SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 17, 23 April 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

VII.— CANADA'S GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL. By the Editor. Two Canadians — one returning from Australia, the other from Honolulu — stood beside me on the Moana's upper deck as we rounded the Alley-Sloper nose of the bulbous promontory at the further end of which Vancouver stands. As the city came suddenly into view, one exclaimed : ' There she is, the Melbourne of the North ! ' The other replied : ' The Glasgow of the West !— I reckon that's about her name.' This latter I found to be a sort of descriptive local pet-name bestowed on Vancouver by people who are firm believers in the destiny which is to raise their city into a foremost emporium of the commerce of the north-western world. Another and less familiar designation was applied to Vancouver by Douglas Sladen :— ' The Constantinople of the West.' These titles give diverse expresion to the three features of Vancouver that appeal with greatest force to the stranger within its gates. Its rapid rise recalls the swift growth of the great Australian city that stands on Port Phillip Bay. Its position, its present commercial importance, and its roseate prospects justify the comparison with ' Glaisgie.' Constantinople is a gem of picturesque effect when seen from the surrounding hills or from the further shore. But for the scenic grandeur of its setting Vancouver is, perhaps, not surpassed by any city in the world. It does not present the parti-colored and picturesque tatterdom that in Stamboul is reminiscent of the glowing East; but its sidewalks and stores and factories and sawmills and homes are alive with the dapper Jap and the stolid-faced Chinaman, who lend to its m oixd and open streets an air that is redolent of the distant Orient Vancouver is a city of yesterday. Seven and twenty ■* ears ago its site was a dense primeval forest where the panther had his lair and the wild deer and bear their abode. It owes its existence and prosperity to the Canadian-Pacific Railway. The history of that remarkable corporation is, in effect, the history of the development of all North-western and Westein Canada troiu the shores of Lake Superior to the vvateis ol the broad Pacific Jn Kill the great Jesuit missionaries. Fathers Raymhault and Jogues, were picachmg the faith to a gieat assemblage of Indians on the neck of land between Union and Superior, where Sault Ste Mai le now stands Father Ravnibault was moving west across the rolling wilderness, anxious to lulfil the hope he had long entertained of uossing the unknown and undiscov eied rnoun-tam-region beyond, and finding his way to v hina Hi v deMreri to ioin his conireres who had i.iised a flouiishmg Chnstian church in the Flowery Land, vvheie a few \eais later — m the reign ol the enlightened Sin-Chec. the first of the Tartar dynasty — Fathei Verbiest held an impoitant astronomical appointment, and Father Schaal's talent foi administration was so highly appiecialod that lie was made Chief Minister ol State and actual ruler %oi the Chinese Empuc Father H.iynihaulL was the In sL w lute man who projected a journey to the ratihc across the wilds of Canada But he never realised his dream, and his bones lie in an unKnovvn grave in Sault Ste Mane r \ lie lust white man who made that penlous journey was A Scottish Fur-tt ador. ITe was a true and dashing representative of those adventurous Fiench and French-Canadian gentilshommes and peasant coureurs des bois of the old regime who were lined by the fascinations ol the fur-tiade far into the-forest-fastnesses ol the west and north, and who were, with the missionary priests, the fust explorers of thOvse unknown regions. 'J hey ' Bla/ed new ways for worlds to come And mourned not, but biavely dumb, So died, full trusting Uod and time.' Like them, the Scottish fur-trader ' blazed ' a track for the future pioneer. 3Je tortured a route for himself through the Rocky mountains, got afloat in his canoe •on the dangerous, swiftly-rushing, and boulder-strewn

Fraaer River— to which he gave his name— and followed its wild course to the Bea. That was in the distant forties. It was & deed of great daring ; (or the Fraser, like the Columbia and the Thompson, and nearly all the rivers of this rugged region, rush at headlong speed in wild aj?d turbulent career through the rocky gorges of the coastal ranges. How Fraser navigated his craft through the steep and stormy rush of Hell-gate canon, is a mystery which I cannot pretend to fathom. The discovery of gold in British Columbia brought long wagon-teams over the Rockies, past camps of hostile Indians, up steep mountain slopes, and down deadly inclines with locked wheels and logs serving as brakes. and dragging astern. Those were the days when only intermittent Indian trails — traces of which you still see along the Thompson and the Fraser— pointed the way across the mountains, and before the sappers cut the track for pack-animals and the Old Wagon Koad which you see in the various stages of ruin as you tread the gorges in the vestibule car of the Canadian-Pacific Railway. But these were comparatively recent developments. And, at best, they were passing makeshifts, and, for commercial purposes,, of little practical value. And so the rich western land remained cut off from the east as though it were in remote Kamschatka, the only way to it around Cape Horn, and its nascent commercial and political and geographical ' affinities ' being all with the adjoining land of Uncle Sam. And thus, political as well as commercial reasons made it every year more urgent to bring Canada's Pacific seaboard nearer to the centre of its life in the eastern provinces. McTaggart was one of those who long ago spoke of a railway line that would link ocean to ocean. People Voted him a Madman for his pains. I find the scheme dimly outlined in a corpulent volume published two generations ago by Montgomery Martin on the resources of Canada, and more clearly and decisively in some speeches delivered half a century ago by Judge Haliburton (better known by his literary name ' Sam Slick '), and in a printed volume of addresses given in 1858 by Hon. Alexander Morris, who had boen Governor ol Manitoba, the North-western Territories and It was voted a pleasant dream and its advocates visionaries. But the impossible of to-day is often the matter-of-course of to-morrow. When the first Napoleon thought of re-opening the sand-encumbered Suez ship-canal made by old Rameses 11. somewhere about the days of Moses, the engineer Lepere, who was deputed to report upon the matter, declared it impracticable. Napoleon dropped the project like a red-hot poker. But Ferdinand de Lesseps brought it to a successful issue, and on a vastly greater scale than the work of the Egyptian monarch of the misty past. History repeated itself in the case of the projected Canadian transcontinental railway. In proportion as political, military, and commercial considerations pressed for its construction, mountains of impossibilities shrank to the dimensions of ant-hills. Objections finally vanished, nnd the dream of the fortios and fifties bocamo the hope of the sixties and the resolve of the seventies. The confederation of the British North American Provinces in 1867 brought The Realisation of the undertaking nearer, just as the federation of the Australian States has already brought the project of a great transcontinental railway from Port Augusta to Fort Darwin within the scope of practical politics. A sparsely peopled nation, as Canada was 30 years ago, might well pause, hesitant and trembling, on the brink of so vast an enterprise. For, as a history of this great project says, it was ' a work of such vast proportions that tKe richest, empire of Europe might well have hesitated before entering upon it.' West from the Red River, in Manitoba, there lay 800 miles of rolling plains known only to the Indian and the fur-trader. Behind those farextending prairies rose, tier above tier, the massive and unexplored barrier of the Rockies, the Selkirks, and the Cascades, soaring to an elevation as great as 15,000 feet, and extending in unbroken succession for 600 miles to the Pacific. The survey alone of the line was a long and arduous and costly work. The construction would represent the ransom of a kingdom. Patience is power. But it takes strength to sit still and wait. And many in Canada lacked that strength. They lost patience. It was only a short step from that to loss of faith in the work,. There were hints of national bankruptcy. The great railway question formed the line of cleavage between political parties in Canada. There were bickerings and delays, and The Construction

of the transcontinental line did not begin till 1875. It began in political fears and party jealousies. These continued to pursue it. Administrations changed, fresh delaya occurred, and in 1880 — five years after the work had been inaugurated— the Dominion Parliament decided to surrender the work to a private company. ' The explorations and surveys for the railway,' saya the story of this great enterprise, ' had made known the character of the country it was to traverse. In the wilderness east, north, and west of Lake Superior, forests of pine and other timber, and mineral deposits of incalculable value, were found, and millions of acres of agricultural land as well. The vast prairie district between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains proved to be wonderfully rich in its agricultural resources. Towards the mountains great coal-fields were discovered, and British Columbia beyond was known to contain almost every element of traffic and wealth. Thousands of people had settled on the prairies of the North-west, and their success had brought tens of thousands more. The political reasons for buildfing the railway were lost sigjht of and commercial reasons took their place, and there was no difficulty in finding a party of capitalists ready and willing to relieve the Government of the work and carry it on as a commercial enterprise. The Canadian-Pacific Railway Company was organised early in 1881, an* immediately entered into a contract to complete the line within ten years. ' The railway system of Eastern Canada had already advanced far up the Ottawa Valley, attracted mainly by the rapidly growing traffic from the pine forests, and it was from a point in connection with thi» system that the Canadian-Pacific Railway had to be carried through to the Pacific coast, a distance of 2550 miles. Of this, the Government had under construction one section of 425 miles between Lake Superior and Winnipeg, and another of 213 miles from Burrard Inlet, on the Pacific coast, eastward to Kamloops Lake in British Columbia. The Company undertook the building of the remaining 1920 miles, and for this it was to receive from the Government 25,000,000 dollars in money and 25,000,000 acres of agricultural land. The two sections of railway under construction were to be finished by the Government, and together with a branch line of 65 miles already in operation from Winnipeg southward to the boundary of the United States, were to be given to the Company, in addition to its subsidies in money and lands ; and the entire railway, when completed, was to remain the property of the Company.' A somewhat similar land-grant system is being proposed in connection with the projected transcontinental railway across the interior of the Australian continent. As things stood, it is clear that the political feara and jealousies of the time threw a rare bargain into the hands of the Canadian-Pacific Company. Without taking into account the well-filled national purse and the completed railway lines presented to them, the broad Kingdom of 25,000,000 acres with which they were endowed was only a seventh less in area than the North Island of New Zealand, and almost exactly equal in extent to Ireland and Wales, and comprised magnificent farm-lands, the like of which is only to be found in the favored United States of Ohio and Illinois. With flowing coffers, the Canadian-Pacific Company threw off their coats to the task. Armies of men were engaged upon the work. Everywhere the track was so perfectly constructed that trains were able to pass safely over it at high speed as soon as the rails were spiked and bolted. On the rolling prairies west of Winnipeg the rails were laid at a rate that varied from three to six miles a day. Eastward, along the northern shore of Lake Superior, there was Terrific Work. When the Russian railroad engineers consulted the Czar as to the direction to be followed by the iron road from St. Petersburg to Moscow, he drew a straight line on the map, and it was followed as closely as circumstances would permit. But the road that skirts the upper shores of the world's greatest fresh-water lake is as sinuous as the path of a mountain brook. It ' winds about and in and out ' through piled up hills and jagged promontories and tall cliffs and massive boulders of Laurentian and Huron rock that is almost as hard and refractory as flint. That rugged region is an affliction of spirit for the railway builder, as it is a happy hunting ground for the sportsman and a paradise for the lover of the picturesque. According to Livy'a storied legend, when Hannibal was leading his seasoned Carthaginian cohorts across the Alps to the conquest of Italy, ho split the impassable rock-walls and intrusive mountain-peaks with fire and then softened and crumbled them to pieces with heavy doses of vinegar. The Cana-

(Han-Pacific Railway engineers treated the tough rocky barriers of the Lake Superior shore with more energetic prescriptions. They employed thousands of tons of dynamite and every rock-racking contrivance that was known at the time and slowly crunched their toilsome way through to the prairie lands beyond Fort William. The average cost of their far-stretching line was £10,700 per mile. But there was one section of the deep-cut, many-tunnelled north-chore track that ran into an expenditure of 700,000 dollars (about £140,000) per mile : perhaps the most costly bit of railway construction of equal length upon the surface of the earth. In the meantime the Company's army-divisions of navvies had been gouging away at the great mountain-barrier of the Rockies both from the eastern and the western side. The year 1884 saw them at the summit. And one morning, in the following year—it was November 7— the workers met and Joined Hands at Craigellachie, in Eagle Pass, in the Columbia (or Gold) Kasnige. And thus in less than one-half oi the stipulated time the last rail of Canada's great transcontinental iron commercial road was well and truly laid. ' Lt was a wet and woolly morning, and raw as a beefsteak,' said a superintendent to nic as he pointed out the spot where Canada's Maritime Provinces and her great Northwest came arm in arm and clasped hands with the Pacific in the mountains. Beside the scene of this historic tableau runs a noisy mountain stream, and round about on every side is a dense forest of the giant spruce and hemlock and balsam and Douglas fir that clothe the steep walls of the narrow Pass and peep into the sleeping waters of its lovely lakes. In 1871 British Columbia entered, on paper, into the Canadian Union. The actual and effective union took place when the last spike was driven into the last tie of the Canadian-Pacific Railway at Craigellachie. There are three railway lines that cross the American continent from shore to shore. Only one of these — the Canadian-Pacific Railway — is the property of a single company, lt was pushed through with the greatest speed and the most thorough workmanship of all, the cuttings being unusually wide, the embankments remarkably solid, and the bridges made of steel of extraordinary strength, resting upon massive constructions of solid stone. The mileage owned by the Canadian-Pacific Company has been raised to over 10,000 miles by the purchase of eastward lines and the construction of branches that, feed the energy of the central track like the tributaries that swell the mighty volume of the St. Lawrence. Its main line from Vancouver to Quebec measures 3U54 miles ; and you can tra\el in its cars, without change or break, from the Pacific to Halifax, a distance of 3666 miles. The merry hum of traffic began on each section as soon as it was complete. Population poured in along its track in a manner that in a milder way recalled the Hush of Settlement to the great bordering States of the American Union which gave rise to those flourishing western cities whose most remarkable development is iound m Chicago Hamlets, villages, and towns rose fast out of the em th ; the rich red soil of the western prairies was turned up and yielded marvellous returns ; mines were opened . and a new spirit stole into the dead North-western and 'Western lands of the Dominion. For a brief space, the terminus of the CanadianPacific Railway was where the Dominion Coveinment had placed it, at Port Moody, thirty-three miles away from Vancouver, at the elbow in the long iioid of Burrard Inlet where it takes a sudden spiko-hke bend northwards into the Cascade Range. Then the rails \ver< pushed on by the southern shoie of the Inlet to Vancouver. This extension was completed in May, 1886. The site of Vancouver was then A Dense Forest of gigantic cedars and firs. The last rails weie laid amidst a double palisade of foiest giants, with a thin streak of sky showing through the pine-tops two hundred feet abo-ve, and in front the sleeping waters of Georgia Strait. The forest fell fast under squads of sturdy axes. It was ripped into building material by buzz-saw and shingle-knife, and a young city of wooden houses and slab shanties, \ aried by occasional ' shacks ' (huts), came out of the ground in a narrow dealing like those 'that one sees in the jungle-forests oi C.ippsland in Australia. Peoule were in hot haste to build, they were too hurried to wait for bricl: and mortar to come lumbering along from the East— a name which coneponds to ' t'other side ' in Western Australia, and donotes not the Orient, but all of Canada that lies to

the sunrise side of the Rocky Mountains. And thuß Van—couver the First arose — a small settlement of wooden buildings in a wilderness of stumps of massive girth, with the tall tree-tops round about peeping down its broad rustic chimneys. In another paper 1 purpose telling how the first Vancouver disappeared and the new arose and prospered.