Vancouver was land after a mountain voyage. With the feelings of a seafarer seeing cliffs after a long ocean journey, we reached common, flat country and saw homely asphalt streets.
There can be no two points of view concerning the beauty and grandeur of the mountain scenery through which the Prince had passed, but after a succession of even the most stimulating gorges and glaciers one does turn gladly to a little humanity in the lump. Vancouver was humanity in the lump, an exceedingly large lump and of peculiarly warm and generous emotions. We were glad to meet crowds once more.
There are some adequate streets in this great western port of Canada. When Vancouver planned such opulent boulevards as Granville and Georgia streets, it must have been thinking hard about posterity, which will want a lot of space if only to drive its superabundant motors. But splendid and wide and long though these and other streets be, the mass of people which lined them on Monday, September 22nd, was such as to set the most long-headed town planner wondering if, after all, he had allowed enough room for the welcoming of Princes.
From the vast, orderly throng massed behind the red and tartan of the Highland guard of honour at the station, thick ranks of people lined the whole of a long route to Stanley Park.
This crowd not only filled the sidewalks with good-tempered liveliness, but it had sections in all the windows of the fine blocks of buildings the Prince passed. Now and then it attempted to emulate the small boys who ran level with the Prince's car cheering to full capacity, and caring not a jot whether a "Mounty" of the escort or a following car went over them, but on the whole the crowd was more in hand than usual.
This does not mean that it was less enthusiastic. The reception was of the usual stirring quality, and it culminated in an immense outburst in Stanley Park.
It was a touch of genius to place the official reception in the Park. It is, in a sense, the key-note of Vancouver. It gives it its peculiar quality of charm. It is a huge park occupying the entirety of a peninsula extending from the larger peninsula upon which Vancouver stands. It has sea-water practically all round it. In it are to be found the greatest and finest trees in Canada in their most natural surroundings.
It is one big "reservation" for trees. Those who think that they can improve upon nature have had short shrift, and the giant Douglas pine, the firs and the cedars thrive naturally in a setting that has remained practically untouched since the day when the British seaman, Captain Vancouver, explored the sounds of this coast. It is an exquisite park having delightful forest walks and beautiful waterside views.
Under the great trees and in a wilderness of bright flowers and flags as bright, a vast concourse of people was gathered about the pretty pavilion in the park to give the Prince a welcome. The function had all the informality of a rather large picnic, and when the sun banished the Pacific "smoke," or mist, the gathering had infinite charm.
After this reception the Prince went for a short drive in the great park, seeing its beautiful glades; looking at Burrard Inlet that makes its harbour one of the best in the world, and getting a glimpse of English Bay, where the sandy bathing beaches make it one of the best sea-side resorts in the world as well. At all points of the drive there were crowds. And while most of those on the sidewalks were Canadian, there was also, as at "Soo," a good sprinkling of Americans. They had come up from Seattle and Washington county to have a first-hand look at the Prince, and perhaps to "jump" New York and the eastern Washington in a racial desire to get in first.
In this long drive, as well as during the visit we paid to Vancouver on our return from Victoria, there was a considerable amount of that mist which the inhabitants call "smoke," because it is said to be the result of forest fires along the coast, in the air. Yet in spite of the mist we had a definite impression of a fine, spacious city, beautifully situated and well planned, with distinguished buildings. And an impression of people who occupy themselves with the arts of business, progress and living as becomes a port not merely great now, but ordained to be greater tomorrow.
It is a city of very definite attraction, as perhaps one imagined it would be, from a place that links directly with the magical Orient, and trades in silks and tea and rice, and all the romantic things of those lands, as well as in lumber and grain with all the colourful towns that fringe the wonderful Pacific Coast.
Vancouver has been the victim of the "boom years." Under the spell of that "get-rich-quick" impulse, it outgrew its strength. It is getting over that debility now (and perhaps, after all, the "boomsters" were right, if their method was anticipatory) and a fine strength is coming to it. When conditions ease and requisitioned shipping returns to its wharves, and its own building yards make up the lacking keels, it should climb steadily to its right position as one of the greatest ports in the British Empire.
Vancouver, as it is today, is a peculiarly British town. Its climate is rather British, for its winter season has a great deal of rain where other parts of Canada have snow, and its climate is Britishly warm and soft. It attracts, too, a great many settlers from home, its newspapers print more British news than one usually finds in Canadian papers (excepting such great Eastern papers as, for instance,The Montreal Gazette), and its atmosphere, while genuinely Canadian, has an English tone.
There is not a little of America, too, in its air, for great American towns like Seattle are very close across the border—in fact one can take a "jitney" to the United States as an ordinary item of sightseeing. Under these circumstances it was not unnatural that there should be an interesting touch of America in the day's functions.
The big United States battleshipNew Mexicoand some destroyers were lying in the harbour, and part of the Prince's program was to have visited Admiral Rodman, who commanded. The ships, however, were in quarantine, and this visit had to be put off, though the Admiral himself was a guest at the brilliant luncheon in the attractive Vancouver Hotel, when representatives from every branch of civic life in greater Vancouver came together to meet the Prince.
In his speech the Prince made direct reference to the American Navy, and to the splendid work it had accomplished in the war. He spoke first of Vancouver, and its position, now and in the future, as one of the greatest bases of British sea power. Vancouver, he explained, also brought him nearer to those other great countries in the British Dominions, Australia and New Zealand, and it seemed to him it was a fitting link in the chain of unity and co-operation—a chain made more firm by the war—that the British Empire stretched round the world. It was a chain, he felt, of kindred races inspired by kindred ideals. Such ideals were made more apparent by the recent and lamented death of that great man, General Botha, who, from being an Africander leader in the war against the British eighteen years ago, had yet lived to be one of the British signatories at the Treaty of Versailles. Nothing else could express so significantly the breadth, justice and generosity of the British spirit and cause.
Turning to Admiral Rodman, he went on to say that he felt that that spirit had its kinship in America, whose Admiral had served with the Grand Fleet. Of the value of the work those American ships under Admiral Rodman did, there could be no doubt. He had helped the Allies with a most magnificent and efficient unit.
At no other place had the response exceeded the warmth shown that day. The Prince's manner had been direct and statesmanlike, each of his points was clearly uttered, and the audience showed a keen quickness in picking them up.
Admiral Rodman, a heavily-built figure, with the American light, dryness of wit, gave a new synonym for the word "Allies"; to him that word meant "Victory." It was the combination of every effort of every Ally that had won the war. Yet, at the same time, practical experience had taught him to feel that if it had not been for the way the Grand Fleet had done its duty from the very outset, the result of the war would have been diametrically opposite. Feelingly, he described his service with the Grand Fleet. He had placed himself unreservedly under the command of the British from the moment he had entered European waters, yet so complete was the co-operation between British and Americans that he often took command of British units. The splendid war experience had done much to draw the great Anglo-Saxon nations together. Their years together had ripened into friendship, then into comradeship, then into brotherhood. And that brotherhood he wished to see enduring, so that if ever the occasion should again arise all men of Anglo-Saxon strain should stand together.
There was real warmth of enthusiasm as the Admiral spoke. Those present, whose homes are close to those of their American neighbours living across a frontier without fortifications, in themselves appreciated the essential sympathy that exists between the two great nations. When the Admiral conveyed to the Prince a warm invitation to visit the United States, this enthusiasm reached its highest point. It was, in its way, an international lunch, and a happy one.
After reviewing the Great War Veterans on the quay-side, the Prince left Vancouver just before lunch time on Tuesday, September 23rd, for Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, which lies across the water on Vancouver Island.
It was a short run of five hours in one of the most comfortable boats I have ever been in—thePrincess Alice, which is on the regular C.P.R. service, taking in the fjords and towns of the British Columbian coast.
Leaving Vancouver, where the towering buildings give an authentic air of modern romance to the skyline, a sense of glamour went with us across the sea. The air was still tinged with "smoke" and the fabled blue of the Pacific was not apparent, but we could see curiously close at hand the white cowl of Mount Baker, which is America, and we passed on a zig-zag course through the scattered St. Juan Islands, each of which seemed to be charming and lonely enough to stage a Jack London story.
On the headlands or beaches of these islands there were always men and women and children to wave flags and handkerchiefs, and to send a cheer across the water to the Prince. One is surprised, so much is the romantic spell upon one, that the people on these islets of loneliness should know that the Prince was coming, that is, one is surprised until one realizes that this is Canada, and that telegraphs and telephones and up-to-date means of communication are commonplaces here as everywhere.
Romance certainly invades one on entering Victoria. It seems a city out of a kingdom of Anthony Hope's, taken in hand by a modern Canadian administration. Steaming up James Bay to the harbour landing one feels that it is a sparkling city where the brightest things in thrilling fiction might easily happen.
The bay goes squarely up to a promenade. Behind the stone balustrade is a great lawn, and beyond that, amid trees, is a finely decorative building, a fitted back-ground to any romance, though it is actually anhôtel de luxe. To the left of the square head of the water is a distinguished pile; it is the Customs House, but it might be a temple of dark machinations. To the right is a rambling building, ornate and attractive, with low, decorated domes and outflung and rococo wings. That could easily be the palace of at least a sub-rosa royalty, though it is the House of Parliament. The whole of this square grouping of green grass and white buildings, in the particularly gracious air of Victoria gives a glamorous quality to the scene.
Victoria's welcome to the Prince was modern enough. Boat sirens and factory hooters loosed a loud welcome as the steamer came in. A huge derrick arm that stretched a giant legend ofWelcomeout into the harbour, swung that sign to face thePrincess Aliceall the time she was passing, and then kept pace on its rail track so thatWelcomeshould always be abreast of the Prince.
The welcome, too, of the crowds on that day when he landed, and on the next when he attended functions at the Parliament buildings, was as Canadian and up-to-date as anywhere else in the Dominion. The crowds were immense, and, at one time, when little girls stood on the edge of a path to strew roses in front of him as he walked, there was some danger of the eager throngs submerging both the little girls and the charming ceremony in anxiety to get close to him.
The crowd in Parliament Square during the ceremonies of Wednesday, September 24th, was prodigious. From the hotel windows the whole of the great green space before the Parliament buildings was seen black with people who stayed for hours in the hope of catching sight of the Prince as he went from one ceremony to another.
It was a gathering of many races. There were Canadians born and Canadians by residence. Vivid American girls come by steamer from Seattle were there. There were men and women from all races in Europe, some of them Canadians now, some to be Canadians presently. There were Chinese and Japanese in greater numbers than we had seen elsewhere, for Victoria is the nearest Canadian city to the East. There were Hindus, and near them survivors of the aboriginal race, the Songhish Indians, who lorded it in Vancouver Island before the white man came.
And giving a special quality to this big cosmopolitan gathering was the curious definitely English air of Victoria. It is the most English of Canadian cities. Its even climate is the most English, and its air of well-furnished leisure is English. Because of this, or perhaps I should say the reason for this is that it is the home of many Englishmen. Not only do settlers from England come here in numbers, but many English families, particularly those from the Orient East, who get to know its charms when travelling through it on their way across Canada and home, come here to live when they retire. And this distinctly English atmosphere gets support in great measure from the number of rich Canadians who, on ceasing their life's work, come here to live in leisure.
Yet though this is responsible for the growing up in Victoria of some of the most beautiful residential districts in Canada, where beautiful houses combine with the lovely scenery of country and sea in giving the city and its environments a delightful charm, Victoria is vigorously industrial too.
It has shipbuilding and a brisk commerce in lumber, machinery and a score of other manufactories, and it serves both the East and the Canadian and American coast. It has fine, straight, broad streets, lined with many distinguished buildings, and its charm has virility as well as ease.
The Prince made a long break in his tour here, remaining until Sunday, September 28th. Most of this stay was given over to restful exercise; he played golf and went for rides through the beautiful countryside. There were several functions on his program, however. He visited the old Navy Yard and School at Esquimault, and he took a trip on the Island railway to Duncan, Ladysmith, Nanaimo and Qualicum.
At each of these towns he had a characteristic welcome, and at some gained an insight into local industries, such as lumbering and the clearing of land for farming. On the return journey he mounted the engine cab and came most of the way home in this fashion.
The country in the Island is serene and attractive, extremely like England, being reminiscent of the rolling wooded towns in Surrey, though the Englishman misses the hedges. The many sea inlets add beauty to the scenery, and there are delightful rides along roads that alternately run along the water's edge, or hang above these fjords on high cliff ledges.
In one of our inland drives we were taken to an extraordinary and beautiful garden. It is a serene place, laid out with exquisite skill. In one part of it an old quarry has been turned into a sunken garden. Here with straight cliffs all round there nests a wilderness of flowers. Small, artificial crags have been reared amid the rockeries and the flowers, and by small, artificial paths one can climb them. A stream cascades down the cliff, and flows like a beautiful toy-thing through the dainty artificial scenery.
In another part of the grounds is a Japanese garden, with tiny pools and moon bridges and bamboo arbours—and flowers and flowers and flowers. And not only does the maker of this enchanted spot throw it open to the public, but he has built for visitors a delightful chalet where they can take tea. This chalet is a big, comely hall, with easy chairs and gate tables. It is provided with all the American magazines. In a tiny outbuilding is a scullery with cups and saucers and plates and teapots—all for visitors.
The visitors take their own food, and use these articles. The Chinese cook at the house near by provides boiling water, and all the owner asks is that those who use his crockery shall wash it up at the sink provided, and with the dish-cloths provided, and leave it in readiness for the next comer.
That generosity is the final and completing touch to the charm of that exquisite place, which is a veritable "Garden of Allah" amid the beauties of Canadian scenery.
Another drive was over the Malahat Pass, through superb country, to a big lumber camp on Shawnigan Lake. Here we saw the whole of the operations of lumbering from the point where a logger notches a likely tree for cutting to the final moment when Chinese workmen feed the great trunks to the steam saw that hews them into beams and planks.
Having selected a tree, the first logger cuts into it a deep wedge which is to give it direction in its fall. These men show an almost uncanny skill. They get the line of a great tree with the handle of their axes, as an artist uses a pencil, and they can cut their notches so accurately that they can "fall" a tree on a pocket-handkerchief.
Two men follow this expert. They cut smaller notches in the tree, and insert their "boards" into it. These "boards" have a steel claw which bites into the tree when the men stand on the board, the idea being both to raise the cutters above the sprawling roots, and to give their swing on the saw an elasticity. It is because they cut so high that Canada is covered with tall stumps that make clearing a problem. The stumps are generally dynamited, or torn up by the roots by cables that pass through a block on the top of a tree to the winding-drum of a donkey-engine.
When the men at the saw have cut nearly through the tree, they sing out a drawling, musical "Stand aw-ay," gauging the moment with the skill of woodsmen, for there is no sign to the lay eye. In a few moments the giant tree begins to fall stiffly. It moves slowly, and then with its curious rigidity tears swiftly through the branches of neighbouring trees, coming to the ground with a thump very much like the sound of an H.E. shell, and throwing up a red cloud of torn bark. The sight of a tree falling is a moving thing; it seems almost cruel to bring it down.
A donkey-engine mounted on big logs, that has pulled itself into place by the simple method of anchoring its steel rope to a distant tree—and pulling, jerks the great trunks out of the heart of the forest. A block and tackle are hitched to the top of a tall tree that has been left standing in a clearing, and the steel ropes are placed round the fallen trunks. As this lifting line pulls them from their resting-place, they come leaping and jerking forward, charging down bushes, rising over stumps, dropping and hurdling over mounds until it seems that they are actually living things struggling to escape. The ubiquitous donkey-engine loads the great logs on trucks, and an engine, not very much bigger than a donkey-engine, tows the long cars of timber down over a sketchy track to the waterside.
Here the loads are tipped with enormous splashes into the water to wait in the "booms" until they are wanted at the mill. Then they are towed across, sure-footed men jump on to them and steer them to the big chute, where grappling teeth catch them and pull them up until they reach the sawing platform. They are jerked on to a movable truck, that grips them, and turns them about with mechanical arms into the required position for cutting, and then log and truck are driven at the saw blade, which slices beams or planks out of the primitive trunk with an almost sinister ease.
Uncanny machines are everywhere in this mill. Machines carve shingles and battens or billets with an almost human accuracy. A conveyor removes all sawdust from the danger of lights with mechanical intelligence. Another carries off all the scrapwood and takes it away to a safe place in the mill yard where a big, wire-hooded furnace, something like a straight hop oast-house, burns every scrap of it.
The life in the lumber camp is a hard life, but it is well paid, it is independent, and the food is a revelation. The loggers' lunch we were given was a meal fit for gourmets. It was in a rough pitch-pine hut at rough tables. Clam-soup was served to us in cylindrical preserved meat cans on which the maker's labels still clung—but it lost none of its delightful flavour for that. Beef was served cut in strips in a great bowl, and we all reached out for the vegetables. There were mammothine bowls of mixed salad possessing an astonishing (to British eyes) lavishness of hard-boiled egg, lemon pie (lemon curd pie) with a whipped-egg crown, deep apple pie (the logger eats pie—which many people will know better as "tart"—three times a day), a marvellous fruit salad in jelly, and the finest selection of plums, peaches, apples, and oranges I had seen for a long day.
I was told that this was the regular meal of the loggers, and I know it was cooked by a chef (there is a French or Belgian or Canadian chef in most logging camps), for I talked with him. To live in a lonely forest, in a shack, and to work tremendously hard, may not be all the life a man wants, but it has compensations.
I understand that just about then the lumbermen were prone to striking. In one place they were demanding sheets, and in another they had refused to work because, having ordered two cases of eggs from a store, the tradesman had only been able to send the one he had in stock.
While we were in this camp we had some experience of the danger of forest fires. We had walked up to the head of the clearing, when one of the men of a group we had left working a short distance behind, came running up to say a fire had started. We went back, and in a place where, ten minutes before, there had been no sign of fire, flames and smoke were rising over an area of about one hundred yards square. Little tongues of flame were racing over the "slashings" (i.e., the débris of bark and splintered limbs that litter an area which has been cut), snakes of flame were writhing up standing trees, sparks blown by the wind were dropping into the dry "slashings" twenty, thirty and fifty yards away and starting fresh fires. We could see with what incredible rapidity these fires travelled, and how dangerous they can be once they are well alight. This fire was surrounded, and got under with water and shovelled earth, but we were shown a big stretch of hillside which another such fire had swept bare in a little under two hours. The summer is the dangerous time, for "slashings" and forests are then dry, and one chance spark from a badly screened donkey-engine chimney will start a blaze. When the fire gets into wet and green wood it soon expires.
These drives, for us, were the major events in an off time, for there was very little happening until the night of the 28th, when we went on board thePrincess Aliceagain, to start on our return journey.
On Monday, September 29th, the Prince of Wales returned to Vancouver and took car to New Westminster, the old capital of British Columbia before picturesque Victoria assumed the reins.
New Westminster was having its own festival that day, so the visit was well timed. The local exhibition was to begin, and the Prince was to perform the opening ceremony. Under many fine arches, one a tall torii, erected by Chinese and Japanese Canadians, the procession of cars passed through the town, on a broad avenue that runs alongside the great Fraser River. Drawn up at the curb were many floats that were to take part in the trades' procession through the town to the exhibition grounds. Most of them were ingenious and attractive. There were telegraph stations on wagons, corn dealers' shops, and the like, while on the bonnet of one car was a doll nurse, busy beside a doll bed. Another automobile had turned itself into an aeroplane, while another had obliterated itself under a giant bully beef can to advertise a special kind of tinned meat.
All cars were decorated with masses of spruce and maple leaf, now beautiful in autumn tints of crimson and gold. And Peace and Britannia, of course, were there with attendant angels and nations, comely girls whose celestial and symbolical garments did not seem to be the right fashion for a day with more than a touch of chill in the air.
Through this avenue of fantasy, colour and cheery humanity the Prince drove through the town, which seems to have the air of brooding over its past, to the exhibition ground, which he opened, and where he presented medals to many soldiers.
From New Westminster the Royal train struck upward through the Rocky Mountains by way of the Kettle Valley. It passed through a land of terrific and magnificent scenery. It equalled anything we had seen in the more famous beauty spots, but it was more savage. The valleys appeared closer knit and deeper, and the sharp and steep mountains pinched the railway and river gorges together until we seemed to be creeping along the floor of a mighty passage-way of the dark, aboriginal gods.
Again and again the train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge. In this land of steep gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, climbed through the mountain passes.
This tract of country has only within the last few years been tapped by a railway that seems even yet to have to fight its way forward against Nature, barbarous, splendid and untamed. It was built to the usual ideal of Canada, that vision which ignores the handicaps of today for the promise of tomorrow. Yet even today it taps the rich lake valleys where mining and general farming is carried on, and where there are miles of orchards already growing some of the finest apples and peaches in Canada.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 30th, the train climbed down from the higher and rougher levels to Penticton, a small, bright, growing town that stands as focus for the immense fruit-growing district about Okanagan Lake.
Here, after a short ceremony, the Prince boarded the steamerSicamous, a lake boat of real Canadian brand; a long white vessel built up in an extraordinary number of tiers, so that it looked like an elaborate wedding-cake, but a useful craft whose humpy stern paddle-wheel can push her through a six-foot shallow or deep water with equal dispatch. And a delightfully comfortable boat into the bargain, with well-sheltered and spacious decks, cosy cabins and bath-rooms, and a big dining saloon, which, placed in the very centre of the ship with the various galleries of the decks rising around it, has an air of belonging to one of those attractive old Dickensian inns.
On this vessel the Prince was carried the whole length of Okanagan Lake, which winds like a blue fillet between mountains for seventy miles. On the ledges and in the tight valleys of these heights he saw the formal ranks of a multitude of orchards.
A short distance along the lake theSicamouspulled in to the toy quay of Summerland, a town born of and existing for fruit, and linked up with the outer world by the C.P.R. Lake Service that owned our own vessel.
All the children of Summerland had collected on the quayside to sing to and to cheer the Prince, and, as he stood on the upper deck and waved his hat cheerfully at them, they cheered a good deal more. When he went ashore and was taken by the grown-up Olympians to examine the grading and packing sheds, where the fruits of all the orchards are handled and graded by mechanical means, prepared for the market, and sold on the co-operative plan, the kiddies exchanged sallies with those waiting on the vessel, flipped big apples up at them, and cheered or jeered as they were caught or missed.
TheSicamouswent close inshore at Peachland, another daughter town of Mother Fruit, to salute the crowd of people who had come out from the pretty bungalow houses that nestle among the green trees on a low and pretty shore, and who stood on the quay in a mass to send a cheer to him.
At Okanagan Landing, at the end of the lake, he took car to Vernon, a purposeful and attractive town which is the commercial heart of the apple industry. Indeed, there was no need to ask the reason for Vernon's being. Even the decorations were wrought out of apples, and under an arch of bright, cherry-red apples the Prince passed on to the sports ground, and on to a platform the corner posts of which were crowned with pyramids of apples, and in the centre of which was a model apple large enough to suit the appetite of Gargantua.
In front of this platform was a grand stand crowded with children of all races from Scandinavian to Oriental, and these sang with the resistless heartiness of Canada. The Oriental is a pretty useful asset in British Columbia, for in addition to his gifts of industry he is an excellent agriculturist.
After the ceremonies the Prince had an orgy of orchards.
Fruit growing is done with a large gesture. The orchards are neat and young and huge. In a run of many miles the Prince passed between masses of precisely aligned trees, and every tree was thick with bright and gleaming red fruit. Thick, indeed, is a mild word. The short trees seemed practically all fruit, as though they had got into the habit of growing apples instead of leaves. Many of the branches bore so excessive a burden that they had been torn out by the weight of the fruit upon them.
It was a marvellous pageant of fruit in mass. And the apples themselves were of splendid quality, big and firm and glowing, each a perfect specimen of its school. We were able to judge because the land-girls, after tossing aprons full of specimens (not always accurately) into the Prince's car, had enough ammunition left over for the automobiles that followed.
Attractive land girls they were, too. Not garbed like British land-girls, but having all their dashing qualities. Being Canadians they carried the love of silk stockings on to the land, and it was strange to see this feminine extremity under the blue linen overall trousers or knickers. They were cheery, sun-tanned, laughing girls. They were ready for the Prince at every gate and every orchard fence, eager and ready to supplement their gay enthusiasm with this apple confetti.
The Prince stopped here and there to chat with fruit growers, and to congratulate them on their fine showing. Now he stopped to talk to a wounded officer, who had been so cruelly used in the war that he had to support himself on two sticks. Now he stopped to pass a "How d'y' do" to a mob of trousered land-girls who gathered brightly about his car, showing himself as laughing and as cheerful as they.
The cars left the land of growing apples and turned down the lake in a superb run of thirty-six miles to Kelowna. This road skirts fairyland. It winds high up on a shoulder above Long Lake, that makes a floor of living azure between the buttresses and slopes of the mountains. Only when it is tired of the heights does it drop to the lake level, and sweeping through a filigree of trees, speeds along a road that is but an inch or two above the still mirror of Wood Lake, on the polished surface of which there is a delicate fret of small, rocky islets. So, in magnificent fashion, he came to Kelowna, and theSicamous, that carried him back to the train.
Through the night and during the next morning the train carried the Prince deeper in the mountains, skirting in amazing loops, when the train seemed almost to be biting its tail, steep rocky cliffs above white torrents, or the shining blue surfaces of lakes such as Arrow Lake, that formed the polished floor of valleys. Now and then we passed purposeful falls, and by them the power houses that won light and motive force for the valley towns from the falling water. There are those who fear the harnessing of water-power, because it may mean the spoiling of beautiful scenery. Such buildings as I saw in no way marred the view, but rather added to it a touch of human picturesqueness.
Creeping down the levels, with discretion at the curves, the train came in the rain to Nelson on Wednesday, October 1st. Rain spoilt the reception at Nelson, a town that thrives upon the agricultural and mining products of the hills about. There seemed to be a touch of mining grey in the air of the town, but, as in all towns of Canada, no sense of unhappiness, no sense of poverty—indeed, in the whole of Canada I saw five beggars and no more (though, of course, there may have been more). Of these one man was blind, and two were badly crippled soldiers.
There are no poor in Nelson, so I was told, and no unemployed.
"If a man's unemployed," said a Councillor with a twinkle in his eye, "he's due for the penitentiary. With labourers getting five dollars a day, and being able to demand it because of the scarcity of their kind, when a man who says he can't find work has something wrong with him ... as a matter of fact the penitentiary idea is only speculative. There's never been a test case of this kind."
I don't suppose there have been many test cases of that kind in the whole of Canada, for certainly "the everyday people" everywhere have a cheerful and self-dependent look.
At Nelson the Prince embarked on another lake boat, theNasookin, after congratulating rival bands, one of brass, and one (mainly boys) of bagpipes, on their tenacity in tune in the rain. Nelson gave him a very jolly send-off. The people managed to invade the quay in great numbers, and those who were daring clambered to the top of the freight cars standing on the wharf, the better to give him a cheer.
As the boat steamed out into the Kootenay River scores of the nattiest little gasoline launches flying flags escorted him for the first mile or so, chugging along beside theNasookin, or falling in our wake in a bright procession of boats. Encouraged by the "movie" men they waved vigorously, and many good "shoots" of them were filmed.
At Balfour, where the narrow river, after passing many homesteads of great charm nestling amid the greenery of the low shore that fringes the high mountains, turns into Kootenay Lake, the Prince went ashore. Here is a delightful chalet which was once an hotel, but is now a sanatorium for Canadian soldiers. Its position is idyllic. It stands above river and lake, with the fine mountains backing it, and across the river are high mountains.
Over these great slopes on this grey day clouds were gathered, crawling down the shoulders in billows, or blowing in odd and disconnected masses and streamers. These odd ragged scarves and billows look like strayed sheep from the cloud fold, lost in the deep valleys that sit between the blue-grey mountain sides.
The Prince spent some time visiting the sanatorium, and chatting with the inmates, and then played golf on the course here. The C.P.R. were, meanwhile, indulging themselves in one of their habitual feats. The lakes make a gap in the line between Nelson, or rather Balfour siding, and Kootenay Landing at the head of the water. Over this water-jump the whole train, solid steel and weighing a thousand tons, was bodily carried.
Two great barges were used. The long cars were backed on to these with delicate skill—for the slightest waywardness of a heavy, all-steel car on a floating barge is a matter of danger, and each loaded barge was then taken up the lake by a tug grappled alongside.
At Kootenay Landing the delicate process was reversed, and all was carried out without mishap though it was a dark night, and the railwaymen had to work with the aid of searchlights. Kootenay Landing is, in itself, something of a wonder. In the dark, as we waited for the train to be made up, it seemed as solid as good hard land can make it. But as the big Canadian engine came up with the first car we felt our "earth" sway slightly, and in the beam of the big headlight we saw the reason. Kootenay Landing is a station in the air. It is built up on piles.
In cold weather and through a snowfall that had powdered the slopes and foothills of the Rocky Mountains the Prince, on Thursday, October 2nd, reached the prairies again. Now he was travelling well to the south of his former journey on a line that ran just above the American border.
In this bleak and rolling land he was to call in the next two days at a series of small towns whose very names—McLeod, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Maple Creek, Swift Current, Moose Jaw and Regina—had in them a savour of the old, brave days when the Red Man was still a power, and settlers chose their names off-hand from local things.
McLeod, on the Old Man River, just escapes the foothills. It is prairies, a few streets, a movie "joint," an hotel and a golf course. In McLeod we saw the dawn of the Mackinaw, or anyhow first saw the virtues of that strange coat which seems to have been adapted from the original of the Biblical Joseph by a Highland tailor. It is a thick, frieze garment, cut in Norfolk style. The colour is heroic red, or blue or mauve or cinnamon, over which black lines are laid in a plaid tracery.
We realized its value as a warmth-giver while we stood amid a crowd of them as the Prince received addresses. Among the crowd was a band of Blood Indians of the Blackfeet Tribe, whose complexions in the cold looked blue under their habitual brown-red. They had come to lay their homage before him and to present an Indian robe. The Prince shook hands and chatted with the chiefs as well as their squaws, and with the missionary who had spent his life among these Red Men, and had succeeded in mastering the four or five sounds that make up the Indian language.
We talked to an old chief upon whose breast were the large silver medals that Queen Victoria and King George had had specially struck for their Indian subjects. These have become signs of chieftainship, and are taken over by the new chief when he is elected by the tribesmen. With this chief was his son, a fine, quiet fellow in the costume of the present generation of Indians, the cowboy suit. He had served all through the war in a Canadian regiment.
At Lethbridge, the next town, there was a real and full Indian ceremonial. Before a line of tepees, or Indian lodges, the Prince was received by the Chiefs of the Blood Tribe of the Blackfeet Nation, and elected one of them with the name of Mekastro, that is Red Crow.
This name is a redoubtable one in the annals of the Blackfeet. It has been held by their most famous chieftains and has been handed down from generation to generation. It was a Chief Red Crow who signed the Wolseley Treaty in '77. Upon his election the Prince was presented with an historic headdress of feathers and horns, a beautiful thing that had been worn by the great fighting leaders of the race.
There were gathered about the Prince in front of these tall, painted tepees many chiefs of strange, odd-sounding names. One of these immobile and aquiline men was Chief Shot on Both Sides, another Chief Weasel Fat, another Chief One Spot, another Chief Many White Horses. They had a dignity and an unyielding calm, and if some of them wore befeathered bowler hats, instead of the sunray feathered headdress, it did not detract from their high austerity. Chief One Spot—"he whose voice can be heard three miles"—was a splendid and upright old warrior of eighty; he had not only been present at the historic treaty of '77, but had been one of the signatories.
The Prince chatted with these chiefs, while the Lethbridge people, who had shown extraordinary heartiness since the public welcome in the chief square of the town, crowded close around. While he was talking, the Prince asked if he could be shown the interior of one of the wigwams, and his brother, Chief Weasel Fat, took him to his own, over the door of which was painted rudely the emblem of the bald-headed eagle.
The wigwam is a fine airy home. Its canvas walls are supported by tall, leaning poles bound at the top. There is no need of a centre pole, and a wood fire burning on a circular hearth sent up a coil of smoke through the opening at the top of the poles.
The floor was strewn with bright soft rugs, on which squaws in vivid red robes were sitting, listening to all that was said with impassive faces. The walls were decorated with strips of warm cloth upon which had been sewn Indian figures and animals. The wide floor space also held a rattanwork bed, musical instruments and the like; certainly it was a more comfortable and commodious place than its bell-tent shape would suggest.
Leaving the exhibition grounds, on which the encampment stood, the Prince passed under an arch made of Indian clothes of white antelope skin, beads and feathers, and after reviewing the war veterans, went to the town ball that had been arranged in his honour.
Lethbridge is a mixture of the plain and the pit. It is a great grain centre, and there is no mistaking its prairie air, yet superimposed upon this is the atmosphere of, say, a Lancashire or Yorkshire mining town. Coal and other mines touch with a sense of dark industrial bustle the easy air of the plain town. It is a Labour town, and a force in Labour politics. That, of course, made not the slightest difference to its welcome; indeed, perhaps it tinged that greeting with a touch of independent heartiness that made it notable.
As a town it impresses with its vividity at once. That, indeed, is the quality of most Canadian cities. They capture one with their air of modernity and vivacity at first impact. True, one sometimes finds that the town that seemed great and bustling dwindles after a few fine streets into suburbs of dirt roadways, but one has been impressed. It may be very good window dressing, though, on the other hand, it is probably good planning which concentrates all the activity and interests of the town in the decisively main avenues.