SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 37, 10 September 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

XIV.— THE FRASER CANON By the Editor. A passing interruption has been given to the flow of travel-talk by the great events that have lately occurred in the Eternal City and by other special and heavy demands that have been made upon the ' Tablet's ' space during the past few weeks. I now resume the thread of the story of movement by field and flood across the forehead of the American continent. The last instalment of travel left us at Yale, on the Eraser River, 103 miles from Vancouver. We had left behind us the rich green flats of the Fraser delta, and the mountains along its narrowing sides had gradually closed in on each hand till at Yale the valley tapered to a point and stopped short before a vast rampart of sheer rock. Out from a deep, wide cleft in this stony barrier the Fraser came tumbling in a swift and sullen flood. It was far past seventeen o'clock (5 p.m.) when our long train snaked its winding way out of Yale. As we rumbled slowly along over the street-level, to the clanging and the jangling of the big brass engine-bell, the slanting sunlight glinted on the gaudy joss-house and lit up the gay sides of the flat-bottomed steamer that lay v at the wharf below. Thus far into the mountains goes the course of navigation, and no farther. The little n\cr-steamer was the last reminder of the salt sea that we met until we touched the great Lakes 1800 miles away to the east. We were soon puffing— all too fast for nur eager eyes intent upon the swiftly changing beauties of the seene — along our winding and upward way into the ruggod heart of The Cascade Ranges. They form, in good sooth, a noble cordillera. They bend away north-westwards, following the coast-line, towards the ice-fields and the snows of the Arctic Circle and raising an unscaleable fence between John Bull and Uncle Sam where British Columbia shoulders Alaska. They run South in rugged chains far into the United States and fill Oregon and Washington with scenery of massive grandeur. Mount Baker— that peeped down at us a hundred times along our way over the heads and shoulders of lesser heights — is one of the taller summits to which the Cascades soar in the Washington Slate, just beyond the southern frontier of British Columbia. In British Columbia the Cascade mountains cool their conical heads in the snows of the higher cloudland and bathe their feet — that is, their coastal spurs and

buttresses—in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. It is a region of wild and rugged grandeur—of snow-capped mountains, great ice-fields, spreading lakes, tumbling waterfalls, and rushing rivers. The eastern side of Canada's great western mountain barrier, which is properly called the Rockies, is a vast region of naked but brilliantly colored stone— towering cliffs, icy cones, stupendous pinnacles, sudden rifts and gorges— almost devoid of vegetation. But the Cascade Mountains, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's island, are ' All A wave with Trees.' This far-spreading region is not less rich than the Rockies in scenic majesty, while its thousand varied charms are enhanced by the rich vegetation and the forests of evergreen conifers— spruces, cedars, firs, and the handsome trees that the ' Canucks ' thereabouts call cypress, juniper, larch, and yew— that scrambled up the slopes and thin out like falling hair near the snow-line, underneath the bald, tapering white summits that are such a striking feature of the sky-line in these mountains. \t was scenery such as this that inspired a stirring stanza in a poem by Charles G. D. Roberts, one of Canada's young and promising bards :— 1 O strong hearts, guarding the birthright of our glory, Worth your best blood this heritage that ye guard ! These mighty streams resplendent with our story, These iron coasts by rage of seas un jar red,— What fields of peace these bulwarks will secure ! What vales of plenty these calm floods supply ! Shall not our love this rough, sweet land make sure, Her bounds preserve inviolate, though we die ? 0 strong hearts of the North, Let flame your loyalty forth, And put the craven and base to an open shame, Till earth shall know the Child of Nations by her name! ' In the rich river-flats below Yale, the Fraser flows broad and deep in a yellow, masterful tide. East of Yale it thunders along at a furious pace for some four-and-twenty miles through a wild, winding, narrow, rocky gorge, which is known as The Fraser Canon (you pronounce this Spanish word ' can-yon ' and fling the accent on the first syllable). This mighty cleft winds through the heart of the Cascade Ranges. It is hundreds of feet in depth, and a glint of sunshine never touches the face of the waters that run through its dark, cold depths. The railway line is a shelf or notch cut deep and safe into the rocky side of the sheer cliff, 200 feet or more above the swirling waters that furiously lash and grind at the great rocks through which, in the course of ages, they have rasped and eaten their way to the ocean. There is a wondrous fascination about those mas-terful mountain rivers. One feels, in gliding along their banks, somewhat of the charm that appealed to the dar and eye and brain of the old-time bards who sang of the Abana and Pharpar, the Nile, the Aufidus, and of Mangan, Moerike, Mueller, Burns, and other later poets whose souls were attuned to the wondrous music of the passing river. As we sped along the Fraser canon, all eyes were intent upon the varying moods and ways of the rushing waters. Now and then the river was hidden from us as the train crossed the chasm by steel bridges of extraordinary strength, resting on massive abutments of solid masonry ;oras we took frequent little • headers ' into tunnels that cut through projecting mountain ribs. But we were ever keenly on the watch for its re-appearance. People paid little heed to the splendidly constructed permanent way, the elaborate system of guard-rails, cut-outs, patent switches, patrols, etc., which make railway travelling in this wild region as safe as it is upon the Canterbury Plains. The fascination of the tossing river was upon them all. It was calling, and its loud voice was heard above the noise of the rushing train and billowed into the tunnel-ends^ and around the projecting spurs and jutting crags and promontories of rock that momentarily hid its waters from our view. River, rock, forest, and snowy moun-tain-top far above formed an awesome and inspiring scene as we dashed along in the gathering twilight 1 And He doth give Thy voice of thunder power to speak of Him Eternally— bidding the lip of man Keep silence— and upon Thine altar pour Incense of awe-struck praise.' My reverend companion and I had the advantage of travelling through the Cascade Ranges in company with a British Columbian Government official and a retired contractor who had constructed this railway line through the Fraser Canon. Their genial courtesy and ready store of local information contributed no small portion of the charm of this part of our trip. Along the north side of the steep ravine they pointed out to us here and there traces of the break-neck old Indian trail over which the early gold-seekers led their pack-horses in

the • early days '— fiye-and-forty years aeo— when tilacor Cotumb^ * he timCS ° f the BarSer In BnS The * Fifty-eighter • clllv PthenlameXPlS'P the n lame XPl S' ? mpir , <Ht>uilder - He occupies lofn r> h o fl el of earl y romance as the ' fortya Set Ha?t e n t^ a «n-S rma ' alth ° Ugh he has not r et f <>™<* a Bret Harte to spin an aureole around him and make him world-famous. Those daring nrosnectors nf th« hh tish Columbian wilds gatheredVST^SintL^fSS across the American border, from the British Tsil* frnm Australia from New Zealand. Th£ l^e^'paTfinders of its rugged mountains, the Argonauts of its rushing rivers, and with pack-saddle and 'dug-out' opened their perilous and toilsome way to the treasures ftat lay deep in the inner fastnesses of Cariboo. In their camps along the Fraser delta and farther east there was not the same ready resort to the derringer as on the Sacramento and the probing of people's ' innards ' with twelve-inch bowie-knives never became a tradition. For fi n piH«° S <L M C ? + h cr l W^ 8 a stern old Spartan on the fields, Sir Matthew Begbie, and he taught the rough miners from across the border the value of human life by the ungentle suasion of the hangman's noose and slipknot, and a short shrift and a long drop. And so the British Columbian miners were not given to ' drawing a 5? ad x? 1 -^ 8^ o .*? 116 at sight ' over cards or cups or dice Neither did they gamble to any great extent for match-boxes filled with gold-dust, like their fellows on the richer Californian and Australian goldfields ; for times were dull, placers were shifty— one of the camps was significantly called ' Root-Hog-or-Die ' ; quartz-reefs went unheeded ; food was scarce and dear ; routes were long and difficult ; and Indians were 'bad.' Thousands of miners were speedily ' on the bed-rock ' of their fortunes. At least a thousand are said to have perished in the exodus from the trackless land of fierce red men, of dense forest, and impassable mountains. But those that struggled over the broken trail that we saw along the Fraser Canon and into the Cariboo district, scooped up the yellow dust to a merry tune. For British Columbia is a gold-land, in good sooth. And when you speak of Klondike to the sturdy miner there as he draws on his rubber boots and cuts his plug of the weed, he tips you a merry wink and answers you back with the saying that is known all over the Coast : ' If the head of the rat is in Alaska and its tail in Montana, the body lies in British Columbia.' Which is, perhaps, pretty near the truth. The dulness of the lone mountain camps in those early days was relieved from time to time by encounters with ' bar '—generally big grizzlies that attacked like a whirlwind and hunted the unskilled hunter to death or up a tree. And then there were ' affairs '—amounting sometimes to Pitched Battles —with Indians, who are said to have numbered 75,000 along the Coast in 1857. A humpy saddle-backed hill over the Fraser was shown to us where ambuscaded Reds phot down the miners on the trail, seized their packhorses and prorisions, and tossed the luckless white men's bodies into the arrowy Fraser two hundred feet beneath. The sequel was a stery which told of the practically complete wiping out of a whole Indian village near the spot. But the Indian trail and its perils and romance had their day. In the early sixties the Royal Engineers built a wagon-road through the Fraser Canon—something which surpassed in breathless peril the wheelway that goes through our Buller and Otira, and equalled that of the Via Mala Gorge on the upper courses of the Rhine. Since the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Vancouver it is no longer used, and snowslide, earth-fall, and the elements are year by year tearing the toilsome work to pieces. The winding pitching, ribbon-like track is still to be seen— part of it at the north side of the Canon, most of it at the south,. It is the father and mother of fearsome wagon-roads— with steep pitches here in the face of the cliff, a sharp turn there around a windy bluff, sometimes close to the tossing waters, at others several hundred feet above them, and here and there supported for quite long stretches on spidery-looking legs of spruce and pine, It has, of course, had Its Tragedies —this Road of Sighs. There, for instance, is a bold,rocky bluff around which the abandoned track bends in a sharp elbow three hundred feet in sheer height above the foaming torrent. A wagoner comes round it with his team. He watches the ' leaders ' as they come far towards the outer eklge of the precipice, so that the wheels shall not graze the rock as the vehicle rounds the sharp and sudden curve. With many a ' Yo-ho-o-o ! » they are

around. The wagoner stands by the precipice, waiting to clap the brakes on the wheels as they pass him, in preparation for the descent west of the rocky elbow. His collie dog, gambolling merrily in the rear, jumps against him. The teamster loses his balance, drops o\er the precipice like a ball of lead, bumps once or twice against the goring rocks, is caught in the swift, white water, and vanishes. The last that was seen of him was his Jim-Crow hat, which caught in a cleft in the rocks far down and remained there, an object of fear to the passer-by, till the storms washed it away. Here and Iheie the Frascr Canon widens out Here in those openings you see on the shelving banks tiny Indian villages with their little Catholic churches , there, rickety stages where the Ked Man scoops the salmon out of the river in August with a pole-net as they struggle in myriads to round the corner against the rapid torrent, further on little groups of Chinamen sluicing the shelving banks in solemn silence for the golden lubncant that keeps this old world a-wagging. And abo\e the river rise the hills, terrace over terrace, like the lesser heights that sit down in the clear, deep wateis of Lake Wakatipu. And over all the spreading forest running up to the white peaks and ice-fields and the everlasting snows. Ten miles above Spuzzum the rocky sides of the Fraser Canon approach till you could almost toss a biscuit across the gorge. This is the narrowest, wildest, noisest, and stormiest part of the Fiasei Canon The descent is rapid, and the river rushes down it at a terrific pace. Midway up this choking gullet, two shoulders of rock project towards, but not to, each other. This is known as Hell Gate. It is the narrowest point in the Canon. ' The river is hdld back by the projecting rocks, and in time of freshets rises 120 feet avove its winter level. Those who pass thiough the Canon in the month of August often see the eddies packed with salmon, their back fins out of the water, as they rest preparatory to making a rush round the next point.' It is, perhaps, the culminating point of interest in a long-drawn and fascinating scene through which our tram had been puffing continuously for nearly two hours, steaming into North Bend at nineteen and a half o'clock (7.30 p.m.) while the white-capped mountains around were still visible and the long-drawn twilight and the red glow of the west were still in the soft April sky. (To be continued.