Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at the future through rose-coloured glasses.

Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine, & Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations) you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city. The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which, by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,” and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West, trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back, living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.