the story of nations. What sort of position in the world would Essex have attained had Essex acted independently of Cumberland and the other English counties? Where would Perthshire have been without the political link with Cork? Similarly, how would Massachusetts have ever become a big power single-handed, and who would care a rap for the Stars and Stripes if they waved only over Pennsylvania? The separate States might have asked for people and respect, but their individual voices would not have carried across the Atlantic. It was only because they spoke in unison that they were audible all over the world.
And here we come to close quarters with the misconception still lingering in the popular mind. The man in the street has confused two Canadas—historic Canada, which dated back to the sixteenth century and comprised only portions of the existing Eastern provinces, and modern Canada, which extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and is less than forty years old. It is as though the name England had originally applied merely to portions of Kent and Sussex. The federation of the distinct countries of British North America began in 1867, and was not completed until 1873. Thus the reason why Canada did not, until recent years, begin to grow is because Canada, until recent years, did not exist. Previously, owing to circumstances that will be traced in a later chapter, little was known of the bulk of the country. The setting up of the Federal Government opened the way to knowledge. That knowledge is still incomplete, being representative rather than general. But already—as this book will, I hope, help to prove—there is justification for the belief that the attractions and resources of Canada are not inferior to those of the United States . . . .
And now, being through with our prologue of broad facts, let us pass to personal experiences of the voyage to Canada. That week’s imprisonment in a travelling hotel is, surely, the ideal holiday. Thrice have I crossed in the saloon and once in the steerage—and a button for the difference! In the great liners of to-day there are comfortable quarters and wholesome meals for everybody, whether he pays £18, £10s. 5s., or £5 15s. As a rule I find third-class emigrants more interesting to talk to than first-class poker-players. On the other hand, grand pianos are preferable to concertinas, and it is wondrous pleasant, when at sea, to stroll on Turkish carpets amid alcoves of growing ferns, palms and flowers; while I personally am alive to the advantages of a spacious smoking-room panelled in carved oak, a well-stocked library, and a writing lounge furnished with necessaries and taste (to glance at a few features of such floating temples of luxury as the Royal George). But air, sea and sky—the common property of all classes—are of chief account.
Let me dip among the memories of my first crossing, which happened nearly nine years ago.
For two days our ship was followed by a dozen gulls—strong birds, with yellow bodies, and having black tips to their long wings. By day they hovered in our wake, eager for whatsoever the cook might discard through a porthole; by night—I was invited to believe—they snatched a little slumber in the rigging. But those sturdy aviators did not accompany us all the way to Canada.
You cannot see, you can only infer, that the Atlantic Ocean is large. At no time in any direction does the eye behold more sea than is visible from Hastings pier. During the long, luxurious day and all through the night the vessel goes on, on, and still on. The throbbing propeller makes with splashing water the music that lulls you to sleep at night, that greets your waking in the morning. For ever the sea is rushing by in frothy confusion. We career through a path mottled with foam. Between the whirling splashes and streaks of white the eye pierces a slatey-green, with the myriad tiny bubbles ascending as a grey cloud.
You look in grateful silence upon the Atlantic skies—purples and lemon-yellow in the east, gold and flaming crimson in the west. Later joys are the moonshine and the phosphorous glowing on the busy, musical, unseen waves.
One afternoon a little bird came to us, perching awhile on the bridge stairs. I did not see him, but they told me of his grey feathers fluttering deranged in the breeze, and the balance of testimony proclaimed him a sparrow. Wondrous welcome little visitor from the land. For to live nearly a week on the boundless sea is to find yourself with tender recollections of meadow and dell, of oak trees and the bumble bee.
Not always did white crests figure in the wide circumference. Once the surface sobered to a polished blue, and as we loitered in the burning sunshine the decks felt hot underfoot. Waggish Nature chose that tropical interlude for an Arctic exhibition. We saw icebergs and whales.
In this enlightened age it may seem superfluous to describe either. I shall give my impressions of both, and for this reason: each was wholly otherwise than I had expected to find it. The whale at sea is very unlike a whale. In our first experience—a creature some two miles away—again and again we saw the jet of water rise as a column of white fluffiness out of a little area of surface commotion. It was easy to infer some animal was causing the upheaval, but for long he abstained from presenting any part of his anatomy to our view. At last he so far satisfied our curiosity as to show us a few yards of the top of his back. The oblong, rounded piece of conspicuous blackness performed a sort of greasy curve, a large and handsome fin travelled round the upper edge, and then Mr. Whale, again wholly immersed, playfully re-engaged in squirting part of the Atlantic Ocean up in the air.
Icebergs in the sunshine are superlatively beautiful. I had expected an iceberg to look like ice. It suggests, rather, a mountain of loaf sugar or alabaster. It is white with the tender, dazzling whiteness of a swan’s breast. Its surface is of milky, silky snow. Moulded in soft contour, it is rich in fanciful, protruding shapes.
A distant berg, floating towards Newfoundland, was revealed in our glasses as two prodigious Egyptian pyramids. Another was half a mile away, aground off Belle Isle. It exhibited, as a conspicuous feature on the windward side, a great seal snorting the air. When we came to leeward the entire mass was seen to be a headless lion, the hind legs adjusted to a squatting attitude, the spinal vertebræ visible up the mountain slope of the creature’s back.
DUFFERIN TERRACE AND LOWER TOWN, QUEBEC
CHAPTER II
RETROSPECT
One’s first impressions of Quebec yield a joy that cannot be recaptured on subsequent visits; yet the better you get to know that old city, the more you love it.
There was no moon shining when, nine years ago, a ship that had voyaged for days across the sea, and for hours through the night, brought me suddenly into view of an escarpment aglow with myriad friendly lights. And soon a quaint old Frenchman in a white hat was driving me in a quaint old carriage up quaint, steep streets where lamp-light gave glimpses of walls of naked rock and mellow brickwork, of venerable gabled houses with green shutters, of noble buildings grey with antiquity, and of stately monuments standing amid leafy gardens, with here and there a moss-grown cannon peeping out of its crumbling embrasure. Nor was it long before, in the garden of the Château Frontenac—that huge, handsome hotel—I was stealing nasturtium blooms.
Next day revealed how beautiful is the situation of Quebec. Standing on Dufferin Terrace—that superb promenade running along the brow of the cliff—you look out upon the great blue river sweeping through a landscape of purple mountains. Quebec has been well defined as “a small bit of mediæval Europe perched upon a rock,” and Charles Dickens wrote of “its giddy heights, its citadel suspended, as it were, in air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways.”
The old French capital is a pleasure resort. Thousands of American tourists visit it every year; golf is played on the battlefield where Wolfe fell victorious; and the city’s ice carnivals and other winter frolics are famous. The old French capital is also of growing commercial importance, and its industries must receive a great impetus from the new St. Lawrence bridge—the largest cantilever structure in the world—and the projected dock extensions. But the old French capital commands admiration mainly for its age and its associations. Of all the fine Canadian cities it is the finest and the least Canadian. Quebec even possesses two slums—the only two slums, I verily believe, in the entire Dominion; and they are far too picturesque to be demolished.
It is surprising to find such an obvious piece of the Old World at the threshold of the New World; and Quebec’s antiquity is emphasised when, on travelling through the Dominion, one notes the modern aspect of the other cities. Clues to that contrast will be found in Canada’s lop-sided history.
Indeed, to look at the Dominion through the historian’s telescope is to be baffled by a picture that will not get into focus. An eastern portion is full of background, middle-distance and foreground; southern and western strips reveal nothing but foreground; a central northern region has detail only in the middle distance; and the bulk of the area is equally without definition here, there and beyond. In other words, one part of the Dominion has much history, other parts have some, and many parts have none.
As I have already hinted, the word “Canada” is a territorial ambiguity, since it applies both to a little old country (with a history commencing in the year 1000, when Icelandic settlers in Greenland discovered Labrador) and to a large new country (with a history commencing in 1873, when Confederation was completed). In reviewing the evolution of the Dominion, therefore, it is difficult to keep history in anything like a proportionate relation to geography. Ancient Canada, being so rich in material for the historian, is apt to monopolise nearly all his space. Beginning with events contemporaneous with the Saxon era in England, he plods through the centuries, peppering his pages with memorable dates, unrolling a long scroll of illustrious names, tracing the varying fortunes of two races and three nationalities in their struggles for supremacy, and recording bloody battles innumerable. When he has done all that, he finds himself with latitude for only vague and brief mention of the bulk of the Dominion; and his readers, thinking they have been reading a history of Canada (whereas they have only been reading a history of a fraction of Canada) are left with an unfortunate impression that Canada is an old, instead of a new, country.
To follow the course of events, one must eliminate existing geographical boundaries from one’s mind, and think of eastern North America (stretching along the present seaboards of Canada and the United States) as a whole.
Voyagers from England and Portugal got there first, towards the close of the fifteenth century; but France and Spain took the lead in forming colonies. The situation soon resolved itself into a rivalry between the French and the English.
In 1535 Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence (which he named), and advanced as far as an Indian town that he christened Mont Royal (since corrupted into Montreal); and afterwards there came other French expeditions, whose attempts to found settlements were frustrated by Indian hostility. At the opening of the seventeenth century, however, Samuel de Champlain established in Acadia (now Nova Scotia) the first European colony that took root within the boundaries of the present Dominion; and in 1608 he visited the St. Lawrence and founded the City of Quebec. Thus was brought into being “New France”—a large territory which included eastern Canada of to-day and stretched south across the existing international boundary line. There was also a rival colony, known as “New England,” which extended north from Virginia.
The struggle between Great Britain and France continued, with intervals of peace and with an ebb and flow of fortunes, for a century and a half; and in the history of this period the most inspiring chapter is that which tells of the unflinching zeal and dauntless courage of Roman Catholic priests who, penetrating to the interior of the country, sought to carry Christianity and civilisation to the Indians.
By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) the possession of Hudson Bay (the history of which I shall glance at later), Acadia and Newfoundland was definitely vested with Great Britain, France retaining authority over a vast stretch of territory. Thirty years afterwards the war of the Austrian Succession justified a resumption of hostilities, which were interrupted by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. A few years later the two Powers reached the final stage of their long contest for mastery in North America; and, following Wolfe’s victory at Quebec in 1759, French rule in Canada came to an end.
But the French people remained, and their descendants remain, in Canada; and their presence there—those two million fine, happy, prosperous French-Canadians, who combine loyalty to the British Empire with a love for France—supplies, I think, the noblest object-lesson in international fraternity anywhere to be found on the earth. It is an object-lesson that grows in distinctness as our eyes open to new possibilities of unarmed amity; for at last we are slowly awakening to the knowledge that brotherhood is a higher interest of the human race, and may even call for a loftier type of bravery than bloodshed.
There was, of course, some little initial unrest in the Franco-English colony, but this was largely allayed when, in 1774, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which restored the French civil code and defined Canada as extending from Labrador to the Mississippi, and from the watershed of Hudson Bay to the Ohio—in other words, as including the present Provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and a number of States over which the Stars and Stripes now float. Then came the War of Independence, which turned our brothers into our cousins, and caused the Great Lakes to be Canada’s southern boundary, instead of her waist-belt.
The English population of Canada—far smaller than the French population—was now increased by the arrival from the south of 25,000 persons who, loyal to the old tie with Great Britain, refused their allegiance to the newly-created United States. French and English were soon united in a desire to enjoy such constitutional privileges as had already been granted to the Maritime Provinces; but while the majority were anxious that their own national traditions should be followed, the minority wished for institutions modelled on English lines. The British Government solved the problem by splitting Canada into two—an Upper Canada for the English, and a Lower Canada for the French—and giving to each a Legislature of its own, though a Legislature in which the people’s representatives were under the thumb of Crown nominees.
The war between the United States and Great Britain, in 1812-14, exposed the two Canadas and the Maritime Provinces to a severe ordeal, through which they came triumphant; and afterwards our French and English fellow-subjects resumed their agitation for a full measure of popular government. They went ultimately to the length of rebellion; and then it was not long before the Home Government granted their desire. Friction had occurred between the two Canadas on questions of revenue, and so, by the Act of 1840 that conceded a democratic constitution, these two Canadas, after half a century of separation, were again made into one Canada under one Legislature; the two halves of a political whole being now distinguished as Canada East and Canada West. Happily, however, a clash of interests arose between the French population and the English—happily, I say, because it led to the union, in 1867, of Canada West and Canada East (thence-forward to be known as the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec) with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; and this was the first stage of Confederation, a process whereby the name “Canada” was transferred to the great country, stretching from ocean to ocean, which bids fair to develop wealth and population like the United States of America, and to become the foremost nation of the British Empire.
I have only told, in broad outline, the story of Eastern Canada—that part of the Dominion which holds the accumulated interest of stirring vicissitudes experienced over a period of four hundred years. We will now turn to the only other part of the Dominion that has a history stretching back to the Middle Ages. I refer to the Hudson Bay region.
Man is a toy in the hands of Time. Things he does in one century are apt, in the light of another, to assume the character of a droll misuse of opportunity. The early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company tells, in effect, of men who worked in a rich gold mine and collected nothing but quartz.
In 1610 Henry Hudson—that glorious, pathetic hero—discovered the great northern indentation in the map of Canada; and it was re-discovered overland, about sixty years later, by two dashing adventurers from “New France”—Medard de Groseillers and Pierre Radisson, who returned from Hudson Bay with rich booty, of which they were despoiled by the authorities at Quebec. The two indignant Frenchmen went with the story of their wrongs to France, where they were treated with laughing contempt. Then they crossed to England and told our King all about it. Charles II. (who was staying at Oxford, to avoid the plague of London) pricked up his ears, and—some of his followers being minded to invest their money in a promising business speculation—a Royal Charter was granted to “Gentlemen Adventurers trading to Hudson’s Bay.” His Majesty did the thing handsomely while he was about it; for the Charter gave the Adventurers all the country and all it contained for all time.
What was the booty Radisson and Groseillers (whom, by the way, Charles II. insisted upon calling “Mr. Gooseberry”) had brought from Hudson Bay? It took the form of 600,000 beaver skins. Resident in that part of the world are many four-footed creatures which, because the weather is apt to be cold, are provided by nature with warm, hairy coats; and the fur that is a necessary for them is a luxury for man—and especially for woman. Accordingly, the Adventurers sent their ships to Hudson Bay for pelts they could turn into pelf. The actual trapping and skinning was done by the Indians, from whom the Adventurers’ agents secured the valuable furs in exchange for tobacco, shot, brandy, and other commodities of civilisation. Sometimes, not content with killing the beaver, the mink, and the silver fox, the Indians killed the Adventurers’ agents, and vice versa; but in a general way the natives and the visitors traded on a footing of mutual toleration—business being done on these lines: six beavers for one blanket, half a pound of beads for one beaver, twelve buttons or twenty fish-hooks for ditto, and twelve beavers for one gun. The Hudson’s Bay men built themselves forts, and their commercial transactions with the red man were always conducted through a small wicket in the palisades.
Nor were picturesque touches lacking at the London end. Prince Rupert was the governor, and for colleagues he had a committee who, by way of tempering the austerity of the company’s affairs, permitted occasional latitude to a festive spirit. Lord Preston having rendered the company a service, the warehouse keeper was instructed to deliver “as many black beaver skins as will make my lord a fine covering for his bedd”; and, in gratitude for favours from a more exalted quarter, “two pairs of beaver stockings are ordered for the King and the Duke of York.” The Adventurers were equally alive to domestic claims on their goodwill, as may be inferred from orders “to bespeak a cask of canary for ye governor,” and “a hogshead of claret for ye captains sailing from Gravesend.”
THE ONLY SLUM IN CANADA—LITTLE CHAMPLAIN STREET, QUEBEC
“One of the quaintest customs that I found in the minute books,” writes Agnes C. Laut, the company’s painstaking historian, “was regarding the home-coming ships. The money that had accrued from sales during the ships’ absence was kept in an iron box in the warehouse on Fenchurch Street. It ranged in amount from £2,000 to £11,000. To this, only the governor and deputy-governor had the keys. Banking in the modern sense of the word was not begun till 1735. When the ships came in, the strong box was hauled forth and the crews paid. . . . An average of ten thousand beaver a year was brought home. Later, otter and mink and marten became valuable. These, the common furs, whalebone, ivory, elks’ hoofs and whale blubber made up the list of the winter sales. Before the days of newspapers, the lists were posted in the Royal Exchange, and sales held ‘by candle’ in lieu of the auctioneer’s hammer—a tiny candle being lighted, pins stuck in at intervals along the shaft, and bids shouted till the light burned out. One can guess with what critical caress the fur fanciers ran their hands over the soft nap of the silver fox, blowing open the fur to examine the depth and find whether the pelt had been damaged in the skinning. Half a dozen of these rare skins from the fur world meant more than a cargo of beaver. What was it, anyway—this creature; rare as twentieth-century radium, that was neither blue fox nor grey, neither cross nor black? . . . Was it senility or debility or a splendid freak in the animal world like a Newton or a Shakespeare in the human race? Of all the scientists from Royal Society and hall of learning, who came to gossip over the sales at the coffee houses, not one could explain the silver fox.”
The Adventurers’ right to the greater part of the present Dominion of Canada was disputed by the French. A nation went to war with a company. France dispatched fighting fleets. So did the Adventurers; for, what with the high price of silver fox and the low price of beads, the iron box at Fenchurch Street kept well filled. Hudson Bay was again and again the scene of horrible carnage; now one party having the best of it, now another. Anybody wishing to have his eyes opened to what happened between 1682 and 1713 should read “The Conquest of the Great North West,” by the authoress I have just quoted. Let us fix our gaze on one typical scene in the grim retrospect.
In 1697 five French men-of-war arrived in Hudson Straits under the command of the redoubtable Iberville. On his ship, the Pelican, forty men were down with scurvy. On another, the Wasp, a gun broke loose during a gale, crushing several of the crew. For eighteen days the little fleet was ice-jammed in an impenetrable fog. Later, the Pelican became separated from the rest of the fleet. Seeing three ships on the horizon, Iberville hastened towards the supposed friends. They proved to be English men-of-war, the Hampshire, the Dering, and the Hudson’s Bay. When the French commander made that discovery, it was too late to flee. “Quickly, ropes were stretched to give the mariners hand-hold over the frost-slippery deck. Stoppers were ripped from the fifty cannon, and the batterymen below, under La Salle and Grandville, had stripped naked in preparation for the hell of flame and heat that was to be their portion in the impending battle. Bienville, Iberville’s brother, swung the infantrymen in line above decks, swords and pistols prepared for the hand-to-hand grapple. De la Potherie got the Canadians to the forecastle, knives and war hatchets out, bodies stripped, all ready to board when the ships knocked keels. . . . The Hampshire let fly two roaring cannonades that ploughed up the decks of the Pelican and stripped the French bare of masts to the hull. At the same instant, Grimmington’s Dering and Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay circled to the left of the French and poured a stream of musketry fire across the Pelican’s stern. At one full blast, forty French were mowed down; but the batterymen below never ceased their crash of bombs straight into the Hampshire’s hull.”
For four hours the battle raged. “The ships were so close, shout and counter-shout could be heard across decks. Faces were singed with the closeness of the musketry fire. Ninety French had been wounded. The Pelican’s decks swam in blood that froze to ice, slippery as glass, and trickled down the clinker boards in reddening splashes. Grape shot and grenade had set the fallen sails on fire. Sails and mast poles and splintered davits were a mass of roaring flame that would presently extend to the powder magazines and blow all to eternity. . . . Still the batterymen below poured their storm of fire and bomb into the English hull. The fighters were so close, one old record says, and the holes torn by the bombs so large in the hull of each ship, that the gunners on the Pelican were looking into the eyes of the smoke-grimed men below the decks of the Hampshire. For three hours the English had tacked to board the Pelican, and for three hours the mastless, splintered Pelican had fought like a demon to cripple her enemy’s approach. The blood-grimed, half-naked men had rushed en masse for the last leap, the hand-to-hand fight, when a frantic shout went up. . . . The batteries of the Hampshire had suddenly silenced. The great ship refused to answer to the wheel. That persistent, undeviating fire bursting from the sides of the Pelican had done its work. The Hampshire gave a quick, back lurch. Before the amazed Frenchmen could believe their senses, amid the roar of flame and crashing billows and hiss of fires extinguished in an angry sea, the Hampshire, all sails set, settled and sank like a stone amid the engulfing billows. Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men—one hundred and ninety mariners and servants, with sixty soldiers—escaped.
“The screams of the struggling seamen had not died on the waves before Iberville had turned the batteries of his shattered ship full force on Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay. Promptly the Hudson’s Bay struck colours, but while Iberville was engaged boarding his captive and taking over ninety prisoners, Grimmington on the Dering showed swift heel and gained refuge in Fort Nelson.”
Iberville had not noticed the gathering storm, which now broke upon him. “Mist and darkness and roaring sleet drowned the death cries of the wounded, washed and tossed and jammed against the railings by the pounding seas. The Pelican could only drive through the darkness before the storm flaw; ‘the dead,’ says an old record, ‘floating about on the decks among the living.’ The hawser that had towed the captive ship snapped like thread. Captor and captive in vain threw out anchors. The anchors raked bottom. Cables were cut, and the two ships drove along the sands. The deck of the Pelican was icy with blood. Every shock of smashing billows jumbled dead and dying en masse. The night grew black as pitch. The little railing that still clung to the shattered decks of the Pelican was now washed away, and the waves carried off dead and wounded. Tables were hurled from the cabin. The rudder was broken, and the water was already to the bridge of the foundering ship, when the hull began to split, and the Pelican buried her prow in the sands, six miles from the fort.”
The boats had been shot away. Men swam ashore with guns and powder-horns between their teeth. They also strove to tow rough rafts on which the wounded were placed. Eighteen lives were lost in the darkness. As for the survivors, “for twelve hours they had fought without pause for food, and now, shivering round fires kindled in the bush, the half-famished men devoured moss and seaweed raw. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, and when the men lighted fires and gathered round them, they became targets for sharpshooters from the fort, who aimed at the camp fires.
Then three of Iberville’s other ships arrived, one without her steering gear, another without her rudder. The Violent had foundered in a storm. A Frenchman went with flag of truce and bandaged eyes to demand surrender of the fort. Its English garrison sent him back with “No” for his answer. Under cover of fog, the French landed and erected their cannon in the very teeth of the fort. A mutual bombardment occupied two days. Then the French sent another emissary to explain that, if the fort did not surrender, no quarter would be given. “Quarter be cursed!” thundered Bailey, the English commander. Afterwards the palisades were hacked down; and when the inevitable capitulation took place, the garrison marched out with flags flying, to the defiant music of fife and drum.
Truly, the French and English of those days were game and tough, and not lacking in the more conspicuous qualities of the tiger and the bulldog. For all those ships and men to have been fighting over the beaver and the silver fox, and the filling of that iron box in Fenchurch Street, gives the modern mind a good deal to think about. As one reads the story of fierce international hatred, of incursions and pillage and crafty ambuscades, of frequent battles on land and water, Hudson Bay figures to the imagination as a frozen inferno of bloodshed, famine, disease and human anguish unspeakable. The rival traders and raiders timed their death-grips as far as possible to correspond with official periods of warfare between France and Great Britain; but European compacts did not always carry weight with the moving spirits of Hudson Bay. However, the Peace of Utrecht left the company at last in uncontested possession of that huge area, and brought to a close the Adventurers’ long maritime struggle. Their warlike operations, however, were not over, for presently the company became involved in sustained and sanguinary inland strife.
When the French King held sway in “New France,” certain of its citizens, acting under Royal licence, adventured into the forests to collect furs from the Indians. Strangely enough, the extinction of French authority in Eastern Canada gave a great impetus to that French industry. Licences being no longer needed, an augmented army of daring spirits went forth in canoes to voyage into the unknown territories, and barter beads and brandy for the red man’s furry booty. Merchants at Montreal fitted out the dashing voyageurs, and waxed opulent from the sale of skins. A fierce rivalry grew among the enterprising Frenchmen, who strove to out-vie one another in hospitality to the much-sought-after Indians. There were incidents like this:
A party of drunken Crees became so obstreperous in their demand for more rum that three traders, who had a little fort as shelter, sought to strengthen their position by adding laudanum to the liquor. One Indian drank too much and died, whereupon his enraged followers smashed the fort and slaughtered their three treacherous hosts, as well as seven other men who happened to be present. Nor did revenge stop there. Word was sent to other tribes that all white traders had better be massacred; and not far away, three companies of Frenchmen, sleeping within the inadequate protection of three wooden houses, were aroused one night by the dread war cry of the Assiniboines, and, for the most part, were promptly slain.
Meanwhile the English fur traders were traversing the rivers that flowed into Hudson Bay, and erecting their fortified posts away inland. Just how far “Rupert’s Land” extended in any given direction they were not in a position to say—they merely knew that, be it little or much, it all belonged to them; Charles II., having, indeed, given away most of the North American continent with true kingly generosity.
And thus it came about that the French fur traders, besides having to put up with a rivalry among themselves, and with spasmodic Indian savagery, found themselves confronted by English competitors, who looked upon them as trespassers and thieves. In the circumstances, the Montreal merchants (who, to add to the complication, were Scotsmen) judged it advisable to combine, so that the voyageurs from Eastern Canada should present a united front to their foes. Such was the origin, in 1783, of the North-West Company, destined to grow exceedingly rich and reckless and to maintain a long, fierce and bloody feud with the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Let us glance at a few representative incidents recorded by Agnes Laut: “The North-West partner, Haldane, came to Bad Lake in 1806 with five voyageurs and knocked up quarters for themselves near the Hudson’s Bay cabins. By May, William Corrigal, the Hudson’s Bay man, had four hundred and eighty packs of furs. One night, when all the English were asleep, the Nor’-West bullies marched across, broke into the cabins, placed pistols at the heads of Corrigal and his men, and plundered the place of furs.” There was further trouble at the same place a little later. “An Indian had come to the post in September. Corrigal outfitted him with merchandise for the winter’s hunt, and three English servants accompanied the saulteur down to the shore. Out rushed the Nor’-Wester MacDonell flourishing his sword, accompanied by a bully, Adhemer, raging aloud that the Indian had owed furs to the Nor’-Westers and should not be allowed to hunt for the Hudson’s Bay. The two Corrigal brothers and one Tait ran from the post to the rescue. With one sweep of the sword, Eneas MacDonell cut Tait’s wrist off, and with another hack on the neck felled him to the ground. The French bully had aimed a loaded pistol at the Corrigals, daring them to take one step forward. John Corrigal dodged into the lake. MacDonell then rushed at the Englishmen like a madman, cutting off the arm of one, sending a hat flying from another whose head he missed, hacking the shoulder of a third. Unarmed, the Hudson’s Bay men fled for the fort gates. The Nor’-Westers pursued. Coming from the house door, John Mowat, a Hudson’s Bay man, drew his pistol and shot Eneas MacDonell dead. Couriers went flying to the North-West camp for reinforcements. Haldane and McLellan, two partners, came with a rowdy crew and threatened if Mowat were not surrendered they would have the Indians butcher every soul in the fort, if it cost a keg of rum for every scalp. Mowat promptly surrendered,” and, after being confined for a year at Fort William, was sentenced by Montreal judges to be imprisoned for six months and to be branded.
The business rivals overran the whole country right to the Pacific, and the names of rivers and passes in Western Canada bear witness to the enterprise and hardihood of those pioneer explorers. Indeed, the Hudson’s Bay men and the Nor’-Westers discovered between them the bulk of the Dominion. That is their title to the respect and gratitude of posterity. For the rest, what a tragic farce the whole business was! Here was a country so enormous that the fastest trains to-day occupy nearly a week in crossing it by a direct route from east to west; a country stretching so far northward that its present population of eight million merely suffices thinly to sprinkle a southern strip; a country with agricultural and mineral resources adequate for the support of over one hundred million people—and those two commercial corporations turned their opportunities to no better account than in murdering one another’s representatives over the miserable business of trading beads and brandy for the hides of small quadrupeds.
Please do not suppose that I write in any spirit of criticism and censure. The world evolves in its own strange way; and the human race is permanently incapacitated by altered circumstances from sitting in judgment on its ancestors. Still, the spectacle of those two companies feeling cramped by each other’s presence in a roomy place like Canada, and using pistols and daggers to lessen the pressure of commercial competition, is exceedingly droll, if grim.
The state of affairs to which I have referred continued until 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed its formidable opponent. That amalgamation was preceded by a very interesting and important event. Lord Selkirk, a wealthy viscount, and one of the noblest characters in Canadian history, established the first community of immigrant settlers in the North-West—a fact to which I shall recall the reader’s attention in my chapter about Winnipeg. The area conceded for settlement was known as the Red River district, and included much of the present Province of Manitoba and part of what is now the State of Minnesota. To secure the co-operation of the Hudson’s Bay Company in his philanthropic design, Lord Selkirk had taken the precaution first to buy up a controlling interest in that commercial concern. Warfare between Nor’-Westers and Hudson’s Bay men involved those early settlers in some bloody horrors. But in the present chapter we need only consider the affairs of the pioneer community in relation to the future opening up of the entire North-West to colonisation. And first I would mention a peaceful understanding at which the Selkirk settlers arrived with the Indians of the district. Land was surrendered in consideration of the annual payment to each tribe of “one hundred pounds of good merchantable tobacco”; that compact of 1817 being interesting as the forerunner of an important series of treaties with the red man.
United as one company, the fur traders flourished exceedingly, and came in time to exercise authority, not merely throughout the present Dominion, but over territory since absorbed into the American Republic, besides extending their sway to Alaska and across the ocean to the Sandwich Islands—a tolerably large area to be exploited in the interests of the iron box of Fenchurch Street. The coming of human settlers to disturb the furry quadrupeds was, of course, a calamity to be prevented, or at any rate delayed, by all the power and statecraft at the company’s command. But the tide of democracy could not for ever be resisted, and the pelt-collectors’ title to a huge empire melted before the hard facts of American, British and Russian occupation.
The company was not so foolish as to take up arms in defence of its flimsy rights. Its policy was to hinder human encroachment as long as possible, and then bow to the inevitable. By 1835 its spheres of influence had sadly dwindled, and its titles to territorial possession were becoming more and more shadowy. The governor and his committee perceived the necessity for doing something to arrest the decay of their power and prestige. So it was the strange fate of the Red River colony to be bought back by the Hudson’s Bay Company, for a sum of £84,000, from the heirs of Lord Selkirk. In that colony the fur traders now established an autocratic government that aimed primarily at the vigorous suppression of all private trade in pelts. It was not long before the settlers were gasping for freedom. Vainly they demanded the representative government that had been secured under the American flag by their comrades in Minnesota. At the opening of the second half of the nineteenth century, indeed, the fate of the Red River settlement—the pioneer colony of the West—hung in the balance. Would it, like Oregon, join the Union? In that critical situation, an independent element of unrest was provided by the growing discontent of the Half-Breeds. For long years past, the fur traders—and more particularly the French Nor’-Westers—had intermarried with the Indians, and brought into existence that numerous, pathetic people, who inherited the conflicting traditions of two races.
In view of growing unrest in the Red River settlement, the Home Government instituted a Parliamentary inquiry into the affairs of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That inquiry seemed to effect nothing. But, hey presto! a change came over the position immediately afterwards. In 1863 a syndicate of capitalists, known as the International Financial Association, bought up the Hudson’s Bay Company for £1,500,000, and turned over the concern to new shareholders in a new Hudson’s Bay Company on a footing of increased capital. The tension was relieved; for public interests were represented by a wisely-controlled force working in the background. With the confederation in 1867 of Canada East, Canada West, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the creation of the Dominion of Canada commenced. The newly established Federal Government promptly arrived at an understanding whereby the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished any rights of territorial administration it may anywhere have possessed; and in 1870 the Red River colony became the Province of Manitoba and an invaluable part of the Dominion of Canada.
But before suffering the Company to pass out of this narrative, I must satisfy the reader’s curiosity concerning the terms it secured. It received a money payment of £300,000; it was granted one-twentieth of the arable land in the country over which, at the date of the arrangement, it held dominion; and its title to all land on which its forts stood was confirmed. Probably the shareholders have never regretted the bargain made on their behalf. “How valuable one-twentieth of the arable land was to prove,” says Agnes Laut, “the company itself did not realise till recent days, and what wealth it gained from the cession of land where its forts stood may be guessed from the fact that at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) this land comprises five hundred acres of what are now city lots at metropolitan values.” Moreover, I understand that the business of collecting furs is still a lucrative one; while visitors to Canada will not fail to notice, in all the great cities, the magnificent general stores of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
OLD FORT GARRY, WINNIPEG
NEW UNION STATION, WINNIPEG
One regrettable fact has to be noted in connection with the creation of the Province of Manitoba. The anxious and bewildered Half-Breeds, fearing their interests were in peril, rose in rebellion under Louis Riel, the trouble not being repressed until Colonel (afterwards Viscount) Wolseley crossed the continent with an armed force. The growth of Manitoba under representative government has been one of the most inspiring achievements of modern times; but the history of that province merges at this point into the history of Western Canada, to which it had become the open door.
Western Canada provided the Federal Government with several problems, of which the most pressing concerned the status of the roving bands of Indians. In the States, civilisation was driving back the natives with fire and sword. In Canada, recourse was had to milder and more effective methods. But in one respect the Yankees and the Canadians acted in concert. They joined in a war of extermination against the buffalo. Of the number of those animals roaming the prairie, it is difficult for anybody nowadays to form a conception. One traveller recorded that he rode for twenty-five miles through an unbroken herd, which he estimated to include one million animals. In the States, “Buffalo Bill” (Colonel Cody) took an active part in the work of extermination. He is credited with shooting forty-eight of the poor creatures in fifty minutes. In a period of some eighteen months—when he was under contract to supply all the meat needed by the huge army of men engaged in constructing the Kansas Pacific Railway—he accounted for 4,280 buffaloes. On both sides of the international boundary line, the country was swept clean of these fine beasts. I have seen places on the prairie white with an accumulation of their bones, whereof the weathered relics may still be found.
When the Indians saw what was being done, they were filled with apprehension. The buffalo was their means of subsistence. Its flesh supplied them with meat, both fresh and, when pounded down and mixed with fat, as pemmican; its skin provided them with clothing, tents, canoes, bridle and reins; its sinews made strings for their bows; and its horns served them as powder flasks. But the Federal Government had no intention of permitting the Indians to starve. Their helplessness without the buffalo was the means of bringing them, willy-nilly, within the pale of civilisation. I have mentioned the pioneer compact with the red man achieved by the Selkirk settlers. That had been followed by similar understandings in Eastern Canada. And now the Federal Government effected a series of treaties with the North-West Indians, who surrendered any general claim they may have had to the country at large, and accepted a specific title to ample lands, or reserves, set apart for their exclusive use. Moreover, the Government agreed to make them annual money payments, and to grant them free rations until such time as they should be self-supporting—an end Canada is striving (and not without a very encouraging measure of success) to further by providing the tribes with schools, both general and agricultural, and with cattle, seed, and farming implements.
The interests of the natives were served in another way. American traders, in defiance of the law, were supplying them with intoxicants; and the fascinating, maddening “fire water” was a temptation wellnigh irresistible to the red man. To sweep that traffic from the prairie, the Government enrolled the North-West Mounted Police—a force that has won for itself a splendid reputation for tact, pluck and all-round efficiency. The suppression of the illicit liquor trade was one of the earliest and best of its achievements. The Riders of the Plains won the respect and confidence of the Indians, and carried through a treaty with the warlike Blackfeet—the last tribes to be won from a footing of irresponsible independence. When the Half-Breeds, again under Louis Riel, once more raised the flag of revolt, the mounted police rendered effective assistance in repressing the trouble; and this time it was repressed permanently.
The year of that rebellion witnessed the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the creation of modern Western Canada.
CHAPTER III
QUEBEC PROVINCE
One of the most interesting facts concerning Canada is that very little is known about it. Its eight million people are scattered along the southern strip—a mere fraction of the country. The great bulk of Canada is neither settled nor surveyed. Nay, it has not been explored, save in the sense that a person proceeding along the road from London to Scotland may be said to have explored England.
Settlement in Western Canada is necessarily of recent date. But in Eastern Canada civilisation has already had a good innings. The colonising of Quebec province began three hundred years ago. Therefore a hasty thinker would be apt to suppose that, however much uncertainty may envelop other parts of the Dominion, Quebec province must by this time be well-trodden territory. What smiles that supposition would cause among the urbane politicians and officials I met in the provincial Parliament House!
If the population of Canada, instead of being eight millions, were one hundred and ten millions—that is, an equivalent to the German and French nations rolled into one—and if the whole of that population were concentrated in Quebec province, the inference of the hasty thinker would probably be correct. For the area of Quebec province is nearly equal to France and Germany combined.
QUEBEC FROM THE ST. LAWRENCE: WINTER SCENE
How can a couple of million busy people inspect and investigate, let alone settle and develop, such an area? Necessarily they and their homes, their farms, their factories, and their railways occupy but a fraction of their vast territory. All the rest of the country is available to whomsoever cares to go and unlock its riches.
Time was when the French-Canadians gave little attention to the problems and possibilities presented by the unknown geography with which they were associated. Prosperous, healthy, and happy, they were satisfied to let the land north of 48° latitude and west of 70° longitude look after itself. But nowadays settled Quebec is much interested in unsettled Quebec. I will tell you why.
Canada, having a pre-vision of her destiny, is vigorously engaged in promoting it. She has set herself the task of attracting population by proclaiming her resources. The paramount need has become the ruling interest. In travelling through the country, you will find that matter uppermost in the mind of every adult with whom you converse. And it is recognised as a leading concern of the State. The Federal Government and the Provincial Governments are expending much thought, ingenuity, and money in furthering this national policy of promoting immigration. The collecting of facts, with a view to their publication, is recognised as one important means to that end. Therefore the Governments are constantly sending prospecting scientists into the unknown lands to scratch the face of Nature and gain some clues.
To give an idea of Quebec province, I will briefly outline a journey made in 1905 by Mr. A. P. Low (now Deputy Minister of Mines) into the Chibougamau district. It is by no means remote, being not much more than a hundred miles from a railway. How Mr. Low came to be sent there was because certain prominent citizens of Quebec, having received interesting tidings from the Chibougamau district, suggested to Sir Wilfrid Laurier that a member of the Geological Survey ought to go and have a look at it. The interesting tidings are worth recalling, since they illustrate the sort of treatment pioneers receive at the hands of Fate. It appears that Mr. Peter McKenzie made a “prospecting and trading journey” through the region in 1903, and while this enterprising gentleman was looking for iron ores “he chanced upon an important discovery of asbestos” (I quote from a Government record, save that I decline to spell the infusible fibrous mineral with a “u”). Thus encouraged, Mr. McKenzie re-visited the district in the following year, and this time he searched for copper deposits, and found “a large mass of gold-bearing quartz.” Had he gone yet a third time, and tried to locate a tin mine, he would, I presume, have stumbled upon a reef of diamonds; but that is mere conjecture.
Now for Mr. Low’s experiences. Leaving Ottawa on June 21st, he went by rail to Lake St. John, and there secured the services of eight Indians, four (who knew the Chibougamau district as well as I know Charing Cross) being engaged to act as canoemen, the other four being required merely to assist with the baggage on the outward journey. And here let me point out what a useful rôle, in connection with the development of Canada, is served by the red man, now that he has been tamed and completely cured of his old abominable practice of removing people’s scalps. To the prospector and the surveyor the Indians are invaluable pilots and porters, their navigation of swift currents being marked by a skill to which the average white man is a stranger. Sustained toil is not to their liking, since it is inconsistent with that large measure of leisure and meditation which they associate with human existence; but, for the rest, Canada’s pioneers and explorers give them a good name. One distinguished surveyor, who has had much experience in the wilds, told me he could recall only a single instance of dishonesty on the part of an Indian who had served him; nor, when he detailed the affair, could I shut my eyes to an element of justification in the delinquent’s conduct.
ASBESTOS QUARRY AT THETFORD, QUEBEC PROVINCE
FARMLAND SCENERY, ASCOT, QUEBEC PROVINCE
“I arranged with the Indian,” said the surveyor, “that, for an agreed sum, he should pilot me along a dangerous stretch of river to a portage where I proposed to camp for the night. He did so, and I paid him his money; but you may imagine my annoyance when, on returning to the river-side after half an hour’s stroll in the woods, I found that the ruffian had absconded with a pair of my blankets. Such an unusual occurrence rankled in my memory, and four months later, on the return journey, I made it my business to inquire for that Indian. It turned out that he was still in the district, and when I charged him with the theft he calmly admitted it. But it was right, he contended, that he should take my blankets, and he went on to tell me why. Nine years previously, a white man engaged him as guide, and afterwards slipped off without paying the promised fee. It was a mean thing to do, and a most unwise one, because the Indian has a very tenacious memory for anything in the nature of treachery. For nine years, you see, this Ojibway had nursed his wrong, and from the next white man who came along he exacted retribution. From my point of view this was rather crude justice, and at first I requested the return of my property. But I did not press the point when I saw how incapable he was of grasping the subtlety that white men are not answerable for one another’s sins.”
Before railways were invented, and when the whole world depended on roads and rivers, it must have been hard to say where settlement ended and the wilderness began. But to-day civilisation marks its domain by steel lines, and a territory that lacks railways is unable to compete, whether in agriculture, mining, or manufactures, with territories that possess railways. Mr. Low’s experiences—which are the experiences of Canada’s hundred and one other explorers—reintroduce us to the world as it existed before Watt and Stephenson interfered. No road having been made to the Chibougamau district, he had to fall back on the rivers. And with rivers, be it noted, Nature has liberally endowed Quebec province.
Having laid in a good stock of provisions, Mr. Low secured some stout cedar canoes, and set off on his journey from Lake St. John—he and the Indians. They did not advance with the speed which readers of Fenimore Cooper’s novels would expect. Their rate of progress averaged fifteen miles a day, the responsibility for this dilatoriness lying wholly with the Ashwapmuchuan River. Only every now and then is it a level, composed, and Thames-like avenue of water. In between whiles, after the wont of Canadian rivers, it plays leap-frog down the gradients. On approaching foaming rapids and roaring cascades, Mr. Low and the Indians got out and walked. Carrying canoes, stores, and baggage over portages that are sometimes a mile in length is, of course, a laborious and slow business. On the other hand, it is better to go through with that ordeal than to be whirled over a waterfall that has a sheer drop of sixty feet—to mention one picturesque feature occurring along Mr. Low’s route.
I will not dilate upon the glorious mountains and the verdant valleys that came under the explorer’s notice. The lovely lakes—some of them twenty miles and more in length—rather tried his patience. “Many of them are so indented and dotted with islands,” he deplored, “that it is difficult for even the Indian guides to follow correctly the channels.”
He noted the millions of dormant dollars existing in the form of timber: the black spruce (most abundant of all), the fir, the banksian pine, the aspen and balsam poplars, the white birch, the cedar, and other useful sorts. “White spruce up to twenty-four inches in diameter are,” he reported, “in many places numerous enough to permit of profitable lumbering if any means existed for transport to the southern markets.” But discerning science did not confine itself to indicating the fortunes in forests that awaited human immigrants. It shed a passing tear over the timber wealth that had been already consumed by immigrants of another genus. “Larch formerly grew in abundance,” Mr. Low reported, “and often they exceeded the white spruce in size,” as was obvious from old trees still standing as skeletons. But about twelve years ago, it seems, those forests were destroyed by a visitation of the European larch saw-fly—that wasp without a waist whose caterpillars have a large appetite, twenty legs, and an interesting way of standing with the hind part of their bodies gracefully curled over their heads. So our European saw-fly was the guilty party, was he? One wonders how in the name of Christopher Columbus he got across.
Mr. Low found some white fellow-creatures in the virgin territory he was exploring. To begin with, he saw (as the opening of this narrative will have prepared my readers to learn) a small party of miners working at the asbestos outcrops on Asbestos Island in McKenzie Bay, which is situated in the north-west corner of Chibougamau Lake. He also found in the district other white, or whitish, people, who were residents of long standing. Indeed, the strange fact has to be noted that groups of these white or whitish people are to be found in even the most northerly and remote districts of unexplored and unexploited Canada. The history of the Hudson’s Bay Company—one of the greatest dramas that the world and the centuries have witnessed—was sufficiently outlined in the preceding chapter. In this place it is merely necessary to relate that, on approaching Lake Mistassini, Mr. Low found “a number of old men, women and children” congregated on the shore, awaiting the arrival of some flour and groceries they were expecting by canoe from Hudson Bay. Much earlier in his travels, at a point only some sixty miles from Lake St. John, he had come upon another settlement of the ancient fur-collecting corporation.
In a manner wholly unforeseen, the Hudson’s Bay Company is proving of great value to modern Canada. Each of its outposts of civilisation is a treasury of clues to the agricultural possibilities of an unknown country. The trappers, in their remote isolation, have naturally gone in for a little gardening. It has helped to pass the time, not to mention the advantage of having fresh vegetables and ripe gooseberries on the dinner-table. When the rare visitor now arrives, as an emissary from populated regions away in the south, the Hudson Bay folk must be intensely gratified by the interest he takes in their cultivated back-yards.
Mr. Low is not the man to neglect opportunities. “The surrounding country appears to be fertile,” he noted, “as, in the clearing about the old Hudson’s Bay Company post, timothy grass grows abundantly and small fruits ripen early.” On the other hand, no great success had apparently attended horticultural efforts at the second trappers’ settlement he visited. “Great difficulty is experienced,” we are told, “in growing a small crop of potatoes, although the soil is the best in the region.” Again, “attempts have been made at this place to grow oats, barley, and wheat, but without success.” The explanation of this unsatisfactory state of things is detected by the scientific mind, and a valuable hint to the agricultural world is the result. This particular Hudson’s Bay post happens to be twelve hundred feet above sea-level—indeed, it occurs very near the line of greatest elevation running through Quebec province. “When lands are situated above the thousand-foot level,” Mr. Low points out, “there is constant danger of summer frosts, though these would probably be lessened by clearing the lands and breaking the surface with the plough.” He emphasises his contention by instancing experiences at the Hudson’s Bay post beside Waswanipi Lake, which is situated about one hundred and fifty miles away to the south-west. The climatic conditions are more favourable there because the elevation is only seven hundred feet above sea-level. At the Waswanipi station, we learn, “excellent root crops are grown annually, while experiments with the cultivation of cereals show that oats, barley, and the hardier varieties of wheat easily ripen.” The Canadian settler, when choosing a northern homestead, will be well advised to keep this matter of elevation in mind.
Mr. Low, it will be observed, by no means limits his investigations, when travelling through a new country, to matters germane to his own science. “The fisheries of the larger lakes,” reported this broad-minded geologist, “will undoubtedly be a source of considerable wealth to the province as soon as a railway provides quick transport.” Speaking from personal experience, he goes on to say that “the chief food fishes are lake-trout, brook-trout, pike, pickerel, sturgeon, whitefish, and two species of sucker.” The sucker is, I believe, also known on the North American continent as the “stone-roller” and the “red-horse.” No doubt it is more appetising than it sounds.
Coming now to matters belonging to Mr. Low’s special province, I must first mention his discovery of an interesting freak of Nature. “Near the western end of McKenzie Bay,” it seems, “is a low cone of dark, rotten serpentine, peculiar on account of its magnetic attraction, the compass pointing to it from all directions within a radius of half a mile.”
A geological report is, of course, a solemn, technical, and unsensational document. The business of a geologist is to identify the rocks, seen and unseen, the word “rocks,” in its scientific application, including pretty well every constituent of the globe save water and air. The geologist does not mine for gold, silver, and precious stones; he merely decides whether and where it would be worth while to mine for them. His task is to go in advance and prepare the way for the prospector.
Thus Mr. Low’s report does little more than hint at mineral wealth. Having confirmed the discovery of a large mass of gold-bearing quartz, he states the conditions under which similar bodies may perhaps be found in neighbouring localities. As to copper, we have to be content with the information that “in a number of places good signs of ore are seen in diabase schists.” Concerning iron, a “locality of promise” is indicated. With regard to asbestos, which lends itself to readier identification, we have more definite information. “All the areas of serpentine discovered in the region up to the present time,” Mr. Low’s report bears witness, “contain veins of asbestos, and in many places these veins are of sufficient size and number to form valuable deposits as soon as a railway is built to the shores of Chibougamau Lake.”
Mr. Low made the return journey in fine style, “shooting all the rapids along the river,” and arriving at Lake St. John on September 1st. Thus his explorations occupied more than nine weeks, and—rendering testimony on yet another important point—he mentions a sustained experience of fine weather, “not a day having been lost by rain or head-winds.”
Thus by following in the footsteps of a scientific scout of civilisation, we have had a peep at one morsel of a huge territory which man has scarcely begun to utilise. There are no means of measuring its natural resources; we know only that they are vast. Conjecture may, however, be based on analogy. The present population of Quebec is practically restricted to a tenth part of the province. What is being done in that tenth part does not by any means represent finality, since development in many districts is still at an early stage. Nevertheless, the achievements of a part supply a clue to the possibilities of the whole, so I will mention a few instructive facts.
Last year some fifty million bushels of oats were grown in the province of Quebec; and since to most persons 50,000,000 is an indefinite total, and only vaguely impressive, like 5,000,000 or 500,000,000, I may mention, for the purpose of affording the reader a standard of comparison, that in 1909 the quantity of that grain grown in Scotland—the national head-quarters of oat-cakes and porridge—was only thirty-eight million bushels. Let me quote another item from the long list of products yielded by the fraction of Quebec province that is at present under cultivation. The French-Canadians and their neighbours annually grow about seventeen million bushels of potatoes, or enough to supply the entire population of Ireland from one year’s end to another, allowing for a consumption of 2½ lbs. per week for every man, woman and child. They also grow enough tobacco (principally black and strong kinds, but including a good deal of Havana) to meet the annual requirements of over a million moderate smokers; while Quebec’s immense quantities of apples, cheese, cherries, butter, pears, pumpkins and melons also provide the statistician with much food for thought.
And, while I am about it, let me give a hint or two with reference to the present mineral output of the province. Note, then, that in 1909 some three thousand miners received £270,000 as wages for wresting £459,000 worth of asbestos from the serpentine rocks of Quebec—a region which in the same year enriched the world with over a million barrels of Portland cement (representing a value of £263,000), besides noteworthy quantities of copper, graphite, marble, granite, phosphate, mica, chromite, and ochres.
GATHERING MAPLE SYRUP IN EASTERN CANADA
TOBACCO GROWING, QUEBEC PROVINCE
As to the forests, they represent a vast treasury from which the lumber and pulp industries draw annually a value of about £4,000,000; nor should we forget the six thousand tons of luscious syrup tapped from the maple trees. Again, there is not an area of the earth more richly endowed with water-power; and therefore to Quebec’s manufacturing activity, which has had a brilliant beginning, no man can foresee the end.
Those of my readers who are well-read sportsmen will have been wondering why, all this time, I have omitted to mention a supreme attraction of the region under notice. With its vast virgin forests full of game, its thousands of lakes and rivers alive with fish, Quebec has won the title, in Canada and the United States, of the Angler’s and Sportsman’s Paradise. Many a wealthy American whiles away delightful months hunting the caribou, moose and red deer, the beaver, mink and yellow fox, the woodcock, partridge and widgeon, in that beautiful country of the St. Lawrence River and the Laurentian Range. American angling clubs lease Quebec’s famous salmon pools, and hundreds of New York’s busy citizens spend their holidays capturing the monster trout, bass, pike, and whitefish for which the province is famous.
And anybody may acquire the freehold of one hundred acres of that favoured country on paying 16s. 6d., with four following annual payments of the same amount, the price of Crown land being 10d. per acre, rising to 2s. 6d. in certain areas. For the rest, steamers ply on some of the lakes, the Government is rapidly extending its network of colonisation roads, and in one district free railway transport is conceded to arriving settlers and their families, with 300 lbs. of household effects.
Nor do these facilities exhaust the measures taken by the provincial authorities to secure population. They recognise a necessity to make further special effort in view of a notable disadvantage in the matter of immigration that is peculiar to Quebec. The majority of new arrivals from the United Kingdom—little dreaming what charming and helpful neighbours the French-Canadians make—elect to locate themselves in the provinces where their mother-tongue prevails, and, the number of immigrants from France being insufficient to adjust the balance, Quebec has its grievance. Perhaps I ought rather to say that Quebec had its grievance, for the genius of French-Canadian politicians has proved a match for the situation.
A law was passed granting boons and honour to the mothers and fathers who rear twelve children or more. I first heard of this stroke of enlightened statesmanship when discussing Canada’s future with M. E. E. Taché, the Deputy Minister of Lands and Forests in Quebec’s noble Parliament House.
“We do not get our due proportion of the inrush of settlers,” explained M. Taché. “Very well, then, for peopling our vast province we look rather to the natural increase of the population already here;” and he presented me with a copy of Volume II. of an interesting Government publication.
This publication shows the law of the twelve children in working. It seems that during the first fourteen years of the existence of the statute 3,395 heads of families were registered as qualified to receive the free grant of 100 acres (or, in the alternative, fifty dollars) by which a progressive Government recognised the service they had rendered to Canada by rearing large families. Those 3,395 names had been printed in Volume I., and the significant fact has to be added that, in the comparatively short ensuing period of fifteen months, as many as 2,018 heads of families were added to the roll of honour.
TYPICAL FRENCH-CANADIAN FAMILY: SIXTEEN CHILDREN
Those prize-winners are recorded in page after page of a table printed in six columns. The first column gives the name of the head of the family—usually, of course, the father, but occasionally his widow or his eldest son. Then occurs the name of the wife, or, in the case of a second marriage, of the wives. The third and fourth subdivisions indicate the parish and county of residence. From the fifth column we learn how many children there are in the family, and the sixth column reveals whether the hundred acres or the fifty dollars were preferred. Since the grant of land is associated with an obligation to clear and cultivate it, and since the people of Quebec are already provided with ample farms, it is natural that choice alighted, in a majority of cases, on the money payment. Here and there, indeed, the table reveals a large family so wealthy and contented that they have waived their claim alike to the land and the cash. The proud father accepts as a sufficient reward the honourable publicity conferred by having his name conspicuously printed in State archives.
The column devoted to “Nombre d’enfants” repays examination. The repetition of the number 12 is constantly interrupted by 13, and, less frequently, by 14; but you do not have to turn many pages before you come upon a 15, then other 15’s, with a sprinkling of 16’s, and with even a 17 here and there. When, on page sixty, I found evidence that a French-Canadian of Montmorency had 18 children I did not doubt that here, at last, I had reached high-water mark. Yet no; on turning to page 127 I learnt that M. Cajetan Vezina, of Hebertville, in the county of Lac St. Jean, had 19 children. Among the 2,018 entries that proved to be the top score. Vive Québec! Vive la famille!
CHAPTER IV
NIAGARA AND WHITE COAL
At night I stood upon a steel suspension bridge that hung high above the mighty river it spanned. Electric lamps shed light even down to the water, visible as streaks of foam moving in the eddies. A deep bass drummed unceasing in the ear, and I knew this muffled thunder came out of the great ghostly cloud lying in the darkness away up stream. The deep bass was a background of sound for the treble of crickets piping on the precipitous banks, black with dense vegetation.
Crossing the bridge, you enter the light and bustle of an American city, with its stores and saloons and hotels, its girls without hats and its men without waistcoats.
That night, in cosy quarters on the Canadian side, I was lulled to sleep by the subdued, dull roar, which next morning greeted my awakening. From the hotel window I had my first glimpse of Niagara Falls—of a section, rather, for an outhouse obstructed the view. I saw a wall of water glistening in the sunlight—green transparency the upper part, opaque whiteness the lower, with a cloud of rolling vapour at the base. From a balcony I saw all—the straight American falls on the left, the recessed Canadian falls on the right, and the intervening island. At that distance Niagara Falls are peaceful and beautiful. Leisurely the water curves from the top in flashing emerald; slowly and softly it descends in thick, broken, snowy coils; indolently it evaporates at the bottom into pale fog.
The American portion seems small beside the far sweep of the Canadian. Look curiously and you will see one thin thread of water detached from the main body of the American falls. During the afternoon I was one of a party of friends on the island, close to the top of that thread.
Entering a house divided into dressing-rooms, we, under instruction, exchanged the whole of our own attire for strange, picturesque costumes—enormous boots of felt tied to the feet with string, blue woollen knickerbockers, a blue woollen jacket, and an oilskin hat that covered the ears. Others of the party accepted outer suits of oilskins, so that they looked like fishermen in northern latitudes equipped for a hurricane. It was a hot afternoon, and I declined to be burdened with those waterproof additions. “Oh, very well,” said the attendant with composure; and he went on munching his chewing-gum.
Out in the roadway we stood in a group to be photographed. Two carriages came to a standstill in our proximity, and the ladies within them laughed, and laughed yet again, as they gazed upon us. Beginning to descend a flight of wooden steps, we met an old man coming up, an old man who, arrayed like my companions in oilskins, looked to have had a recent narrow escape from drowning. Wet and glistening, he walked with bent back and heavy footsteps, a saturated moustache assisting his melancholy aspect. He was, it seemed, to be our guide, and soon we were following him down the staircase, which was spiral, and contained within a wooden tower.
At the bottom, thunder stunned our ears, and only by signals and grimaces could we communicate one with another. The thunder never ceased as we followed a downward path cut in the rugged cliff. Presently, at a bend in the path, we saw a frightening sight. I felt like a helpless insect watching the disruption of the universe. The bottom of that thread of Niagara Falls was immediately before us, edge on. Oh, the weight and speed of the endless world of waters smashing down upon the huge boulders! I strove to look upwards to the full height of that grey cataclysm; but the spray was blinding.
Following our guide to the right, we soon were upon a rustic bridge spanning rocks washed by a running riot of waves. The fine rain became a deluge of great spots of heavy water, which hurt my shoulders like pellets of lead. Bitterly did I regret my refusal of the oilskins.
Now we were in front of the waterfall, gasping, with bowed heads, clutching by both hands at wooden rails draped with slimy weed, and shuffling shamelessly along the deluged planks. So we made our way over several bridges—shuddering, blinded, deafened; and as we crept up wooden stairs—a pitiful procession of bent, helpless, suffering men—I found myself doubting the wisdom of making this excursion when so high a wind was blowing.
Somehow we gained a footing on another bridge, and when I forced open my eyes it was to find ourselves between a cliff of rock and a cliff of water. Still were we bombarded by violent rain; still did thunder numb our brains; still was my poor body pierced with cold. But chiefly were our senses afflicted by the wind. In that awful cloister the atmosphere seemed thin and insufficient, and to be moving so quickly as to leave us no time to breathe it.
My right arm was clutched by the man ahead. Instinctively I gripped the man behind. And so we dragged one another through several moments of amazement, blindness, and repressed fear—suddenly to emerge, with a chorus of laughter, into dry, still, sunny air. For there was no rain that day, and no wind—brilliant sunshine pouring from the blue American sky. The only thunder was caused by water falling 167 feet on rugged rock in unending millions of tons. We had passed round the base of the thin, detached thread of the American falls. We had visited the Cave of the Winds. I should not like to take that heroic shower-bath every morning.
As we reascended the pathway to the tower—dripping, aglow, delighted—we turned our heads, and beheld an unbroken rainbow shining in the clouds of vapour that rolled across the river.
All of that is but one experience of Niagara. Afterwards we went on board the Maid of the Mist, where special clothing was once more proferred us; and this time I dressed in accordance with suggestion. On the little steamer’s deck we soon were seated, cowled and habited like a company of friars, with only our faces showing. The stout little craft crept cautiously towards the cataract. Soon we were cruising through the clouds and into the white confusion of eddies, our craft riding perceptibly deeper in water of a buoyancy reduced by myriad intermingled bubbles of air. From the Maid of the Mist we saw the might and majesty of the Niagara Falls from a fresh, if somewhat hazy, point of view.
Niagara is certainly a most unsuitable place for a river. First, there is that appalling, unavoidable tumble down a precipice; then, when equilibrium and composure have been recovered, and dignified progress is resumed between verdant cliffs clothed with flowers and innocence, more geographical treachery is met with. Out of the left bank a bay has been scooped, and water entering there is doomed to rush round and round, entrapped and helpless, carrying branches, leaves, and other floating objects in a monotony of aimless circles. This is the whirlpool, and residents of the neighbourhood tell you grim stories of men in canoes, women in barrels, and derelict human corpses travelling for weary hours in those dizzy waters, until some chance eddy at last brought them within reach of rescuing arms.
NIAGARA: ABOVE THE CANADIAN FALLS
NIAGARA: THE CANADIAN FALLS
Still lower down, the river knows the grievous disadvantage of a channel inadequate to its bulk. Forsaking their parallel relation, the banks deflect in gradually converging lines. At once the water takes alarm. Its face puckers into wrinkles of distress, then is bedabbled with foam; and anon the panic-river, blanched with terror, flings itself forward in delirious haste, white wave climbing over white wave until, at the point of greatest restriction, one sees high piles of struggling water.
Between the whirlpool and the rapids I noted strong men on the rocky banks fishing with thick rods in the fierce current. Out on the Queenston heights locusts droned in the trees on the battlefield, and wild grapes were growing on slopes that commanded a far view of fair scenery.
I have concluded my cursory sketch of Canada’s greatest coal mine—white-coal mine. For a remarkable change has come over the character of Niagara Falls. In my school-days it was merely one of the wonders of the world, and of no more practical account than the Sphinx. Now it is a thing of infinite utility, and has as definite a commercial value as the bullion in the Bank of England.
In the history of mankind no fact is more quaint, I think, than that the greatest achievements of civilisation should be dependent, almost entirely, upon the carboniferous strata in the crust of the earth. Coal, as a means of producing steam, has long been the vital, indispensable factor in human affairs. What would become of the world, people have anxiously asked, when our stock of the grimy mineral should be exhausted? Nay, against that evil day we have long been eagerly awaiting the discovery of an alternative source of heat, the automobile almost suggesting that man has at last put his finger on the substitute. Coal’s great rival has been found; but it is not oil. It happens to be (and this is another quaint fact in the history of mankind) the waterfall.
Who would have thought it? Who could have dreamed that water would prove the substitute—the superior substitute—for fire? It was so natural to suppose that coal could only be deposed by something that was, at any rate, inflammable. We failed to remember that steam and the piston-rod are but means to an end; that end being—power. In the waterfall we find power ready-made.
To convert mechanical energy into the electric current and utilise that current for practical purposes of illumination, was a great achievement, now more than thirty years old. To convert mechanical energy into the electric current, dispatch that current to a distant point, and there re-convert it, without serious leakage, into mechanical energy, was a far greater achievement, now about fifteen years old. Just exactly how it all happens I will not attempt to explain, there being many things concerning electricity that are not known to science, as well as many things that are known to science but not to me.
In visiting the power-houses at Niagara I went behind the scenes, so to speak, and saw everything. Also I saw nothing—energy being invisible. A power-house is a shining palace of repose and polished machinery. Each gallery of dynamos is a cloister of peace, where a poet might compose verses to his lady’s eyes. Huge turbines hum softly in the trim wheel-pit—so deep, so quiet. The giant generator slumbers in a death-like stillness only to be attained by machinery revolving at the pace of twenty-six miles a second. At Niagara one stands in the clean presence of a volume of power measurable by the united strength of a million men.
White coal gives forth no smoke, dirt, or smell—which reminds me of an instructive personal experience.
I was at Hamilton, a city of between seventy and eighty thousand inhabitants, and situated amid delightful scenery at the western end of Lake Ontario. With its hills and magnificent views, Hamilton suggests a small Edinburgh, and (because of its tree-planted avenues and public gardens) an Edinburgh built on Garden-City lines. The train had lately taken me through the orchards and vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula, and here, in the market-place of Hamilton, I found glowing produce from that region—tons of peaches (selling for a few cents the large basketful), and great consignments of apples, pears, plums, and other fruits, massed with pyramids of vegetables and glorious clusters of flowers, so that, in passing along the bustling avenues, I walked amid the most seductive perfumes.
“This, then, is the Fruit City?” I suggested to the resident of Hamilton who accompanied me.
“That is a new name,” he replied, “for the Birmingham of Canada.”
At this I could not help laughing as I looked around at Hamilton, a city bathed in unpolluted sunshine and almost innocent of factory chimneys.
“Birmingham,” I pointed out, “is a manufacturing centre.”
“Exactly,” said my companion; and he went on to tell me of Hamilton’s four hundred large factories, which annually produce I don’t know how many million dollars’ worth of cotton goods, farm implements, boots, furniture, and goodness knows what.
Still was I mystified when dinner-bells rang in the part of the city whither we had wandered, and from out great buildings there poured swarms of high-spirited toilers, who mounted their thousands of bicycles and swept hungrily over the hill.
I began to understand. The machinery in those factories was worked by the water plunging down the Niagara escarpment, over forty miles away. This was a sunny, white-coal Birmingham. I prefer it to the smoky, black-coal Birmingham.
When I first crossed the Atlantic, some nine years ago, the Americans were deriving light and power from Niagara, but the Canadians had merely begun preparations to that end, preparations which, by the way, provided a touch of romance. For a temporary breakwater had been constructed some distance above the Falls, thus laying bare a strip of the river bed, and on that area of polished rock, which during countless ages had been swept by a terrific force, little toddling children were engaged in innocent frolics.
Driving last year amid smiling homesteads, I saw the great steel cable which, suspended from a succession of lofty metal towers, transmits the power of the falls to municipalities of Western Ontario, a share even going to Toronto, which is more than eighty miles from the famous cataract.
The palatial power-houses, the illuminated cities, the smokeless factories, the superb systems of electric tramways—all combine to make a strong appeal to the imagination. Yet Niagara, with its yield of 400,000 horse-power, is but a sample of the Dominion’s unnumbered sources of force. Note this portentous fact—Canada’s supply of white-coal, which is fifty per cent. cheaper than black coal, greatly exceeds that of any other country. In Ontario, prospectors have surveyed readily-available sources to the extent of 3,500,000 horse-power. Some idea of British Columbia’s wealth of waterfalls is conveyed to everyone who travels through that glorious region. Quebec measures its available horse-power by tens of millions.
“When all the coal on the earth shall have been consumed by our machines,” said M. Fabrèques, an eminent French engineer, “Canada will be mistress of the world.” At the time those words were written, water-power and fire-power stood, or were supposed to stand, on an economic equality. The superiority of white-coal has since been demonstrated.
Thus to the future expansion of Canada’s manufactures, who so rash as to prophesy a limit?
CHAPTER V
THE LUMBER KING
Newly arrived in Ottawa one afternoon last summer, I was standing amid its noble buildings, chatting with a fat policeman; and the fat policeman, having identified me as a visitor from England, said I must certainly call on his friend J. R. Booth. My comment was directed to the necessity for an introduction and an appointment, whereupon a puzzled face revealed the friendly constable as wondering what I was talking about. Thus this incident epitomised the great difference between two peoples, otherwise identical, who are divided by three thousand miles of ocean.
I am British, and, consequently, a snob; the fat policeman was Canadian, and, therefore, unhampered by any sense of social distinctions. It would never occur to a fat policeman in the Old Country that he was everybody’s equal. If he happened to know a millionaire, he would talk of that person with awe, instead of with affectionate respect, as was the note sounded in my corpulent companion’s references to J. R. Booth. The untravelled English reader may find a difficulty in realising that it is not a natural law, by Providence ordained, which divides humanity into ladies and gentlemen on the one hand, and common people on the other. In this dear old country many excellent folk would be shocked at the idea of dining at the same table, or praying in the same pew, with a man who does useful manual work; but the people of Canada, while very much alive to the power of the dollar, are blind and deaf to the idea that personal wealth has anything to do with personal worth. The fact is that kid gloves and the silk hat are emblematical of a country that has reached a ripe, not to say rotten, stage of development. In a new and progressive country like Canada muscle commands, not emolument alone, but honour.
From the terrace of the Ottawa Parliament House—that majestic Gothic pile which crowns the architectural beauty of the capital—I looked out upon a far sweep of beautiful Canadian scenery. Down below, in the foreground of that living panorama, the eye noted, on the farther shore of the broad stretch of glistening river, a little town of workshops and factories clustering behind the white smudge that marked a waterfall. I was looking at the head-quarters of the industry out of which the city of Ottawa has grown. I was looking at the largest lumber-mill in the world. I was looking at a part of the property created, owned, and controlled by J. R. Booth, the friend of the fat policeman.
During my tour of the Dominion’s great cities—so full of light, racing tramcars, human enthusiasm, and other forms of electricity—Canada became typified in my mind as The Man Without a Waistcoat; for the energetic citizen permits himself that toilet modification during the brilliant summer months. But an abstract personification was destined to be superseded in my thoughts by a definite human example. In J. R. Booth I felt that I had met the spirit and genius of Canada in the flesh.
I went to him under the conditions which had the sanction of national usage—that is to say, I went without introduction or appointment.
An old man, thick-set and of medium height, with white beard and clean-shaven upper lip; an old man in a suit of dark grey homespun, with peaked cap to match; an old man standing by himself, thinking, in the lee of a wooden shed—that was the multi-millionaire as I happened to find him. It is not many persons who have found him thus.
A while ago Sir Robert Perks dropped in from the Old Country to discuss high finance with the Lumber King of Canada. Sir Robert was shown into an office, where he presently was much astonished by the entrance of an elderly individual in overalls, sprinkled with red dust and mortar. The old man on that occasion had been laying bricks. Visitors sometimes find him at the bottom of an excavation showing his men how to lay concrete.
There was someone with me who, when we saw him standing beside the wooden building, said that was J. R. Booth. I should not have known. At a casual glance he might, even in Canada, have been anybody; in England he could easily have been mistaken for nobody. But when I stepped forward and spoke to that upright, impassive old man, when I confronted his calm, strong countenance, with its wise, blue, penetrating eyes, I realised the presence of J. R. Booth. I cannot find the right word to reflect the impression he produces. The strength of simplicity; the oak pillar or marble column unadorned; a man content to lean on mind instead of manner—those are but imperfect suggestions.
I asked if I might go over his works, and he said “Yes.” I asked if I could have a chat with him afterwards, and again he said “Yes.” For he is a straightforward Aye-and-Nay talker—there is no polite pretending, no verbal embroidery, with J. R. Booth. He struck me as being the rare human marvel—a genius without vanity.
Genius is not an exaggerated definition. J. R. Booth gave the first clues to his future career at an early age by doing something that his relatives considered silly and something else that they considered insane. I should mention he came of a stock of seven brothers Booth who, over a century ago, emigrated from Ireland to Waterloo—a district within that vast stretch of Quebec territory known as the Eastern Townships. There they toiled, prospered, and multiplied; and it came to pass that J. R. Booth, of the rising generation, had to plough, chop wood, and tend stock. But homestead duties did not monopolise the young man’s attention. It was in his mind that the utmost power of a man’s body can accomplish but a minute fraction of the work waiting to be done in the world; and, undeterred by the titters of his intimates, he put in a lot of private time constructing amateur watermills on a rivulet that coursed through the paternal property. Those wheels were running in his mind when, at the age of twenty-one, he broke away from the traditions of his youth, and, with no more than nine dollars in his pocket, set forth to conquer the world in his own way, the good people of Waterloo shaking their heads over the departure of one whom they feared must be crazy.
We may jump a few years spent bridge-building in the States, and so come to the time, fifty-eight years ago, when J. R. Booth, a carpenter without capital, stood on the banks of the River Ottawa, bending an appreciative eye on the Chaudière Falls. There they were, rushing and roaring—a mighty volume of sustained force running to waste. J. R. Booth decided that they were what he was looking for.
Lower rungs of the ladder were quickly mounted—from factory hand to foreman, from foreman to tenant of a mill, from tenant to owner. A bank was willing to back such a man; and at a public auction J. R. Booth bought, for £9,000, a large territory endowed with timber wealth which—as he had taken the precaution to ascertain—was almost incalculable. Local lumbermen regarded the transaction as hopelessly vast and audacious. But with J. R. Booth it was just a beginning.
From having water-wheels on the brain, he now had them on the Ottawa, where they propelled powerful machinery that hauled and sliced his logs. The reader will not, of course, confound this time-honoured water-power, as used at the place of its occurrence, with modern “white coal,” which is water-power in a fluid, invisible form that lends itself to distribution. J. R. Booth had not introduced a new method. He merely introduced an old method into a new place. By the one plan you must bring your factory to the waterfall; by the other plan you send the waterfall, along a metal cable, to the factory.
If the Chaudière cataract illustrates the latent resources of Canada, J. R. Booth illustrates the qualities that go to make good Canadians—those men with daring imaginations, industrious brains and educated hands. But he is not the type—he is a supreme example. It is as though Nature had prepared a store of business capacity sufficient for a townful of merchants, and then, on second thoughts, had bestowed it all on one man.
So fully did J. R. Booth post himself on the practical details of logging and lumbering, so securely did he lay the foundations of every fresh extension of his enterprise, that, of all the forest properties in the world, his became the largest. Mr. Paul E. Bilkey put the case comprehensively when he wrote: “Rivers, streams big and little, snow-covered forest tracks, roads that are good and roads that are bad and roads that are no roads at all, lead ultimately to the coffers of J. R. Booth; veins and arteries stretching over two great provinces and an American State, parts of or tributaries to a great industrial system whose heart pulsates day and night at the Chaudière, to the uttermost agency devised and dominated by the genius of one man—Booth.” And again: “The river is bitted and broken to do the work that Booth requires it to do: turns the wheels of his mills, takes the logs and timbers down through his slides, floats his noisy tugs and carries his booms; and Booth, to keep it all going, draws upon a timber empire in the north which, if strung out in a line a mile wide, would stretch from Quebec to Victoria.”
Thus to measure the scope of this colossal enterprise your imagination must first roam over large areas of Ontario and Quebec, and then (J. R. Booth having felt cramped in a little place like Canada) take cognisance of great slices of the United States. But it is easier to find the limits of the business than of the brain that controls it. Of that brain, the more obvious feature is its organising power. For J. R. Booth is the sole and actual head of the vast concern. It is not run by a syndicate or a company. He easily and successfully carries a burden of mental responsibility, and exercises a volume of mental control, that would suffice to keep half a dozen boards of directors out of mischief.
But the most remarkable feature of this brain, I think, is its capacity for detail. It is not only a mental telescope that sees things too large for ordinary vision; it is a mental microscope that detects minutiæ invisible to most men. I will give two illustrations.
A certain amount of carting having to be done, there are some five hundred horses at the Booth lumber yards, and, one of them recently dying suddenly overnight, it was replaced within an hour or so by the responsible foreman. “Where did the new horse come from?” asked the eagle-eyed old man next morning, soon after arriving on the scene at seven o’clock, as is his daily custom. The other incident occurred one afternoon, when many hundreds of the hands were streaming homeward on the conclusion of their day’s work. The old man, standing by, called to one of the men by name. Said the venerable employer: “Are you satisfied with your wages?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then why do you steal my property?” came the further inquiry. At first the man made faltering protestations of innocence, but when requested to raise the lid of his dinner-can—which, indeed, proved full of copper nails—he confessed his fault in an extremity of penitence and dismay. The old man—who, by the way, associated a reprimand and a warning with forgiveness—had not been blind to the fact that a dinner-can swings in one way if empty (which is its normal state at four o’clock in the afternoon), and in another way if it be full of metal.
PUMPKINS GROWN IN QUEBEC PROVINCE (see page [42])
And all this time I have been speaking of J. R. Booth merely in his capacity of Lumber King. He is other things as well. For example, he has long been a wood-pulp magnate. You get a tree, and pound it into a fibry mass which, with added water, resembles thick oatmeal porridge; and when you have spread that mess out and let it partly dry, it rolls up like a thick, coarse blanket, in which form you can ship it across the ocean to be the basis of the great reels of paper that feed the daily Press. The old man acquired the necessary knowledge and machinery for doing that class of business, and he does it on a grand scale.
Thus on my conducted tour of inspection there was much to see. First, I beheld a stretch of river where the water was hidden by wood—logs floating end to end and side by side, giving a ribbed surface to the vista, which suggested acres of a Brobdingnagian corduroy. They look flat and tame—those trees without roots or leaves or branches. Here one saw the forest suspended midway between the poles of its destiny—no longer an asylum for birds and beasts, nor yet house and furniture for man.
I knew something of the stages through which that floating timber had passed. For I have penetrated into Canada’s lofty jungle and visited the camps where companies of sturdy men fell the trees and saw them into logs, and haul those logs to the nearest river, along which they are borne by the current or drawn by tugs, until at last they join the dense congregation of their fellows massed within sight of the mill.
I now saw the places where, one by one, the logs were pushed within reach of mechanism that lifted them out of the water and bore them up an incline, thence to be delivered into the maw of complex, ingenious, deafening, ruthless machinery. You had some inkling of the force of the Chaudière Falls when you saw what that force was doing. Metal platforms went racing airily about with huge logs as though they were featherweights. Sometimes a great blundering log would roll off the platform, whereat a devilish iron arm arose out of the floor and pushed all that timber tonnage back into position. Always the heavily burdened platform was running forward; and, looking ahead, you saw an obstruction along the route—an obstruction of whirling, shrieking machinery. Still looking, you saw the logs, without any jarring or delay, melt miraculously through the obstruction as if they were no more substantial than cloud. And on the other side they were logs no longer, but merely clusters of planks—circular saws having sliced them like so much cheese.
In those vast chambers of clean, quick mechanism—fed at one end with tree-trunks, and elsewhere belching forth streams of boards, beams, laths, and shingles, with avalanches of chips and cascades of sawdust—in those vast chambers, I say, one’s ears are put out of service by the shrieking din, and the visitor has the more occasion for his eyes. He must walk circumspectly, lest peradventure he be hurled hence by an iron arm, and cut with swift precision into thin, wet slices.
From the lumber mills I passed into regions where J. R. Booth makes wood pulp. My guide began by introducing me to a grinder—a huge affair that swallows six tons of logs a day and files them to fibre. Twenty-two of these grinders were growling away at their mammoth meals, and there were others, I learnt, in process of construction. It was certainly a case of lost identity with the thick, grey stuff that went flowing on to the screens. That it had once been the solid part of a forest was a thought as unthinkable as that little boys would soon be running about with it in distant cities, shouting “’Orrible murder! Lytest special!”
The screens are discriminating. The bulk of the fibre passes through a one-hundredth-of-an-inch aperture, and is good for paper. Then the residue runs on a screen having apertures of about a sixtieth of an inch; and while that which penetrates the interstices is available for fine cardboard, that which remains above is suitable for coarse cardboard. Now the several streams of porridge are pumped upstairs to wet-presses that contain revolving cylinders. You next see the stuff clinging to a hurrying felt band that transfers it to wooden rollers. When several thicknesses have wound round a roller, they are cut with a pointed stick, removed, and folded; and there you have your mechanical ground pulp, which is nothing but washed wood fibre loosely matted by water. That mechanical ground pulp constitutes about three-fourths, in bulk, of paper used by the daily and weekly Press. I was conducted to the range of buildings where J. R. Booth makes the constituent which, with certain small accessories, completes the substance of our news-sheets. Again logs are the raw material. But this time they are not ground. They are first despoiled of their bark by one piece of mechanism; then by another piece of mechanism they are cut into chips. It seems ungracious to criticise a machine; but I observed that the “chipper” is apt to be a little remiss. Some of the chips it turns out are rather larger than J. R. Booth requires them to be. So all are subjected to a screening test, those of excessive size being dealt with in an auxiliary apparatus called a “re-chipper.” The little nuggets of wood are now sent upstairs in a carrier, and shot into big bins, each of which holds nearly two hundred tons. Thence they pass through funnels into great steel digesters, in which they are packed down close with long iron rods. The digesters have an acid-proof lining of bricks and cement; and, to be informed of the reason for this, I was taken downstairs again. We visited a part of the premises which, by reason of certain fumes, suggested “Paradise Lost.” I am not a chemist, and I cannot describe what the agents of J. R. Booth were doing with their immense supplies of lime and sulphur. It must suffice to say that they produced sulphurous acid and a horrid smell.
The former is conveyed to the upper story, and pumped into the digesters, previously packed with chips. “Digester” is the technical and literal description, for the acid-saturated wood is now cooked with steam for ten or twelve hours, at the end of which time it is reduced to white fluff. After being washed in cold water it is called sulphite, and is ready to be mixed with mechanical ground pulp to form paper, small quantities of china clay, size, soda-ash, resin, and blue and red earth being added as a kind of seasoning.
Such, at least, is J. R. Booth’s recipe; for I found that, by a recent addition to his manifold activities, he now makes paper. They took me through the mill, a long building containing several machines stretched out in a perspective of great cylinders, suggesting the segments of a huge iron caterpillar.
It seemed that the mixture of pulp, sulphite, and accessories has to pass through a refining engine on its way from one receptacle to another. Afterwards I saw it pouring like gruel on to each caterpillar’s tail. Under a shower-bath of water sprays—necessary for breaking bubbles—the liquid paper ran on to rotating screens, and was received on moving belts of wire gauze. The endless web of grey liquid soon became a web of white substance.
My companion bade me note the “suction box.” This was a gap in a metal cylinder, and as the material ran over that gap it was sucked inward, with consequent loss of moisture. Now watch its gliding, serpentine course over thirty cylinders, heated by steam, until, finally—as dry, warm, immaculate paper—it is wound into rolls of from four to five miles. Its journey has been to and fro, back and turn, for the cylinders are ranged in double and treble tiers; yet but a minute or so elapses between the fluid state and the finished stage, each caterpillar reeling off paper at the pace of 525 feet per minute.
I have forgotten how many tons of J. R. Booth’s paper are now absorbed by England, what quantity goes to the States, and the proportion consumed in Canada; but I remember that thirty-nine rolls make a car-load, and that those destined for an ocean voyage are furnished with an extra wrapper and have their edges protected by burlap hessian.
To be talking with the Lumber King is to find yourself in the presence of a man unlike anyone you have ever met before, the reason being that J. R. Booth is content to be J. R. Booth. As a matter of fact, everybody is unlike everybody else; but the average mortal disguises his personality with conventionalities of manner, so that only after a while, and from chance clues, do you “get to know him.” J. R. Booth is natural and genuine even at a first acquaintance; in this respect, as in others, being a conspicuous example of a national virtue. For, whereas the island-bred Briton loves to present a surface of polished veneer, the Canadian is satisfied to be solid oak.
To have briskly opened the door, to have entered the office graciously smiling, to have uttered a few formal words of welcome—that is how it would have been with most people. That is not how it was with J. R. Booth. Sitting sideways at the corner of the table, I did not know he had arrived until, on turning, I found him, with head thoughtfully bent, quietly seated at right angles to me. A bearing so devoid of pretence wins instant confidence and respect, if at first it be a little disconcerting.
It was left to me to start the conversation, and I plunged into some unpremeditated talk about trees. What was the best sort for paper-making? Hemlock, he explained, was good, but any kind of hard timber would do if it hadn’t gum in it. Gum prevented the acid penetrating the fibre. Couldn’t they extract the gum? Yes; they were learning how to do that, and paper had been made from pitch pine after the turpentine and gum were extracted. Did his own processes yield any by-products? Well, a good deal of gummy substance came out of spruce during the cooking process, but it was mixed with the acid, and a market for it had not been found. “Except for the acid,” said J. R. Booth thoughtfully, “it would make good chewing-gum.”
In an interrogatory spirit, I mentioned the great trees of British Columbia. But the old man shook his head. There was, it seemed, a great deal of pitch in them. “I don’t know of any place in the world,” he added, “where, for softness and lightness and durability, you would get anything to match our white pines.”
But all this time—as the keen blue eyes seemed fully aware—my questions were unrelated to the matter uppermost in my mind. I really did not feel curious about the trees. It was not my intention to start a rival pulp and paper mill. I was not even proposing to write a treatise on the subject. My desire was to gain some clues to the working of an abnormal business brain. I sought to lead the conversation in that direction.
How much paper did he make? One hundred tons a day, and about forty tons of cardboard. How many hands did he employ? In summer, 2,400 at the mills, and very nearly as many more in the woods. Then I gave tongue to my thoughts.
“Paper-making is obviously a very delicate and complex matter,” I said. “How came you to strike out in that new direction at the age of eighty, and when you already had such vast undertakings to engage your attention?”
Had I asked him the time, he could not have replied with greater readiness or in a tone more matter of fact.
“Yes,” he said, “paper requires a great deal of care. When I took it up I didn’t know anything about it, and that was a little disadvantage for a while. You ask why I took it up. Well, I had a railroad—four hundred miles—and I sold it. I felt rather lost without my railroad. So I took up paper.”
Could any explanation be more complete or more simple? J. R. Booth hadn’t enough to occupy him, so he “took up paper.”
Before going further with our conversation, I ought to explain what lay behind that other simple sentence: “I had a railroad.”
From an admirable biographical sketch in Collier’s I take the following interesting facts: “Booth had no idea of becoming a railway owner till Governor Smith, of Vermont, came along one day and told a hard-luck story. Smith and his associates had started the Canada Atlantic as a feeder to the Central Vermont, and the enterprise was costing money. They asked for the co-operation of Booth. They got it; and one day J. R. Booth woke up to the realisation that he must take the work over and carry it on himself if it was to be done at all. It might be throwing good money after bad, and it might not. Booth plunged again. He built the Canada Atlantic from Couteau Junction to Depôt Harbour, and he built the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, four hundred miles of main line and a hundred miles of sidings. He bought engines and cars and he built shops. There being no terminus on the Georgian Bay, he created a terminus. When the line was nearly completed to the bay, he invited the Premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—then in his first year of office—to go over it with him. They went to the end of the steel, and from there walked half a mile to the shores of the bay, described by Sir Wilfrid as ‘a bleak shore, without a building upon it.’ ‘This,’ said J. R. Booth, ‘is the terminus of my railway.’ The Prime Minister asked: ‘Where is your trade to come from?’ Booth answered: ‘I shall have to create it. I shall have to collect it from Port Arthur, from Duluth, from Chicago, and from both sides of the lakes. I shall have to build elevators. I shall, perhaps, have to buy wheat in order to furnish trade for my railway.’
“All that the one-time bridge carpenter told the Prime Minister he would do he did. He made Depôt Harbour. He built elevators. He put a line of steamers upon the lakes, and he forced so much of the Western trade into a new channel down through Ontario that the Canada Atlantic was carrying yearly two hundred thousand tons of flour and package freight and twenty million bushels of grain. The man who built it had seen to it that the railway was a good one. Other people saw that it was a good one. The Canadian Northern hankered after it. Seward Webb, of New York, went so far as to get an option on it—an option which is said to have left the New York financier poorer and J. R. Booth richer by a quarter of a million. The Conservative Opposition in the Canadian Parliament wanted the country to buy the Canada Atlantic, and join it to the Inter-Colonial as an alternative to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. The Government refused to do it, because they said that they could not do what J. R. Booth had done. Then along came the Grand Trunk and took the Canada Atlantic, and John R. Booth put fourteen million dollars down into his clothes.”
I think he must, at first, have been glad to be rid of his railroad responsibilities. At any rate, that was one of the occasions when, as though in festive mood, he played the part of Santa Claus in the family circle, presenting each of his two sons and each of his two daughters with one million dollars—a little attention certainly calculated to fortify a parent in the esteem of his children.
But, as we have learnt, any temporary feeling of relief was followed by a sense of not having enough to do; and so he set in to assist feeding the newspaper Press and the cardboard users of Europe and North America.
And now to resume the report of our conversation.
“But,” I said, when he confessed to having felt lost without his railway, “you still had your enormous timber business to occupy you?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I’ve been in lumber so long that the exciting part of it has got worn off.”
The “exciting part!” Here was a clue, and I eagerly probed further.
“Then the interest lies in the doing, not in the results?” I asked, speaking from the depths of my ignorance of what it feels like to be a millionaire.
“Yes,” said J. R. Booth, “to build up and afterwards to improve—that occupies the mind, and is a great pleasure; but he is a miserable man who gets to the end of it.”
His words carried a note of pathos to the ear. There was no mistaking the implication—a great organising capitalist, a millionaire many times over, was suggested as a case for compassion.
I did not speak. The earnest expression of those blue eyes told me there was more to come.
“The advantage,” J. R. Booth went on, “is certainly with the manual worker, as distinguished from the man who does the mental part. If he is healthy, and sleeps well, and eats well, no man enjoys life more than the working man. Only,” he added ruefully, “you can’t make him believe it. I have been in both places, and I prefer the heavy end of it.”
Those words were ringing in my memory when, later in the afternoon, I was talking with one of J. R. Booth’s lieutenants. He was telling me something that I scarcely needed to be told, namely, that the entire staff felt, not merely respect, but personal affection for the old man—the wonderful old man whose knowledge, patience and industry seemed without limit; the old man who was never known to be beaten by a difficulty.
And even while we were talking I chanced to look through the glass panel of a door that gave entrance to an inner office. In that office I again saw J. R. Booth. But it was J. R. Booth in a new aspect—an aspect that held my eyes enthralled. The Lumber King was leaning over a desk studying some document, his face alight with interest, yet immovable as marble.
Only once before in my life had I seen that absorbed expression on a human countenance. I was being conducted over the library of the late William Ewart Gladstone, while the venerable statesman sat there writing at his table near the window. A member of the family accompanied me, and began to explain, in a loud voice, the space-saving arrangement of the books. “Hush!” I whispered, “we must not disturb Mr. Gladstone.” “He will not hear,” came the hearty reply. “I had no idea,” was my comment, “that his deafness was so serious.” “Neither is it,” I was informed; “but when Mr. Gladstone is absorbed in mental work a pistol-shot would not disturb him.”
The unmoving face I saw last year in the Ottawa office, like that other unmoving face I saw years ago in the Hawarden library, seemed mesmerised, and to have the power of mesmerising me.