“Say,” said an enterprising business man, “this place is deserted, all right, all right. The Indians have evidently gotten out for good. So what’s the matter with our chopping down that big totem-pole over there, hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle? It’ll look perfectly bully set up in Pioneer Square.”

Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly bully suggestion and it was carried out, the purloined pole being erected in due time in the heart of Seattle’s business section, where it stands to-day. The affair received considerable notice in the newspapers, of course, and those responsible for thus adding to the city’s attractions were editorially patted on the back. A few weeks later, however, they were served with papers in a civil suit brought against them by the Indians from whose village, without so much as a by-your-leave, they had removed the pole. At first they jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers dwelling up there on the skirts of civilisation having any rights which they could enforce in a court of law, but they soon found that it was no laughing matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Columbian Government, pressed their claim and it cost the gentlemen concerned four thousand dollars for their Siwash souvenir.

Everything considered, British Columbia is, I believe, the finest game country in the western hemisphere, bar none, for the sportsmen have as yet barely nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what the Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable sportsman’s paradise, to make use of a term which the writers of railway folders have taken for their own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska where the hunter can go with almost positive assurance that he will have a chance to draw a bead upon a grizzly bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen so frequently on the slopes of the Rocher de Boulé, at the back of New Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing comment; the islands off the province’s ragged coast are the only habitat of that rara avis, the spotted bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest big game in existence, still graze on the prairies which are watered by the headwaters of the Mackenzie and the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer are as common as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes, lynxes, and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of the beaver, the marten, and the mink, still make the province one of the richest fur grounds in the world. Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the spring and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have previously remarked, are so tame that they can be and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout, and sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such vast numbers that they actually choke the smaller creeks and rivers. When there is taken into consideration the fact of its comparative accessibility (New Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more than three days) and the healthfulness of its climate—for British Columbia, unlike most of the other celebrated hunting-grounds, is distinctly a “white man’s country”—it is almost incomprehensible why it has not attracted far greater attention from the men who go into the wild with rod and gun.

It is a land of immensity and majesty and opportunity, is this almost unknown empire in the near-by North. It is a region of sublimity and magnificence and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It is as savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman. Its scenery is of the set-piece and drop-curtain kind. Streams of threaded quicksilver, coming from God knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns. On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak barbarian pines, while above the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in council under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam in splendour, and behind them, beyond them, the sun-god paints his canvas in the West. Pregnant with the seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and possibilities beyond the stranger’s ken, it lies waiting to be conquered: