It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed him.

“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”

“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost anywhere?”

“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll knock off the forty cents.”

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.

The population of Fort Fraser turned out en masse to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako to Burns Lake was uneventful.

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:

“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.

“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see the car again.”

What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could see.

“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t get traction.”

As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded “mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.

“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.

“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House. Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”

“How far is it from here?” I asked.

“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three mile.”

“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”

Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.

“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,” he said.

“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.

“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to stand in the road bargainin’.”

I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.

That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three perfectly awful miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. It had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles.

Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable litter of small children.

“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads, unless ’twould be in the loft.”

“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”

Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”

But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and left in darkness everything.

We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however, the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon, ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.

I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation, as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast, quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which, if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were therefore fair game, we were given the suite de luxe. This consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked, tired humanity. It was a nuit du diable, as our Paris friends would say.

It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton, the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the throttle.

“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”

Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination. There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton, rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn, my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline. Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey’s end!

Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board. After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating, too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:

“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”

“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting through to Hazelton.

“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named “Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”

So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself.

New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.

A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit, seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.

The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships, uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the tenderness of a woman.

Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world, but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake his only companion had gone suddenly insane. MacDonald bound the raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do? You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you? You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you would.”

When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many months upon such scanty game as they could find in the frozen forests. He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices; of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse, the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.

Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man, six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum. Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande. So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets and, wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue, señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange performance.

They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He was not molested.

When the world was electrified by the news that gold had been discovered on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward, the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal Cataline came riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s end, pocketed his pride.

“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked politely.

“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”

Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and “U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.

“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired his assistant.

“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”

The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because of their remoteness from civilisation, have retained far more of their racial customs and characteristics than have their cousins below the international boundary. Though divided into innumerable clans and tribes, under local names, they fall naturally, on linguistic grounds, into a few large groups. Thus, the southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the Salish and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are to be found the Tinneh or Athapackan people; while the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas have their villages along the coast, though the white settlers speak of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash” being nothing more than a corruption of the French sauvage. These British Columbian aborigines are strikingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the facial characteristics of the Mongol that it does not need the arguments of an ethnologist to convince one that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed, it is a common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash you will find a Japanese. They are generally short and squat of figure and, though habitually lazy, are possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of them was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who packed a piece of machinery weighing three hundred pounds over one hundred and eighty miles of rough forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians of the Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension bridge of rope and timbers across the dizzy chasm at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley. This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building it the Indians adopted the cantilever system, a form of construction generally supposed to be beyond the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the amazing feature of the structure is that the varying members are not secured together by nails, bolts, or screws but simply lashed with willow withes. It is a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. Even the weight of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating sickeningly. When it was completed, the Indians were evidently in some doubt as to the stability of their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score of kloochmen out upon the quivering structure. If it held, well and good—it was strong enough to bear the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there were plenty of other squaws where those came from.

The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the strangest cemeteries in the world, over each grave being erected a grave house of grotesquely carved and gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog kennel, a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish kiosk. In these strange mausoleums the personal belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dressing-table, usually bedecked with vases of withered flowers; from a line stretched across the interior of the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing, and always in a conspicuous position is a photograph of the deceased. Though sometimes several hundred dollars are expended in the erection of one of these quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over the tomb is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a cent being expended upon its up-keep. Of recent years, however, those Indians who can afford it are abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for elaborate enclosures of wire netting which gave the cemeteries the appearance of being filled with enamelled iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, however, is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is generosity carried to the nth degree. Some of them are very grand affairs, the Indians coming in to attend them from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an Indian to actually beggar himself by his munificence on these occasions, a wealthy chieftain who gave a potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which are the Indians’ chief measure of wealth, around a totem-pole to a height of forty feet.

The Siwash villages are usually built high on a bank above some navigable stream, the totem-poles in front of the miserable cabins being so thick in places as to look from a distance like a forest that has been ravaged by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be called the Totem-Pole River, for from end to end it is bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely carven spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before whose dwellings they are reared. Though the Siwashes are accustomed to desert a village when the fishing and hunting run out and establish themselves elsewhere, their totem-poles may not be disturbed with impunity, as some business men of Seattle once found out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer for the purpose. While returning down the British Columbian coast, the vessel dropped anchor for a few hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash village whose water-front was lined with imposing totem-poles.