Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, was the Prince's farthest north. He arrived there on Friday, September 12th, to receive the unstinted welcome which, long since, we had come to know was Canada's natural attitude towards him. As we crossed the broad main street to the station, the sight of the vast human flower-bed that filled the road below the railway bridge made one tingle at the thoroughness with which these towns gathered to express themselves.
Canada, as I may have hinted already, has a way of leading strangers astray concerning herself. In Eastern Canada we were told that we would find the West "different." From what was said to us, there was some reason for expecting to find an entirely new race on the Pacific side of Winnipeg. It would be a race further removed from the British tradition, a race not so easy to get on with, a race not moved by the impulses and enthusiasms that stirred the East.
And in the West? Well, all I can say is that quite a number of Western men shook me by the hand and told me how thankful I must be now that I had left the cold and rigid East for the more generous warmth of the spacious West. And hadn't I found the East a strange place, inhabited by people not easy to get on with, and removed from the British tradition—and so on...?
This singular state of things may seem queer to the Briton, but I think it is easily explainable. In the first place, Canada is so vast that her people, even though they be on the same continent, are as removed from immediate intimacy as the Kentish man is from the man in a Russian province. And not only does great distance make for lack of knowledge, but the fact that each province is self-contained and feeds upon itself, so to speak, in the matter of news and so on, makes the citizen in Ontario, or Quebec, or New Brunswick, regard the people of the West as living in a distant and strange land.
The Canadian, too, is intensely loyal to Canada; that means he is intensely jealous for her reputation. He warned us against all possibilities, I think, so that we should be ready for any disappointment.
There was not the slightest need for warning. Whether East or West, Canada was solid in its welcome, and, as far as I am able to judge, there is no difference at all in the texture of human habit and mind East or West. There is the same fine, sturdy quality of loyalty and hospitality over the whole Dominion. Canada is Canada all through.
Edmonton is a fine, lusty place. It is the prairie town in its teens. It has not yet put off its coltish air. It is Winnipeg just leaving school, and has the wonderful precocity of these eager towns of the West. It is running almost before it has learnt to walk.
While full-blooded Indians still move in its streets, it is putting up buildings worthy of a European metropolis. It has opened big up-to-date stores and public offices by the side of streets that are yet the mere stamped earth of the untutored plain.
Along its main boulevard, Jasper Avenue, slip the astonishing excess of automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns. A brisk electric tram service weaves the mass of street movement together, and at night over all shines an exuberance of electric light.
That main street is tingling with modernity. Its stores, its music-halls, its "movie" theatres, and its hotels glitter with the nervous intensity of a spirit avid of the latest ideas.
Fringing the canyon of the brown North Saskatchewan River is a beautiful automobile road, winding among pretty residential plots and comely enough for any town.
Yet swing out in a motor for a few miles, and one is in a land where the roads—if any—are but the merest trails, where the silent and brooding prairie (hereabouts blessed with trees) stretches emptily for miles by the thousand.
Turn the car north, and it heads for "The Great Lone Land," that expands about the reticent stretches of the Great Slave country, or follows the Peace River and the Athabasca beyond the cold line of the Arctic Circle.
To get to these rich and isolated lands—and one thinks this out in the lounge of an hotel worthy of the Strand—the traveller must take devious and disconnected ways. Railways tap great tracts of the country, going up to Fort McMurray and the Peace River, and these connect up with river and lake steamers that ply at intervals. But travel here is yet mainly in the speculative stage, and long waits and guides and canoes and a camping outfit are necessary.
In winter, if the traveller is adventurous and tough, he can progress more swiftly. He can go up by automobile and run along the courses of the rivers on the thick ice, and, on the ice, cross the big lakes.
Though the land is within the Arctic Circle, it is rich. I talked with a traveller who had just returned from this area, and he spoke of the superb tall crops of grain he had seen on his journey. It will be magnificent land when it is opened up, and can accommodate the population of a kingdom. The growing season, of course, is shorter, but this is somewhat balanced by the longer northern days and the intense sunlight that is proper to them. The drawbacks are the very long winters, loneliness and the difficulties of transport.
Edmonton, sitting across the gorge of the Saskatchewan, feeds these districts and reflects them. Because of this it is a city of anachronisms. High up on the cliff, its site chosen with the usual appositness of Canada, is the Capitol building, a bright and soaring structure done in the latest manner. Right under that decisively modern pile is a group of rough wooden houses. They are the original stores of the Hudson Bay Company, standing exactly as they did when they formed an outpost point of civilization in the Northwest.
It is obviously a town in a young land, pushing ahead, as the Prince indicated in his speech to the Provincial Government, with all the intensity and zest of youth, having all the sense of freedom and possibility that the rich and great farming, furbearing and timber-growing tracts give it.
The keen spirit of the city was reflected in the welcome it gave the Prince. It was a wet, grey day, but the whole town was out to line the streets and to gather at the ceremonial points. And it was a musical greeting. Edmonton is prone to melody. Brass bands appear to flourish here. There was one at every street corner. And not only did they play as the Prince in the midst of his red-tuniced "Mountie" escort passed by, but they played all day, so that the city was given over to a non-stop carnival of popular airs.
At the Parliament Buildings the crowds were as dense as ever. They showed the same spirit in listening to addresses and reply, and the same hustling sense of "getting there" when entering the building to take part in the public reception. The addresses of welcome were a novelty. Engrossed on vellum, it had been sewn on the purple silk lining of a yellow-furred coyote skin, a local touch that interested the Prince. There was another such touch after the reception. A body of Stony Indians were presented to His Royal Highness. These Indians had travelled from a distance in the hope of seeing the son of the Great White Chief, and they not only saw him but were presented to him. He talked with particular sympathy to one chief whose son had been a comrade-in-arms in the Canadian ranks during the war and who had been killed in the fighting.
The opening of a war memorial hall, a big and dazzling dance at the Government House, and other functions, fulfilled the usual round. And, last but not least, the Prince became a player and a "fan" in a ball game.
There was a match (I hope "match" is right) between the local team, and one of its passionate rivals, and the Prince went to the ground to take part. Walking to the "diamond" (I'm sure that is right), he equipped himself in authentic manner, with floppy, jockey-peaked cap and a ruthless glance, took his stance as a "pitcher" and delivered two balls. I don't know whether they were stingers or swizzers, or whatever the syncopated phraseology of the great game dubs them, but they were matters of great admiration.
Having led to the undoing (I hope, for that was his task) of some one, the Prince then joined the audience. He chose not the best seats, but the popular ones, for he sat on the grass among the "bleachers," and when one has sat out of the shade in the hot prairie sun one knows what "bleachers" means.
This sporting little interlude was immensely popular, and the Prince left Edmonton with the reputation of being a true "fan" and "a real good feller."
The Royal train arrived in Calgary, Alberta, on the morning of Sunday, September 14th, after some of the members of the train had spent an hour or so shooting gophers, a small field rat, part squirrel, and at all times a great pest in grain country.
Calgary was a town that charmed at once. It stands in brilliant sunlight—and that sunlight seems to have an eternal quality—in a nest of enfolding hills. Two rivers with the humorous names of Bow and Elbow run through it; they are blue with the astonishing blueness of glacial silt.
From the hills, or from the tops of such tall buildings as the beautiful Palliser Hotel, the high and austere dividing line of the Rockies can be seen across the rolling country. Snow-cowled, and almost impalpable above the ground mist, the great range of mountains looks like the curtain wall of a stronghold of mystics.
In the streets the city itself has an air of radiance. There is an invigoration in the atmosphere that seems to give all things a peculiar quality of zest. The sidewalks have a bustling and crisp virility, the public buildings are handsome, and the streets of homes particularly gracious.
The Sunday reception of the Prince was eloquent but quiet. There were the usual big crowds, but the day was deliberately without ceremonial. Divine Service at the Pro-Cathedral, where the Prince unveiled a handsome rood-screen to the memory of those fallen in the war, was the only item in a restful day, which was spent almost entirely in the country at the County Club.
But perhaps the visit to the County Club was not altogether quiet.
The drive out to this charming place in a pit of a valley, where one of the rivers winds through the rolling hills, began in the comely residential streets.
These residential districts of Canada and America certainly impress one. The well-proportioned and pretty houses, with their deep verandahs, the trees that group about them, the sparkling grass that comes down to the edge of the curb—all give one the sense of being the work of craftsmen who are masters in design. That sense seems to me to be evident, not only in domestic architecture, but in the design of public buildings. The feeling I had was that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build. And by building, I do not mean merely erecting a house of distinction, but also choosing sites of distinction.
Nearly all the newer public buildings are of excellent design, and all are placed in excellent positions. Some of these sites are actually brilliant; the Parliament Houses at Ottawa, as seen from the river, are intensely apposite, so are those at Edmonton and Regina, while the sites of such buildings as the Banff Springs Hotel, and, in a lesser sense, the Château at Lake Louise, seem to me to have been chosen with real genius.
In saying that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build, I am speaking of both the United States and Canada. This fine sense of architecture is even more apparent in the United States (I, of course, only speak of the few towns I visited) than in Canada, for there are more buildings and it is a richer country. The sense of architecture may spring from that country, or it may be that the whole Continent has the instinct. As I am not competent to judge, I accuse the whole of the Western hemisphere of that virtue.
The Prince passed through these pretty districts where are the beautiful houses of ranchers and packing kings, farmers and pig rearers whose energy and vision have made Calgary rich as well as good to look upon. Passing from this region of good houses and good roads, he came upon a highway that is prairie even less than unalloyed, for constant traffic has scored it with a myriad ruts and bumps.
Half-way up a hill, where a bridge of wood jumps across the stream that winds amid the pleasant gardens of the houses, the Prince's car was held up. A mob of militants rushed down upon it, and neither chauffeur, nor Chief of Staff, nor suite could resist.
It was an attack not by Bolshevists, but by Boy Scouts. They flung themselves across the road in a mass, and would take no nonsense from any one. They insisted that the engine should take a holiday, and that they should hitch themselves to the car. They won their point and hitched. The car, under some hundred boy-power, went up the long hill—and a gruelling hill it is—through the club gates, and down a longer hill, to where, in a deep cup, the house stands.
At the club the visit was entirely formal. The Prince became an ordinary member and chatted to other men and women members in a thoroughly club-like manner.
"He is so easy to get on with," said one lady. "I found it was I who was the more reserved for the first few minutes, and it was I who had to become more human.
"He is a young man who has something to say, and who has ears to listen to things worth while. He has no use for preliminaries or any other nonsense that wastes time in 'getting together.'"
He lunched at the club and drifted about among the people gathered on the lawns before going for a hard walk over the hills.
The real day of functions was on Monday, when the Prince drove through the streets, visiting many places, and, later, speaking impressively at a citizens' lunch in the Palliser Hotel.
His passage through the streets was cheered by big crowds, but crowds of a definite Western quality. Here the crowns of hats climbed high, sometimes reaching monstrous peaks that rise as samples of the Rockies from curly brims as monstrous. Under these still white felt altitudes are the vague eyes and lean, contemplative faces of the cattlemen from the stock country around. Here and there were other prairie types who linger while the tide of modernity rushes past them. They are the Indians, brown, lined and forward stooping, whose reticent eyes looking out from between their braided hair seem to be dwelling on their long yesterday.
At the citizens' lunch the Prince departed from his usual trend of speech-making to voice some of the impressions that this new land had brought to him. He once more spoke of the sense of spaciousness and possibility the vast prairies of the West had given him, but today he went further and dwelt upon the need of making those possibilities assured. The foundation that had made the future as well as the present possible, was the work of the great pioneers and railway men who had mastered the country in their stupendous labours, and made it fit for a great race to grow in.
The foundation built in so much travail was ready. Upon it Canada must build, and it must build right.
"The farther I travel through Canada," he said, "the more I am struck by the great diversities which it presents; its many and varied communities are not only separated by great distances, but also by divergent interests. You have much splendid alien human material to assimilate, and so much has already been done towards cementing all parts of the Dominion that I am sure you will ultimately succeed in accomplishing this great task, but it will need the co-operation of all parties, of all classes and all races, working together for the common cause of Canadian nationhood under the British flag.
"Serious difficulties and controversies must often arise, but I know nothing can set Canada back except the failure of the different classes and communities to look to the wider interests of the Dominion, as well as their own immediate needs. I realize that scattered communities, necessarily preoccupied with the absorbing task of making good, often find the wider view difficult to keep. Yet I feel sure that it will be kept steadily before the eyes of all the people of this great Western country, whose very success in making the country what it is proves their staying power and capacity."
Canada, he declared, had already won for herself a legitimate place in the fraternity of nations, and the character and resources within her Dominion must eventually place her influence equal to, if not greater than, the influence of any other part of the Empire. Much depended upon Canada's use of her power, and the greatness of her future was wrapped up in her using it wisely and well.
The great gathering was impressed by the statesman-like quality of the speech, the first of its kind he had made since his landing. He spoke with ease, making very little use of his notes and showing a greater freedom from nervousness. The sincerity of his manner carried conviction, and there was a great demonstration when he sat down.
In the afternoon he left Calgary by train for the small "cow town" of High River, from there going on by car over roads that were at times cart ruts in the fields, to the Bar U Ranch, where he was to be the guest of Mr. George Lane.
His host, "George Lane," as he is called everywhere, is known as far as the States and England as one of the cattle kings. He is a Westerner of the Westerners, and an individuality even among them. Tall and loose-built, with an authentic Bret Harte quality in action and speech, he can flash a glance of shrewdness or humour from the deep eyes under their shaggy, pent-house brows. He is one of the biggest ranch owners in the West (perhaps the biggest); his judgment on cattle or horses is law, and he has no frills.
His attractive ranch on the plains, where the rolling lands meet the foot-hills of the Rockies, has an air of splendid spaciousness. We did not go to Bar U, but a friend took us out on a switchback automobile run over what our driver called a "hellofer" road, to just such another ranch near Cockrane, and we could judge what these estates were like.
They are lonely but magnificent. They extend with lakes, close, tight patches of bush and small and occasional woods over undulating country to the sharp, bare wall of the snow-capped Rockies. The light is marvellous. Calgary is 3,500 feet up, and the level mounts steadily to the mountains. At this altitude the sunlight has an astonishing clarity, and everything is seen in a sharp and brilliant light.
In the rambling but comfortable house of the ranch the Prince was entertained with cattleman's fare, and on the Tuesday (after a ten-mile run before breakfast) he was introduced to the ardours of the cattleman's calling. He mounted a broncho and with his host joined the cowboys in rounding several thousand head of cattle, driving them in towards the branding corrals.
This is no task for an idler or a slacker. The bunch was made up mainly of cows with calves, or steers of less than a year old, who believed in the policy of self-determination, being still unbranded and still conspicuously independent. Most of them, in fact, had seen little or nothing of man in their life of lonely pasturage over the wide plains.
Riding continually at a gallop and in a whirlwind of movement and dust and horns, the Prince helped to bunch the mass into a compact circle, and then joined with the others in riding into the nervous herd, in order to separate the calves from the mothers, and the unbranded steers from those already marked with the sign of Bar U.
Calves and steers were roped and dragged to the corral, where they were flung and the brand seared on their flanks with long irons taken from a fire in the enclosure.
The Prince did not spare himself, and worked as hard as any cattleman in the business, and indeed he satisfied those exacting critics, the cowboys, who produced in his favour another Westernism, describing him as "a Bear. He's fur all over." Then, as though a strenuous morning in the saddle was not enough, he went off in the afternoon after partridges, spending the whole time on the tramp until he was due to start for Calgary.
His pleasure in his experience was summed up in the terse comment: "Some Ranch," that he set against his signature in Mr. Lane's visitors' book. It also had the practical result of turning him into a rancher himself, for it was at this time he saw the ranch which he ultimately bought. It is a very good little property, close to Mr. Lane's, so that in running it the Prince will have the advantage of that expert's advice. Part of the Prince's plan for handling it is to give an opportunity to soldiers who served with him in the war to take up positions on the ranch. Mr. Lane told me himself that the proposition is a practical one, and there should be profitable results.
Leaving Bar U, the Prince returned to High River at that Canadian pace of travelling which sets the timid European wondering whether his accident policy is fully paid up. In High River, where the old cow-puncher ideal of hitting up the dust in the wild and woolly manner has given way to the rule of jazz dances and bright frocks, he mounted the train and steamed off to Calgary.
In Calgary great things had been done to the Armoury where the ball was to be held. Handled in the big manner of the Dominion, the great hall had been re-floored with "hard wood" blocks, and a scheme of real beauty, extending to an artificial sky in the roof, had been evolved.
At this dance the whole of Calgary seemed in attendance, either on the floor, or outside watching the guests arrive. In Canada the scope of the invitations is universal. There are no distinctions. The pretty girl who serves you with shaving soap over the drug store counter asks if she will meet you at the Prince's ball, as a matter of course. She is going. So is the young man at the estate office. So is your taxi chauffeur (the taxi is an open touring car). So is—everybody. These dances are the most democratic affairs, and the most spirited. And as spirited and democratic as anybody was the Prince himself, who, in this case, in spite of his run before breakfast, a hard morning in the saddle, his long tramp in the afternoon, his automobile and railway travelling, danced with the rest into the small hours of the morning.
All the little boys in Calgary watched for his arrival. And after he had gone in there was a fierce argument as to who had come in closest contact with him. One little boy said that the Prince had looked straight at him and smiled.
Another capped it:
"He shoved me on the shoulder as he went by," he cried.
The inevitable last chimed in:
"You don't make it at all," he said. "He trod on my brother's toe."
In the night the Royal train steamed the few miles from Calgary and on the morning of Wednesday, September 17th, we woke up in the first field works of the Rocky Mountains.
It was a day on which we were to see one of the most picturesque ceremonies of the tour, and slipping through the high scarps of the mountains to the little valley in which Banff station stands, we were into that experience of colour at once.
Drawn up in the open by the little station was a line of Indians, clad in their historic costumes, and mounted on the small, springy horses of Canada. Some were in feathers and buckskin and beads, some in the high felt hats and bright-shirts of the cowboy, all were romantic in bearing. They were there to form the escort of the new "Chief."
As the Prince's car drove from the station along a road that wound its way amid glades of spruce and poplar glowing with the old gold of Autumn that filled the valleys winding about the feet of high and austere mountains, other bodies of Stoney Indians joined the escort about the car.
They had gathered at the opening of every side lane, and as the cavalcade passed, dropped in behind, until the procession became a snake of shifting colour, vermilion and cherry, yellow and blue and green, going forward under the dappling of sun that slipped between the swinging branches.
Chiefs, the sunray of eagles' feathers on their heads, braves in full war-paint, Indian cowboys in shirts of all the colours of the spectrum, and squaws a mass of beads and sequins, with bright shawls and brighter silk head-wraps, made up the escort. Behind and at times in front of many of the squaws were papooses, some riding astraddle, their arms round the women's waists, others slung in shawls, but all clad in Indian garb that seemed to be made up of a mass of closely-sewn beads, turquoise, green, white or red, so that the little bodies were like scaly and glittering lizards.
This ride that wound in and out of these very beautiful mountain valleys took the Prince past the enclosures of the National Park, and he saw under the trees the big, hairy-necked bison, the elk and mountain goats that are harboured in this great natural reserve.
On the racecourse were Indian tepees, banded, painted with the heads of bulls, and bright with flags. The braves who were waiting for the Prince, and those who were escorting him, danced, their ponies whirling about, racing through veils of dust and fluttering feathers and kerchiefs in a sort of ride of welcome. From over by the tepees there came the low throbbing of tom-toms to join with the thin, high, dog-like whoop of the Indian greeting.
On a platform at the hub of half-circle of Indians the Prince listened to the addresses and accepted the Chieftaincy of the Stoney tribe. Some of the Indians had their faces painted a livid chrome-yellow, so that their heads looked like masks of death; some were smeared with red, some barred with blue. Most, however, showed merely the high-boned, sphinx-like brown of their faces free from war-paint. The costumes of many were extremely beautiful, the wonderful beadwork on tunic and moccasins being a thing of amazing craftsmanship, though the elk-tooth decorations, though of great value, were not so attractive.
Standing in front of the rest, the chief, "Little Thunder," read the address to the Prince. He was a big, aquiline fellow, young and handsome, clad in white, hairy chaps and cowboy shirt. He spoke in sing-song Cree, his body curving back from straddled knees as though he sat a pulling horse.
In his historic tongue, and then in English, he spoke of the honour the Prince was paying the Stoneys, and of their enduring loyalty to him and his father; and he asked the Prince "to accept from us this Indian suit, the best we have, emblematic of the clothes we wore in happy days. We beg you also to allow us to elect you as our chief, and to give you the name Chief Morning Star."
The suit given to the Prince was an exceedingly handsome one of white buckskin, decorated with beads, feathers and fur, and surmounted by a great headdress of feathers rising from a fillet of beads and fur. The Prince put on the headdress at once, and spoke to the Indians as a chief to his braves, telling them of the honour they had done him.
When he had finished, the tom-toms were brought into action again, and a high, thin wail went up from the ring of Indians, and they began almost at once to move round in a dance. Indian dancing is monotonous. It is done to the high, nasal chanting of men gathered round a big drum in the centre of the ring. This drum is beaten stoically by all to give the time.
Some of the dancing is the mere bending of knees and a soft shuffling stamping of moccasined feet. In other dances vividly clad, broad-faced, comely squaws joined in the ring of braves, whose feathers and elk-tooth ornaments swung as they moved, and the whole ring, with a slightly rocking movement, shuffled an inch at a time round the tom-tom men. The motion was very like that of soldiers dressing ranks.
A more spirited dance is done by braves holding weapons stiffly, and following each other in file round the circle, now bending knees, or bodies, now standing upright. As they pass round and dip they loose little snapping yelps. All the time their faces remain as impassive as things graven.
The dancing was followed by racing. Boys mounted bareback the springy little horses, and with their legs twisted into rope-girths—with reins, the only harness—went round the track at express speed. Young women, riding astride, their dresses tied about their knees, also raced, showing horsemanship even superior to the boys. The riding was extremely fine, and the little horses bunch and move with an elastic and hurtling movement that is thrilling.
The ceremony had made the bravest of spectacles. The Indian colour and romance of the scene, set in a deep cup rimmed by steep, grim mountains, the sides and icecaps of which the bright sunlight threw up into an almost unreal actuality, gave it a rare and entrancing quality. And not the least of its picturesque attractions were the papooses in bead and fringed leather, who grubbed about in the earth with stoic calm. They looked almost too toylike to be true. They looked as though their right place was in a scheme of decoration on a wall or a mantel-shelf. As one lady said of them: "They're just the sort of things I want to take home as souvenirs."
Banff is an exquisite and ideal holiday place, and I can appreciate the impulse that sends many Americans as well as Canadians to enjoy its beauties in the summer.
It is a valley ringed by an amphitheatre of mountains, up the harsh slopes of which spruce forests climb desperately until beaten by the height and rock on the scarps beneath crests which are often snow-capped. Through this broad valley, and winding round slopes into other valleys, run streams of that poignant blueness which only glacial silt and superb mountain skies can Impart.
The houses and hotels in this Switzerland of Canada are charming, but the Banff Springs Hotel, where the Prince stayed, is genius. It is perched up on a spur in the valley, so that in that immense ring of heights it seems to float insubstantially above the clouds of trees, like the palace of some genii. For not only was its site admirably chosen, but the whole scheme of the building fits the atmosphere of the place. And it is as comfortable as it is beautiful.
It faces across its red-tiled, white-balustered terraces and vivid lawns, a sharp river valley that strolls winding amid the mountains. And just as this river turns before it, it tumbles down a rock slide in a vast mass of foam, so that even when one cannot see its beauty at night, its roar can be heard in the wonderful silence of the valley. On the terrace of the hotel are two bathing-pools fed from the sulphur springs of Banff, and here Canadians seem to bathe all day until dance-time—and even slip back for a moonlight bath between dancing and bed.
It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing, walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty. And it is, of course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the Canadians and Americans sign themselves:
"Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane. We are on our honeymoon."
The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful roads. There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.
The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a little cavern deep in the hillside—a cavern made almost impregnable by smell. In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of the spring. Now the Government has arranged things better. It has carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with all modern accessories.
From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.
At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the sea-level, but the Château and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional breather in a deep pool, over rocks.
The Château is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but, thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the windows or the broad lawns of the Château, for the mountain and glacier is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of the valley.
Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of trees, is the home of an English woman. She used to spend her days working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely crag. She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly off to California when the winter comes. The Prince went up to take tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.
There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Château, and one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance during the night. In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds. He thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was attempting to sneak in by the back way. He marched up to the edge of the wood and waited in his most legal attitude for the intruder—and a bear came out to meet him. Not only did it come out to meet him, but it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner. The policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.
His experience was one of the next day's jokes, since it appears that bears often do come out of the woods attracted by the smell of hotel cooking. On the whole they are amiable, and are no more difficult than ordinary human beings marching in the direction of a good dinner.
From Lake Louise the Prince went steadily west through some of the most impressive scenery in Canada. The gradient climbs resolutely to the great lift of petrified earth above Kicking Horse Pass, so that the train seemed to be steaming across the sky.
A little east of the Pass is a slight monument called "the Great Divide." Here Alberta meets British Columbia, and here a stream springs from the mountains to divide itself east and west, one fork joining stream after stream, until as a great river it empties into Hudson Bay; the other, turning west and leaping down the ledges of valleys, makes for the Pacific.
Beyond "the Great Divide" the titanic Kicking Horse Pass opens out. It falls by gigantic levels for 1,300 feet to the dim, spruce-misted valleys that lie darkly at the foot of the giant mountains. It is not a straight canyon, but a series of deeper valleys opening out of deep valleys round the shoulders of the grim slopes. Down this tortuous corridor the railway creeps lower, level by level, going with the physical caution of a man descending a dangerous slope.
The line feels for its best footholds on the sides of walls that drop sheer away, and tower sheer above. We could look over the side down abrupt precipices, and see through the dense rain of the day the mighty drop to where the Kicking Horse River, after leaping over rocky ramps and flowing through level pools, ran in a score of channels on the wide shingly floor of the Pass.
Beneath us as we descended we could see the track twisting and looping, as it sought by tunnelling to conquer the exacting gradient. The planning of the line is, in its own way, as wonderful as the natural marvel of the Pass. One is filled with awe at the vision, the genius and the tenacity of those great railway men who had seen a way over this grim mountain barrier, had schemed their line and had mastered nature.
At Yoho Station that clings like a limpet near the top of this soaring barrier, the Prince took to horse, and rode down trails that wind along the mountainside through thickets of trees to Field at the foot of the drop. The rain was driving up the throat of the valley before a strong wind, and it was not a good day for riding, even in woolly chaps such as he wore, but he set out at a gallop, and enjoyed the exercise and the scenery, which is barbaric and tremendous, though here and there it was etherealized by sudden gleams of sunlight playing on the wet foliage of the mountain-side and turning the wet masses into rainbows.
During this ride he passed under the stain in a sheer wall of rock that gives the Pass its name. For some geological reason there is, high up in a straight mass of white towering cliff, a black outcrop that is like the silhouette of an Indian on a horse. I could not distinguish the kick in the horse myself, but I was assured it was there, and Kicking Horse is thus named.
From Field, a breathing space for trains, about which has grown a small village possessing one good hotel, the Prince rode up the valleys to some of the beauty spots, such as Emerald Lake, which lies high in the sky under the cold glaciers of Mount Burgess. It was a wonderful ride through the spruce and balsam woods of these high valleys.
During Saturday, September 20th, the train was yet in the mountains, and the scenery continued to be magnificent. From Field the line works down to the level of the Columbia River, some 1,500 feet lower, through magnificent stretches of mountain panorama, and through breathless gorges like the Palliser, before climbing again steeply to the highest point of the Selkirk Range. Here the train seemed to charge straight at the towering wall of Mount MacDonald, but only because there is a miracle of a tunnel—Connaught Tunnel—which coaxes the line down by easy grades to Rogers Pass, the Illicilliwaet and Albert Canyon. Through all this stretch the scenery is superb. In the gorges and the canyon high mountains force the river and railway together, until the train runs in a semi-darkness between sheer cliffs, with the water foaming and tearing itself forward in pent-up fury between harsh, rocky walls. Sometimes these walls encroach until the water channel is forced between two rocks standing up like doorposts, with not much more than a doorway space between them. Through these gateways the volume of water surges with an indescribable sense of power.
At places, as in the valley of the Beavermouth, east of the Connaught Tunnel, the line climbs hugely upward on the sides of great ranges, and, on precarious ledges, hangs above a gigantic floor, tree-clad and fretted with water channels. The train crept over spidery bridges, spanning waterdrops, and crawled for miles beneath ranges of big timber snowsheds.
The train stopped at the pleasant little mountain town of Golden, where the Prince went "ashore," and there was the ceremony of reception. This was on the program. The next stop was not.
West of the Albert Canyon, at a tiny station called Twin Butte, we passed another train standing in a siding, with a long straggle of men in khaki waiting on the platform and along the track, looking at us as we swept along. Abruptly we ceased to sweep along. The communication cord had been pulled, and we stopped with a jerk.
The Prince had caught sight of the soldiers, and had recognized who they were. He had given orders to pull up, and almost before the brakes had ground home, he was out on the track and among the men, speaking to them and the officers, who were delighted at this unexpected meeting.
The soldiers were English. They were men of the 25th Middlesex, H.A.C. and other regiments, four hundred all told. They had come from Omsk, in Russia, by way of the Pacific, and were being railed from Vancouver to Montreal in order to take ship for home. The men of the Middlesex were those made famous by the sinking of their trooper off the African coast in 1916. Their behaviour then had been so admirable that it will be remembered the King cabled to them, "Well done, Diehards!"
By the isolated railway station and under the lonely mountains so far from their homes, they were drawn up, and the Prince made an informal inspection of the men who had been so long away, and who had travelled the long road from Siberia on their way Blightyward.
The inspection lasted only a few minutes, and the episode, spontaneous as it was characteristic, scarcely broke the run into Revelstoke. But it was the happiest of meetings.
Revelstoke is a small, bright mountain town known, as its inhabitants say, for snow and strawberries. It is their way of explaining that the land in this deep mountain valley is splendidly fertile, and that settlers have only to farm on a small scale in order to make a comfortable living, though in winter it is—well, of the mountains. The fishing there is also extremely good, and we were told almost fabulous tales of boys who on their journey home from school spent a few minutes at the creeks of the Columbia River, and went on their way bearing enough fish to make a dinner for a big family.
The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that climbed by corkscrew bends. This was thrilling enough, for there were abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly corners.
From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fishing centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore later), where there are rich orchard lands.
With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers, those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.
A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we passed dumps of war material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver. After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.