CHAPTER XXIX.THE DOUKHOBORS: A COMMUNITY RACE IN CANADA.

A MADONNA OF THE KOOTENAYS.

DRAWING WATERFROM THE COLUMBIA.

NO greater contrast can be afforded by Nature than that between level Prairie and the Rocky Mountains. It is at the moment of the change from one to the other that one realizesbothare Characters, each separate, individual and eternal. Here, as the train swings along by the banks of the Bow River, one looks up to those towering peaks, their gray and aged cheeks flushed with the wine of the air into perpetual youth, the Character that is Nature dominating all others. One cannot think of those peaks as still and dead matter only. They must be alive! There is the sharpness of the Craig, the smoothness of the scumbled bloom upon it, head after head against that faultless blue that one has hitherto thought of as exclusively Italian. But there it is—Capri inverted.

And so one comes to Banff, or drops down at Lake Louise, or bestrides a pony to the Valley of the Ten Peaks, or watches the Mountain Goat a riotous snowflake against the blue sky or wanders at the end of a rope about the face of the Great Glacier and, doing these things, feels it good just to be alive. That must surely have been the thought behind the preservation of this section of the Rockies as a national playground in perpetuity when it was reserved by the Dominion Government as a great Park.

But British Columbia, in addition to being a land of Mountains, is also a land of large tumbling rivers and fingerlike lakes pushing out into the fruitful valleys. It was the West of early days that enriched the language with that word “Trail”. British Columbia is the land of the Trail. The Trail or mere thread-road of the early pioneer from the Prairie to the Coast has now been completely metamorphosed into the orderly double-track of the railroad; so that hardships have vanished and, in their place, positive luxury attends a trip to the Pacific Coast via the Canadian Rockies.

Yet there is more than enough of the “primeval” remaining to give sauce to the voyage. Romance still clings to the Columbia and the Fraser Rivers. The mere names of Sun-Dance Canyon, The Crow’s Nest, Glacier, Jasper Park and a dozen others but faithfully record the existing charm and atmosphere. They suggest, too, that these Ranges were once the Hunting Grounds of Indians. Some old-timer says that these now have headquarters“down about MacLeod”. Nevertheless the Indian still comes back to the hot sulphur springs at Banff which it is quite probable he knew and used long ages ago, before even the discovery of the American Continent.

The Indian in British Columbia, like the Indian all through Canada, is still a romantic figure of the atmospheric background. He is still and always will be a page from the tome of the simple life, retiring before the advance of that form of society which involves living indoors. He still clings to the wigwam, to the canoe and to fishing and hunting for a living. (Although, of course, even among the Indians there are many notable exceptions and some of them carry on business and own fine homes of their own).

Romance, however, clings to the blanket of the old-timer. The web of fancy is not confined when a bend in the road reveals a group of Indians spearing salmon from a flat rock, perilously over-hanging the swirling, canyoned cauldron of the Fraser. There is something bizarre in the simple arrangement of the bleached wooden poles whereon their salmon swings a-drying in the wind. One feels that if anyone knows the secrets of the great Ranges, the towering peaks, the vast stretches between the Pacific and that faraway Northern mysterious Arctic, it is that man, a ragged-spot-of-brown above the swift cascade; too steep for all navigators except the salmon, madly daring every obstacle in efforts to reach the very highest pools where her spawn will be safe. A well of tradition is stored up in that old squaw’s head down there by the calmer waters, cooking the evening meal where the spiral of blue smoke trails upward.

These folk know the Nature-book of these parts by heart. For long centuries there trails in these old hearts and minds a survival of the fittest in picture. And that is all there is in history and Tradition ... a series of pictures, a few outstanding facts and figures. Time in the aggregate is like that. As a Figure, the Indian is a Synopsis.

The land embraced by British Columbia is elemental—big. Every form of it, rivers, peaks, lakes and valley, is grand in the sense of bigness. It is a land of big trees, big mines, big ranches, big outlook. And the big outlook not only glances Eastward across a Continent, but wings its way outward across the Pacific with its ships touching the shores of Asia and Australia.

The co-relation of interests between those most widely separated of Canadian Provinces, British Columbia and Nova Scotia,has been strikingly increased by the prominence acquired by the Pacific since 1914. Canada has now aPacificMaritime Province as well as the Atlantic group which for so long has held exclusive rights to the term. But the craft of the Pacific coast are laid down on different lines from those of the East. Nova Scotia started with sails and she still stands by the halyards of Banker and Coaster. Vancouver came into the race at a later date. Steam, now oil-burners, and the Panama Canal, have opened her way to European as well as Oriental ports. Truly the Canadian Trader is a big ship!

But British Columbia has its little ’longshore boats too. And the Westerner, with Cowboy breeziness, looks upon these half-indulgently and dubs them the “mosquito fleet”. In this lesser fleet are found the halibut-fisherman and the whaler, cruising, the one, many hundred miles out in the Pacific; and the other off the Queen Charlotte Islands or along the Alaskan shore, in fact anywhere a skipper deems he can raise the cry of “Thar she blows” from the lookout. A whaler out of the Pacific ports is a steamer with mechanical devices and bombs for killing and inflating the whale at once, so that the carcase floats and can be brought in to market. Her counterpart in Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is the sturdy old “sealer”; but what a difference in model! The Sealer is old. But with her staunch, wooden timbers and planks and roomy deck, with a “crow’s-nest” for the lookout, her ocean-wisdom for seals, is every bit as keen, as the Westerner’s for oil.

In British Columbia great stress is laid on the proper “smoking” of fish and delicious indeed is the flavour attained by the Western process. A range of characteristic atmosphere follows in the long trail of “smoked” salmon and herring. Scotch lassies have come out from fishing-towns of Old Scotland to give the proper “Scotch Cure” to the Pacific bloater in the curing houses at Vancouver. It is a far cry from these girls, and the big plant, with its chill-rooms for freezing the halibut, the latter with its own private car to Boston, to the old Indian woman, who has her little “smokehouse” on the shingle at Alert Bay and trusses up her salmon on splints in the shadow of the wet piles of some old boat-landing.

These are sea-pictures and pictures of ’longshore life. British Columbia in its valleys is a land of farms. It raises its own famous apples around its lakes, as Nova Scotia brings Bellefleurs and otherbeauties to perfection, round the Bay of Fundy. Okanagan, Arrowhead, Kootenay, all have their ranches with their acres of meadow, bench-lands and climbing fields. And here, on these Ranches beside the Lake, backed by mountains from whose peaks the snow never melts, are perched the homes of the ranchers.

Each of these homes presents its own epic, each family tracing it to the chosen spot from somewhere in Eastern Canada—Nova Scotia, Quebec or Ontario—or coming here to this Alpine region of the Dominion from somewhere over-seas, the British Islands, France, and indeed, all other countries of Old Europe, even reaching a finger into Asia at India and Japan. Truly the human-interest element of British Columbia is as big as its outlook.

Each little homestead and ranch stands for a family uprooted from old associations, whether Eastern Canadian, British or Foreign, transplanted here to the West, on the edge of things; but now—within the past ten years—coming to a consciousness of itself as no longer on the edge of wilderness and remoteness, separated from its fellows of the East by the great barrier of the Mountains, but a part of the beautiful curve of the World-circumference of the British Empire. Each little log-cabin in its forest or surroundings of stump-land (and the big trees of British Columbia make an endless number of big stumps) is a stake in the land. Practically it represents the bombardment of the black and unfriendly wilderness with a home and a family—the best ammunition in the world for the pioneer.

There is a long list of miniature cities and little towns, with a hotel, a bank, a couple of grocery shops, a butcher, a drug-store with week-old newspapers from Winnipeg or Calgary, yesterday’s Vancouver Sheets and the Newspaper from the nearest Over-the-Border large city; all these business places with large single-pane show-windows, in utter contrast to the little old-fashioned shop-windows of the small towns and villages of rural Quebec. The arrival and departure of trains once or twice a day is a thing as personal as the letter which comes into the hand of the butcher, the banker, the druggist, from that same adventuring train that kicks the level dust of the Prairie miles behind it, with the ease of a thoroughbred, and climbs the gorges, the canyons and the steeps of the passes, and enters the black mysteries of the long tunnels as nonchalantly as a cowboy, hand on hip, sits astride his pony.

These little towns may be rather dull, with a society only partly stirred into life by an occasional Movie, but there is always morethan appears on the surface, since, behind them somewhere out there in the miles, threaded up sometimes by mere trails, are the little homes of the ranchers converting the soil to agriculture, “making land”—a curious phrase—where every ranch is a stage of dramatic action, and every little simple act of everyday life takes on heroic proportions from the very closeness of success or disaster constantly stalking the adventure on which the rancher has staked his all.

In the Russian Doukhobor....

IN A COMMUNITY DOOR YARD.

DOUKHOBOR WOMEN WINNOWING.

IN the Russian Doukhobor settlements of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia, the Canadian West houses the Community-life of a curious religious sect. Through them it may be said that Canada is perhaps the only country in the world outside Russia having a very intimate living, human-interest acquaintance with the Slav on the land—the only country presenting an opportunity to study him in his daily life. And what pictures this life does make! Not even Old Russia has just such pictures, for although the Doukhobor is Russian the religion of these peasants in British Columbia gives them a certain distinction and grace of their own, shearing the elements of coarseness from even ordinarily coarse work. Indeed a rare dignity attends the individual Doukhobor as it attends the transaction of all work and all business involving the people of one “village” with those of another.

As religion is the foundation on which the very existence of these people is laid; as it was religion which brought them into existence as a separate people; as it was the source of all their difficulties with the government of the Czars, and as it was the immediate motive which brought them to Canada—“the Promised Land”—some twenty years ago, it is necessary here very briefly to touch upon the chief item of the Doukhobor Faith. And this can best be done by giving an example.

Romance seems to have reached idealism indeed when one of these peasants here on the uplands of a British Columbia valley meeting another on the highway, lifts his hat and makes a ceremonial bow—a bow arresting and almost Eastern in its slow dignity. The habitant of Quebec is hardly so solemn in making his obeisance to the roadside calvary. Yet these men are in a hurry, too. Work presses.

Questioning them as to this ceremonial greeting brought out the fact that the Doukhobor believes first of all that Jesus is actually a living presence, alive in every human being! All other articles of the Faith it appears are merely the natural sequence of this condition. One man bows to the Christ-spirit in the other, rather than to the man himself. He bows in reality exactly as the habitant, man or boy does—to the beautiful thing that is symbolized by the roadside Cross. Life is a Universal brotherhood, to theDoukhobor—hence the Community idea in which all share alike. Peasants often lay hold of many elemental facts and ideas of religion and holy things as to which other people are, for some reason, more timid. There is the world-famous example of the peasant rendering of the “Passion”, at Oberamergau.

The Doukhobor talks about Jesus with the sweet simplicity of a child. A swift shade of surprise, as quickly gone, flits across the gentle face of any of them that you question as to how they get along without such institutions as poor-houses, old peoples’ homes, asylums, jails, etc. They tell you the idea of “the Spirit of Jesus in all men”, simply lived, prevents all the sins of the Decalogue and so renders these institutions unnecessary. For this reason, they explain, they object to military service because they believe that in killing a man they are killing Jesus. They go even further, claiming that even the taking of animal life for food is contrary to the spirit of God, and therefore sinful; so that they are vegetarian not because they think vegetables more wholesome, but because they know meat and fish can only be achieved by the destruction of a life. In this matter their belief is carried out to the letter. Some of the old folk even now find it difficult to kill flies. And it was only after a long time and many inroads on the precious grain that they could be induced to kill rats and gophers.

Legally the Doukhobors have now exchanged the name “Doukhobor” for a name in English. They call themselves in all business dealings “The Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood Ltd.” “Doukhobor” is, strictly speaking, their religious name, only.

Neighbours however will always call them “The Douks.” Brilliant, Grand Forks and Verigen, their three outstanding settlements, are worth in the neighbourhood of five million dollars; and approximately eight to ten thousand persons abide in these settlements,—the largest successful “Community” settlement in the world. Its success, as against many another attempt at Utopia that has failed, is undoubtedly due to the fact that it is founded on a basis of simple religious faith rather than either a colonization scheme or a business trust.

In the settlements, the houses are set up in groups of twos. Local wit aptly calls these “the twins”. The Doukhobors themselves call these groups “villages”. Each village contains anywhere from thirty to fifty people who are apportioned a certainamount of land for culture. The women in these villages take a hand in all work, at home and in the fields.

Stepping through the big Russian gateway into one of the yards, or all of them, reveals an almost interminable series of tableaux of heroic significance. Women with sieves in hand play them, full of seed, millet, etc., above their heads as dancing-girls the tambourine, in an effort to scatter the chaff on the breeze. Under their feet tarpaulin is spread to receive the grain or the seeds. From some doorway an old woman appears, with a broom of dried twigs, and brushes up a circle or a corner whereon to lay a mat. Laying aside the broom, she disappears around some corner to return with voluminous apron stuffed with beans in the pod. Sitting down on the mat she begins to belabour the beans with a billet of wood. Thus the shelling is accomplished. Two women appear carrying a plank between them. Presently they come again with a tub of apples already cut, and these they carefully spread to dry on the plank already brought. A mother appears out of a door, plotok on her head, a cup in hand, and begins to feed from the cup a little boy, with bread-and-milk, in which there is a dash of mustard. Other women are picking over tomatoes on the porch-floor. The cook for the week appears in the doorway of the great community-kitchen, seeking a momentary rest for her eyes, so long centred on her pots and pans with their contents, in the life and scenes going on in the yard. In the sun an old grandfather warms himself as he amuses his old age with making wooden spoons. Over there, two boys with their heads together are making a pair of nut-crackers by hammering two long wire nails into shape. Everywhere, there are flowers.

When the tasks in the yard are completed the women repair to the fields; or, on other days the field work comes first.

Here is a group of women in a field of sunflowers, some passing from plant to plant plucking the seed-discs into their aprons and carrying them to a group of women and children sitting about a big mat. This scene resembles some religious festival, the women and girls with white plotoks on their heads and sticks in their hands beating, on the reverse side of the seed-plate and the seeds falling, like a rain, in a drift on the old tarpaulin.

Sunflower seeds are the peanuts of this people, unaccustomed, as they are, to candy. Shy children met on the highways, overcoming their shyness, and falling into step by your side, offer you little handfuls of sunflower-seeds drawn from their stuffed pockets.And when men or women go on long journeys afoot they always take with them a supply of these seeds to munch by the way. As one chats with the sunflower harvesters, the bright figures of the clover-seed gatherers flit in the upland-climbing clover fields; and among the leafy green on the mile-stretching orchards of plum, apple and peach are to be seen the carts, the pickers and the boxers all working together like bees in a hive.

Everywhere children accompany their elders, naturally imitating with their tiny fingers the tasks of the larger hand. Thus, quite easily, the children learn, and, learning, look upon work as pleasurable. A Doukhobor child is seldom or never told to do any especial task. They simply fall in, of their own accord. The Douks are very gentle with their children and a child is as free to speak, and is listened to with as much courtesy, as an elder. This applies in “church” as well as in the daily life.

The flowers growing everywhere in the dooryards and in every little pocket of soil here and there on the edges of the orchards and flanking the vegetable gardens, are explained, when one happens on the bee-hives in some sheltered nook of more or less every “village”. The Doukhobors place honey on the market and it is a stand-by on the home tables.

The interior of the “twins” presents no fewer pictures than the yards and the fields. The kitchen and the living room occupy all of the ground-floor. The kitchen is always a large room. In the middle of it stands an enormous brick oven wherein are baked innumerable loaves of brown bread. These loaves are always round and, for size, put to shame the “big loaf” of Quebec. After the bread is done, the pans are lined with straw, and, filled with fruit, are replaced in the cavernous mouth till the oven is full. Thus pears and apples are dried for the home-table. The dining-table is a long board resembling a giant carpenter’s bench and painted an art-red, standing across one end of the big room. Long benches serve the big table in lieu of chairs.

The chief stand-by on the Doukhobor menu, as seems to be the custom with peasants everywhere, is soup. In this respect one is carried back to the habitant table of Quebec. But here the soup is solely vegetable, fat being supplied by butter which makes this Russianborschmore delicate in flavour thanla soupeof the habitant. Butter is the one Doukhobor extravagance.

Pancakes, with jam or honey, boiled millet-and-butter, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, big slices of the Russian brown bread,

DOMESTICITY.

all sorts of vegetable pies, beets, carrots, cheese, little triangles blanketed in a pastry of millet or a mixture of brown flour and white, make up one of these vegetable meals, all being completed by unlimited draughts of Russian tea sweetened and flavoured with raspberry or black-currant jam. The women take turns at the cooking, a week at a time, and as there are usually six or seven women in each village, no woman is worn-out at the stove, but each has a six-week interval before the wheel of time brings her turn round again.

In this time her spare moments are filled with knitting, making rugs for her room, spinning and weaving, and embroidering her own or her children’s plotoks or kerchiefs. The Doukhobor women are especially clever at all work of this kind, showing exquisite taste in the selection and blending of colours in their rug-making. Occasionally one of the older women brings out to show you, a Turkish rug which she wove, in conjunction with a Turkish woman, at the time, when, by the Czar’s decree they were banished to the wild parts of Southern Russia bordering on Turkey; in the hope, perhaps, that the Turks would put them to the sword. Instead, it seems the women of each side took to making rugs together.

In the threshing of straw into a fine powder, to help-out in feeding horses and cattle, a peculiar kind of instrument is used, consisting of a board, its under-side teethed with sharp stones. This instrument the Doukhobor men tell you they learned how to make from the Turkish men, so it is evident that the men of both sides fraternized, as well as the women. It seems strange indeed to happen on these things in Western Canada, until we remember that Romance knows no political or racial boundaries; that there is a great sisterhood in spinning and weaving, in embroidery, in rug-making, and in home-making everywhere.

No phase of this Community life is more Russian or Tolstoyan in appearance than the great threshing-floor, in the centre of the Settlement, at Brilliant, B.C.

The action of threshing is like that of a chariot-race, with the driver on board the drags, and the horses racing in pairs, one behind the other, round and round the large, circular earthen floor, in which the dust of the flying chaff arises and half conceals horse and driver, passing in a whirl. Ten minutes of this and the man in charge signals a halt. Each horse is then given a bucket of water and a new driver takes the place of the old. These drivers areusually mere boys, entering into the race with all a boy’s excitement in the sport.

While the horses are resting, the older men come out with pitchforks made from forked branches cut in the woods, and shake up the chaff, the heavier wheat falling to the bottom. After the race has gone on for several hours or until all the grain has escaped from its tiny straw-sack, these men pitch the chaff to one side, and the wheat is swept up and carried off in the big carts, to store in the community-granary till it goes to mill.

PULLING FLAX.

WASHING FLAX IN THE COLUMBIA.

Early in the morning....

EARLY in the morning of a Sunday when daylight still leaves the shadows deep under the fruit-trees in the orchard, and the grass is wet and the air full of the dewy freshness that only melts with the sun, the Doukhobors may be seen—a figure or two at a time—stepping lightly under the apple-trees, clad in their homespun suits of bleached linen, the men in their Russian blouses and bareheaded, the women in full skirts, and tight “bodies” with snowy plotoks on their heads, all barefooted, all converging upon the church. Inside, gravely bowing, the men range down one side of the empty room and the women line up on the other. In the centre of the aisle between, stands a table always supplied with a little dish of salt, a loaf of bread, and a jug of water, the three elements that are the Trinity of life. In season, these three simple elements are supplemented by offerings of a plate of the most perfect specimens of tomatoes, a plate of the finest peaches, another of the largest plums, a fullgrown watermelon, and a bunch of asters. This dash of colour against the simple purity of the white linen suits of the congregation is indeed effective.

The Doukhobors are very fond of singing, and this carries one back to the daily life in the “villages”. For at almost every meal the Doukhobors, in addition to saying a solemn “grace”, end the meal with the singing of old religious chants. At the evening meal in particular the singing is never omitted. It is worth while going among these people just to listen to this sweet community part-singing gathering in volume as it goes rolling through the miles of the “Valley of Consolation” caught up from village to village, and borne away on the romantic wings of the dusk enfolding the mountains, the rushing river and the orchards.

The garments of linen worn as the ceremonial dress at these early Sunday morning services, are the offering upon the altar, as it were, of the epic of flax. The Doukhobor women though “Doukhobor” in religion are Russians in their knowledge of flax. This knowledge is their own special contribution to Canada. Other wheat-wizards there are, other masters of mixed-farming, other specialists in stock, others who would find them children at the fishing. Perhaps no Doukhobor has ever been a sailor, (because this is a strictly earth-loving people) but nowhere else in Canadais the complete story of flax, from the seed to wearing of the woven linen, to be come upon, without moving outside a settlement! Flax knowledge is the Doukhobors’ gift to Canada but up to this time, apparently, there has been no attempt to employ these people as Flax-teachers.

In the fields at Verigen one comes upon the figure of a woman stooping over and seizing in her strong hands a full handful of the tall plants. These she pulls and ties with a twist of green into a sheaf. “Flax must be pulled”, she tells you. In response to inquiry as to the quality and length of the fibre in this Canadian flax, she raises herself to rest awhile, and drawing a wisp through her fingers says half-reminiscently “Oh, good, vera good. Vera long fibre.”

The British Columbia woman “rets” her flax in the river. And she keeps the swift current from running away with her precious plants, by weighing them down with the rounded river-stones, the smoothed product of the ice-age. These smooth stones serve the Indian-woman as pestles for the stump-mortar wherein she grinds her corn, and this Russian woman turns them to service for anchoring her flax, as though they were made to order. A week or ten days and the flax, now clear of all wood-fibre, is given the final washing and then carried up the steep bank of the river to sway in the wind, the while it dries on some “village” clothes-line. After this it comes into the hands of the heckler and the spinner, in every odd moment between drying fruit, picking beans, winnowing seeds, gathering aprons full of ripened millet and the thousand and one tasks the hand finds to do on these almost self-supporting farms.

The spinning-wheel is as common in every household here as in Quebec. Indeed, in the big yards, one often happens on several women at their wheels, while indoors, other women are sitting at the big handmade loom that their husbands have concocted of the B. C. cedar log. The Russian flax-wheel appears smaller than the wheel ofde lainein Quebec. But its whirr and blurr of action is no less musical and rapid, and its measure of spun thread as long. The only difference between the spinners of the East and West is that the Russian woman spins flax and her habitant sister—wool.

The Doukhobor woman is also a spinner of wool but as yet the keeping of sheep on the Doukheries is in its infancy.

The Russian woman’s flax-wheel is light so that she can easily take it under her arm, spinning here or there, as she wishes, indooror out. In the heat of the midsummer day, when work in the fields is only pursued early in the morning or in the late afternoon, you find her spinning in her bedroom or on the porch. Or she sits out of doors among the flowers abloom in her dooryard enjoying the blossoms and the shade thrown by peach-trees—laden boughs bending, a symphony in fruit, to lay themselves across the heart of their Earth-mother. Indoors, the blur of the flying shuttle hums a minor accompaniment to the song of the bees busily planing from flower to flower, gathering up the nectar, that, as honey, is later to come to home tables. Then some morning the bolt of linen is finished, the linen that will, with ordinary care, long outlive the women whose industry has brought it into being.

CLOSE OF THE SEASON.

CHRYSANTHEMUMS A-BLOOMBY A STEVESTON DOOR WAY.

BOOM! Um-mmm-m!...

Every Sunday evening at six o’clock during the salmon-run, the signal gun that marks the beginning of another fishing-week rings out upon the evening air of Steveston the capital of the British Columbia salmon fisheries at the mouth of the great Fraser River. Not a net passes over any gunwale of the hundred odd motorboats that for the past hour have been jockeying up-and-down picking up the great river’s signals-of-fish and the way they “set”, until the crack of the official gun rings out over the water. The moment, however, that this is heard, over go the great seines, imported here from Old Scotland for just this dramatic instant, entrants in the great race, boat against boat, andallin league, against salmon.

Of all the stories of animal-life, none is more wonderful or pathetic, than the story which the salmon of the Fraser have given to Canada. From out the deep-sea they come by tens of thousands, crowding, pushing, over-leaping each other, a silvery mass of fighting-mad mothers, trying to start their off-spring on the perilous road of fish-life, somewhere in a pool, high up in the mountains out of harm’s way; and here across the river, near its mouth, is this line of boats and their submerged nets lying in wait, while on the river’s bank in league with the boats are the huge canning factories, like so many Molochs open-mouthed, waiting to swallow to-day’s catch and to-morrow’s, as they have snapped up those of the years gone by.

One has not spent an hour on this waterfront before story and romance have flitted across the stage in almost confusing numbers. Each figure in the vaudeville of fish, a flashing mosaic, stepped out of the Far East to serve this river of the Far West. For the Japs are the servitors of Salmon at Steveston. Out of the Islands of Nippon have come these fishermen, to serve in the ranks of Fraser salmon-fishing, men with wives and little families, caught in the net of circumstance and landed far from home, to work here where the snow-capped Mount McKinley, over in the State of Washington, gleams an intermittent nimbus of light above the foggy head-veil of distance, suggesting, like a lighted candle on the altar of remembrance, all the sweet associations and memories clinging to the snow-capped brow of Fujiyama.

Here in the boats are the nets, all the way from the hand of the old net-maker in Scotland, and here the hands handling the nets come from the other side of the world to bring Canadian salmon to the tables of the home-land and to carry the overflow to the tables of the world. For when one comes to think of it, there must indeed be few, if any lands, that do not know Canadian salmon, and few undertakings calling for a ration of canned-food which do not depend on canned-salmon to hold up the fish-end.

These up-to-date motorboats, so broad in the waist to hold the net and the fish-cargo, bear in their rounded bows striking psychological resemblance in quaint twist of line to the old Saint Malo fishboats riding in the anchorage sentried off Cape Barrie at Percé, while at the same moment in that blunt blow, there is suggestion both of the tripping old canal-barge of the Richelieu and of the craft of the Yang-tse, so that one involuntarily murmurs “Sampans of Salmon”. So too, in the lower river-silt bank platformed by rough planks and water-soaked piles, there is both touch of Fundy and whiff of Asiatic Deltas.

The little wooden shack homes of these Japanese fisher folk of Steveston are raised above flood-danger on wooden platforms and set about with wooden yards, fronted by clear-running canals crossed by foot bridges of wide plank.

Who can screen a picture of Japan without a bridge, or of a Japanese home, however homely, but its poverty is beatified by masses of flowers? So, here against the unpainted walls, set about on the floor of the wooden yard, are buckets and tubs of Chrysanthemums a-bloom, Japan-transplanted. And do the flowers stop at the bucket or the box? Not at all. Marigolds and cornflowers and candytuft and many others under the loving hand of the Jap-mother, are coaxed out of every crevice of river-silt staved-up by any old bit of wood. Vines set near the edge of the tiny canals trail tendril fingers to touch the water. And the little bridges are so invaded by pots of bloom that the man of the family must surely object to the narrow gangway allowed him to and from his boats, did he not love flowers as keenly as his little Flower-of-Japan wife.

Passing to and fro here and in the salmon-factories one begins to realize that the Japanese women share the work on the fish with the men. One might even call these little women “the ’longshoremen of Salmon” as they stand at the tables,—groaning under the weight of sockeye and its lesser brethren—their babies tied to their backs with a soft shawl, in the same way that the Cree mothercarries her baby in a tikanagan. Many a lullaby is crooned while the skilful brown fingers place the juicy steaks in the little flat tins. The gentle rocking of the mother’s swaying figure sends the baby to sleep more effectively than any cradle. And the mother and her baby are together through the long day of toil.

As one steps along the factory-floors between the long rows of women, figures just made by Nature for the kimona and the smooth shiny ebon-elegance of the Japanese coiffure, these plump little women with their brown-eyed babies on their backs are indeed a picturesque contribution to thegenreappearing on the vast stage from Atlantic to Pacific that is—the Dominion. Nor is canning the fish the limit of the Japanese woman’s usefulness. Not all of them work in the factories. Figures of the wharf-side and of the platform-yards by the flowering banks of the canals are the great seines a-drying. And while one sees men, sitting about in the sun, netting-needle in hand, mending these nets, just as frequently one happens on some strong Japanese woman, long knife in hand, cutting away the large wooden floats, against the net’s being laid away at the close of the season, her baby, released from the back cradle-perambulator, playing at her side.

Although situated directly....

ALTHOUGH situated directly on the Alaskan coastal highway, with a constant stream of large freight and passenger steamers calling at the cannery pier or dropping anchor in its fine harbour, Alert Bay is a spot haunted by the spirit of the untamed, full of those powerful undercurrents that thrive on the edge of the wilderness. It is altogether mysterious and bizarre.

Part of this spirit is due to the wildness of nature hereabouts, to the high-reaching mountains, the low-hanging, encircling mists, the dark woods, and, in the rainy season, the general atmospheric wetness clinging to the nearer distances; but specifically it is due to other things, things which the natural setting helps to accentuate and for which it forms a splendidly effective stage. Merely to mention Alert Bay is to think of Indians. For this little trading-post, now grown to prime importance as a Pacific coast port-of-call, has filled a high place in coastal Indian life from time immemorial.

Just how long the Indians have had homes or congregated at Alert Bay no one knows, not even they themselves. But as far back as their traditions go, this particular spot on the coast has been a gathering-place focussing all the events of tribal life in peace and war. Time, therefore, has vested Alert Bay with all the importance of a capital and hallowed it to the red men all up and down the coast. Far within the Arctic Circle, away off on the shores of Queen Charlotte Islands, the aboriginals look to Alert for guidance in many things and in ways that are a mystery to us.

Building on established foundations, Alert Bay is now an Indian reservation, with an Indian agent and government school. For upward of a score of years a Church of England, established here with a resident rector, has maintained two boarding-schools—one for Indian boys and the other for Indian girls. But despite all these civilizing influences, there still obtains in the village the mysterious philosophy of life embodied in the community-house without windows, the open wood-fire in the middle of the floor and the hole in the roof for escaping smoke. There still remain the picturesque dugout orkayak, totem poles, big and little; tree burials, potlatches, including wild orgies, and a host of other curiouscustoms that lend colour and weave a motif of weirdness into all the life hereabouts.

A curving beach and a boardwalk above the swishing waves following the bend of the beach, form what might elsewhere be termed “The Avenue of the Totem”. These totems, or “family trees”, the chief attraction of visitors to Alert Bay, are curiosities indeed! British Columbia giant trees sculptured by some old redskin into heraldic insignia of tribe and family, dealing mostly with leviathans that dwarf “our family trees” to nothing by comparison.

Crude? Yes, and no. The writing is a little unformed, perhaps, but thetaleitself, one of the most perfect bits of symbol the world contains.

Whales, bears, giant kingfishers, thunderbirds and fish tell the life-history of the primitive ancestor, sitting astride the giant sulphur-bottom, harpoon in hand, with a pictorial accuracy and vim that far exceed the ordinary printed page having to do with early times. It must be remembered, too, that the early Indians did not know how to write in any form but that of carving and colour, so that the men who at different times carved these totems were not only artists of a kind, buthistorians, limning history—valuable Canadian history—upon the heart of the giant British Columbia cedar, to the end that all ages may read what happened in these parts when the world was young.

As family history, in this peerage of the race, there are doubtless many errors. Details are probably exaggerated to reveal personal prowess to greater advantage. The teeth of the bear are very large, the whale is a perfect giant and rapid in movement as was no whale before or since, so that the forbear who leapt astride the giant back, from thekayak, harpoon in hand, was a veritable master among Indians—a hero of heroes. All of which everyone admits to be legitimate poetic licence in the totem-maker and wisely calculated to whet the edge of the most callous imagination. But although the place of the whale is great and the lure of him, even at this distance in time, well-nigh impossible to resist, since through the length and breadth of him a wicked spirit seems to look at you through the mist, out of very spirited eyes fairly dancing with mischief, still it is the “Thunder-bird” who is the reigning spirit of these totems, swaying the imagination of the tribe far more than the whale, or the bear, who is here depicted holding against his great hairy breast the sacred “copper” emblem of “Chieftaincy” to this day. Even to uninitiated eyes there is a magic weirdness in the very look of the “Thunder-bird”. Its beak resembles somewhat the prows of twokayaksinverted one above the other. The bow of the lower, forming the under half of the beak, is hinged and allowed to drop open on state occasions. At the time of the potlatch, by dint of much writhing and wriggling, the “braves” make their entrance to the house of entertainment through the “Thunder-bird’s” open mouth. It requires but little imagination to see how this beak might be converted into a diabolical trap. Indeed, there is a story common in Alert Bay that at one time a tribe of enemies were invited to “potlatch” and treacherously slain, a man at a time, as they entered the house through the beak, the arrangement being such that no Indian on the outside knew what was happening till he received his death wound. The entire number of guests was thus wiped out.

Standing before the bird, mystery shrouding the crude mechanism, you feel that it was designed for some suchcoup d’etatas the one cited. It is so simple and so subtle withal. Every time you see an Indian pass it, stolid and reserved, he seems to glance that way with satisfaction, proud that here among his people should be a device that holds the interest of thewhiteman, to the extent of repeated visits, if his stay in the neighbourhood be for long. The times assure us that the treacherous “feast-of-blood” will never be repeated. Yet the potlatch survives and who, even of the Indians, knows if the diabolical spirit of the bird is dead?

It is not altogether the natural scenery that makes the mystery and charm for the visitor to Alert Bay, but rather those unfathomable, sometimes intangible things, which having no articulate voice yet speak with marvellous power to every generation, and I supposehaveso spoken since the dawn of time. One day as we were looking the “Thunder-bird” in the eye, trying to read his secret, a group of little Indian boys played nearby with their bows and arrows. Presently another lad came out of a “community house” with his family coffee-pot, which he set up on a post for a target. Soon the twang of the bow-strings and the tinkle of the falling coffee-pot spoke eloquently of the quality of the youngster’s markmanship. Over against the sea-edge of the board-walk a group of men and fatkloochmans(squaws) squatted on logs, watching the tableau and giving a deep, satisfied grunt every timethe coffee-pot was shot from its perch. To the Indian—whose ancestors fought the giant sulphur-bottom, single-handed, on his own ground, and invented the Thunder-bird’s wily beak to trap the foe—skill in the use of the bow and arrow even to-day is of far more value than any coffee-pot ever made! At least the Indian mind is nothamperedby little things! Marksmanship is still the perfection of acquirements to him. All his training hitherto has been along such lines. It is in his blood. But in these days, he turns his skill to different ends. He is broad and big in his conception of nationality now, where formerly it was the “tribe” that was the biggest concept of his days. To-day the Alert Bay Indian almost reverences the privileges of nationality! The British flag means so big a thing to him that when at death he now consents to be buried in the ground instead of being put far up in one of the giant trees in some old box or trunk much too short for his six feet unless doubled up once or twice, he usually has one and sometimes two or three handsome British flags set up over his grave on a pole or an overhanging tree—a rich bit of colour among the dark green pines. What faith in the flag and in its conquering ability to drive away evil spirits! Day and night, year in and year out, above that lone grave in the mists “the flag is still there”—waving above great painted whales, giant kingfishers, yellow moths and other symbols of name and place.

In keeping with this loyal spirit is “the roll of honour” hanging on the little English church door! An honour roll on which the names of red men and white men commingle! Some of the volunteers have made “the supreme sacrifice” “somewhere in France”, and are now taking their long sleep under the poppies in Flanders; and “the flag is still there,” with its deeper significance for the red man than ever before. For with his life’s blood he has bought the right to add it, a new theme, to his family totem.

A splendid work is being done among the Alert Bay Indians by both the Government and the Church. The Indian agent here is a hardy Ontario Scotsman, who understands the Indian and has won his confidence to a splendid degree. “’Tis true,” he himself assured us, “they still live in the community-house. But I’m not sure,” he added with characteristic Scotch humour, “but what the hole in the roof gives better ventilation than the window in the pretty cottage that’s never opened.”

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