Chapter V
To Manitoba and the Rockies
It was the morning of 7th August that I left St. Paul. With our last money, as I said, we had bought provisions, which consisted of a couple of loaves, some cheese, and a long sausage, with a few onions and two or three green peppers. After buying this I had twenty-five cents left.
All the 7th was consumed in running north from St. Paul to the Canadian line, which from the Lake of the Woods to the Gulf of Georgia follows the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. After getting clear of the Minnesota forests we ran into the Red River Valley, which to the eye seems a perfectly level plain, green and grassy, but absolutely treeless. At nightfall we were at Glyndon, a few miles from the Dakota line and Fargo. At midnight we passed the Dominion line at St. Vincent and were in Manitoba, through the whole extent of which the same character of the country prevails as in Northern Minnesota. We reached Winnipeg that morning, and I devoted an hour to seeing what I could of the town, which seemed to me to be an entirely execrable, flourishing and detestable business town, flat and ugly and new. The climate is said to be two months black flies, two months dust, and the remainder of the year mud and snow. The temperature in winter goes down sometimes to sixty degrees below zero, which the inhabitants will often tell you is not disagreeable; "if you are well wrapped up, as the Polar bear said when he practised his skating," I thought.
My partner, M'Cormick, came to me a few minutes before the train started and asked if I had any money.
"What for? " said I.
Pat was ready with his answer. "If you have, it won't be any good after leaving here, and I want some whisky."
"Well, Mac, if I give it you, you'll get drunk."
"Drunk! I never was drunk in my life. Come, Texas, you may as well. What's the good of money if you don't spend it?"
"If I do," I answered, "you'll repent it before long, you bet your life; and as to your never being drunk, why, you're drunk now." And so he was, for some of the others had been passing the bottle round freely. But it wasn't any use trying to put him off, so, for the sake of peace and quietness, I let him have the last twenty-five cents I had, and he got a small flask of whisky.
As I refused to drink any he drank most of it himself, with the result that he began quarrelling with one of a bridge-gang who boarded the train at Winnipeg. The altercation would have been amusing if Mac hadn't kept on appealing to me, trying to drag me into his troubles. He called the bridgeman a very opprobrious name, and for a moment there was great danger of a "rough house" out of hand. Mac wanted him to get off the train when it stopped to have it out, but the other man, though not very peaceable by any means, was not so drunk as my partner, and had sense enough not to get left on the prairie for the sake of a fight. So they sat opposite each other wrangling for hours, while I expected their coming to blows every moment. Presently Mac came over to me.
"Texas, give me your six-shooter."
"I haven't got one."
"Oh yes, you have; I know it's in your blankets. I want it."
"Well, Mac," I said, getting a little mad, "in the blankets or not, you won't get it."
Mac went off, muttering that I was a pretty partner not to help him. Presently the bridgeman came over and sat down by my side. He began with drunken courtesy :
"Sir, I thank you for not giving him your gun. Perhaps you saved my life." Then getting ferocious: "Not that I'm scared of him." Then a short silence, and glaring fiercely at me: "Nor of you either. I've seen cow-boys, bigger men than you, and with bigger hats too, but they didn't tire me. No, they didn't tire me any."
"That's good, pard," said I; "don't get tired on my account. I'm a quiet man, and don't often kill anybody."
He looked at me for a while, muttering, and got up to go, saying, " Oh no, he can't scare this chicken, bet your life."
A great many kept taking me for a regular cow-boy who had got out of his latitude, especially as Mac would always call me Texas. And to illustrate the absurd ideas so prevalent about the cow-boy, I may mention that when we were about to approach Moose Jaw, in the North-west Provinces, which are Prohibition Territories where whisky is forbidden, I went into the next car to ours for a drink of water. There was a little boy, about ten years old, there with his father and mother, and it is evident he had heard them speaking about it being forbidden to introduce spirits into Assiniboia and Alberta. So after he had taken a furtive and somewhat awe-stricken look at my hat, which, I am bound to say, was of extremely formidable brim, with the leather gear on it so much affected by Southern cow-boys, he turned to his father, saying, "Pa, if the office knew a cow-boy had whisky, do you think they would search him?" Of course the little fellow thought the hat a sure sign of a desperate character, whose belt was certainly full of six-shooters and bowie-knives and whose mind ran on murder and scalping.
At Moose Jaw, where we remained for some few minutes, there were a number of Cree Indians, bucks and squaws, some of whom came begging to us. These were the reddest, most bronze Indians I ever saw. They used, I believe, to be constancy at war with the Blackfeet, who live nearer the Rockies.
I paid but very little attention to the scenery as we passed through the North-west Provinces, though it is not so wearisome as the Manitoba dead-levels, on account of the prairie being somewhat rolling, with numerous lakes upon it, the haunt of flocks of wild-fowl But the country is uninhabited. It seems to me that we passed over nearly 600 miles of plain without seeing a town or any habitation save a few small houses of the section gangs. Of the millions of buffaloes that used to be on these prairies there are no signs save bones to be seen. In the United States they have about 300 head in the Yellowstone Park, and it is said there are a few on the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, in Texas and New Mexico. Some exist, too, in Northern Montana and Southern British Columbia, in the most inaccessible ranges, for the process of hunting selection has destroyed all on the prairie and given rise to a mountain variety. I confess, for my own part, that I have never seen one wild in all my wanderings.
At Gleichen we were told we could see the Rockies, and I was so eager to get beyond the vile monotony of the prairie that I had my head out of the window all the while for hours before we got there. And I and Mac were now rather in straits. Our food-supply gave out after two days, and this was the middle of the third. I had foolishly given a meal to a man who had nothing with him at all, and we were now suffering ourselves, staying our increasing appetites with tobacco. It does not, I imagine, predispose one to revel in heroic scenery for one's baser mechanism to go in pain and hollowness; but perhaps I had arrived at a stage of ascetic ecstasy, for I hardly thought of such needs the whole of that day, and was content in hunger until night blinded my vision and brought my soaring spirit back to its more material casing.
At Gleichen I could just discern the first faint line of the far Rocky Mountains, hung like a bodiless cloud in the air over the level plain. As we ran farther west it grew by slow gradations more and more distinct, until at last the sharp, fine, jagged outline stood out clear against the blue. Yet underneath that line was nothing, not even the ghost of the huge solidity of mountain walls. It was still thin, impalpable as faint motionless smoke, yet by the steadfastness of peak and pinnacle a recognised awful and threatening barrier.
We came to Calgary, a flourishing and well-known town. Here numerous Blackfeet had their tepees, or wigwams. I shook hands with two of this tribe, the most noble of the Indians. Two tall old men they were, one with smooth, tight skin and glittering eyes, calm, steadfast, and majestic; the other cut and carved by a million wrinkles, but strong and upright, with a kindly smile. Ye two of the Indians who pass away, I salute you! Vos morituros saluto!
Before Calgary we had crossed the Bow River, soft and blue, and heavenly and crystal, born of the mountains and fresh from snowfield and glacier. As we left the town we ran on the right bank, and being now among the first of the lower hills which buttress up the mountains from the plain, we went more slowly up grade, looking down into the stream far below. The sun was shining, the air clear and warm, the flowers blooming on every earthy spot, and the grass yet green.
In a few hours we ran up to the real entrance of the Bow Pass. Tired of straining my neck out of window, I left the passenger-car and climbed upon one of the freight-cars in front, and, spite of choking smoke, cinder and ash, I kept my place till we ran into the heart of the mountains and night as well, for I wished to be alone with the hills.
It was the first time in my life that I had seen mountains. I had been in Cumberland, it is true, and seen Skiddaw; I had climbed Cader Idris, and had lain there for hours, watching the vast stretch of sea and river and mountain; I had been on the Devon hills and on Derbyshire's peak. But these are not mountains of snow and fire perpetual. They are, it lay be, haunted with ancient legend, but their newer garments of story and fable have clothed their primeval nakedness. We love them, but have no awe of them. They have no divinity. But the untouched virgin peaks of snow, the rocky pinnacles where eagles sun themselves in swift and icy air, the dim and scented pine-woods, the haunt of bears, the gorges of glaciers, and the birthplace of rivers, these are sacred,
We are thousands of feet above the plain. Look back, and look your last on the vast and hazy prairie beneath you! In a moment you shall have pawed the barrier and be among the hills, you shall be within the labyrinth and maze. Here is a vast gorge, now broad with sloping bastions of opposing fortresses on either hand, now narrow with steepest walls and impending rocks threatening the calm lakes that catch their shadows and receive their rejections. Even as you look do they not nod with possible thunderous avalanche, or is it the play only of shadow from opposite peak and pinnacle? How these are cut and scarped to all conceivable fantasy of art and inconceivable majesty of nature, how they are castled and upheld with arch and bridge and flying buttress! This is the aisle of the Great Cathedral of the Gods; this is the cave of Æolus, the home of the hurricane; this is the lofty spot most beloved by the sunlight, for here come the first of the day beams, and here they linger last on rosy snow covering the rock whose massy base lies in the under shadow.
I was in a land of phantasm, and the memory remains with me as a broken dream of wonder. As I write I catch from that past day shifting pictures, and, half seen, one dissolves into the next, to give way in turn in the kaleidescope to some other symbol of the seen. For memories of such a pageant as a man sees only once in a lifetime are but as conventional signs and symbols for the painting of the unpaintable, of the foam and thunder of the stormy seas, of the golden sunset, of the fleece of floating cloud. So we ran on into the night and I slept, with eyes and imagination jaded, at the end of our journey on the western slope of the Great Divide of the Continent, where the waters flow towards the set of sun.
It is almost as painful to me as I write to come back again to the more solid facts of my journey as it was to be hungry. The troubles we pass through vanish from our memories and the pleasures remain, as the gold is caught in the sluice-box while the earth and mud run out in turbid rush of water. Now I love to think only of the beauty I saw, and the pain drops away from me as I dream my toils over again. But the pain was real then.
On the morning when we woke in the Rockies we found ourselves at the end of the track. We had come nearly as far as the rails were laid, and quite as far as the passenger-cars were allowed to run. Round me I saw the primeval forest torn down, cut and hewed and hacked, pine and cedar and hemlock. Here and there lay piles of ties, and near them, closely stacked, thousands of rails. The brute power of man's organised civilisation had fought with Nature and had for the time vanquished her. Here lay the trophies of the battle.
The morning was clear and glorious, the air chill and keen, and through it one could see with marvellous distinctness the farthest peaks and the slender pines cresting the shoulders of the ills 3000 feet above us. Before us stood the visible iron symbol of Power Triumphant—the American locomotive. She was ready to run a train of cars with stores of all kinds ten miles farther on, and now her whistle screamed. Echo after echo rang from the hills as the sound was thrown from one to the other, from side to side in the close valley, until it died like the horns of Errand. We were to go with her, and all clambered in. Some sat on the top, some got in empty cars, with the side doors open. I was in one with about twenty others. I sat down by the door, opened my blankets and put them round me, for the cold grew more intense as we moved through the air, and watched the panorama.
By this time I was absolutely starving, as it was now the third day since I had had a really satisfactory meal, and from Calgary to the Summit, Mac and I had eaten nothing. So we were glad when our train stopped and let us alight. We were received by a man who acted as a sort of agent for the company. He got us in group and read over the list of names furnished him by the conductor of the train, to which about a hundred answered. He then told us we were to go much farther down the pass, that we should have to walk about forty miles, and that we could get breakfast where we then were for twenty-five cents. It was about time to speak, and, as nobody else did, although I well knew there were dozens with no money in the crowd, I stepped up and wanted to know what those were to do who had no money, adding that I and my partner were "dead broke." And after this open confession of mine the rest opened their mouths too, until at last it appeared that the moneyed members of the gang were in a very small minority. Our friend agreed that we couldn't be expected to go without food, and we had our meals on the understanding that the cost was to be deducted from our first pay. We had breakfast and set out on our forty miles' tramp down the Kicking Horse Pass.