Kitabı oku: «Peeps at Many Lands: Canada», sayfa 4

The goods trains are known as freight trains. The "cars" which run on them are very much bigger and heavier than the trucks on an English goods train, and can carry 20 to 50 tons each. When the cars are sent back empty, they are generally made up into trains of enormous length. As many as fifty-six have been counted in one train, so that the train itself is often more than a quarter of a mile long, and in the mountainous parts looks like a gigantic snake, as it winds, let us say, alongside a lake, following every curve and indentation of its shore.

 
"Through the gorge that gives the stars at noon-day clear —
Up the pass that packs the scud beneath our wheel —
Round the bluff that sinks her thousand fathom sheer —
Down the valley with our guttering brakes asqueal:
Where the trestle groans and quivers in the snow,
Where the many-shedded levels loop and twine,
Hear me lead my reckless children from below
Till we sing the song of Roland to the pine.
 
 
"So we ride the iron stallions down to drink,
Through the cañons to the waters of the west!"
 

KIPLING: The Song of the Banjo.

CHAPTER VIII
GOLDEN WHEAT AND THE BIG RED APPLE

The most important product of the Dominion of Canada is wheat. Except for a little hay and oats, the big prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta are especially noted for their production of wheat, which they yield in truly enormous quantities. In point of quality Canadian wheat ranks amongst the best in the world. But the three big prairie provinces are not the only ones that produce wheat; it is also grown in Ontario, as well as, in smaller quantity, in each of the other provinces.

As soon as the snow disappears in spring, the prairie farmer gets out his ploughs, and if he owns, as many of the prairie farmers do, large tracts of land, his ploughs are worked by steam. In the North-West there are no fields and no fences, except, it may be, round the home paddock. In this case the ploughs set in and follow one another from one end of the farm to the other; and when they reach the boundary of the farm, they turn round and plough back again. Thus the furrow may be a quarter of a mile, half a mile, or even a mile long. The ploughing finished, the seed is sown. When harvest comes, the ripe corn is cut down by the reaping-machines, following one another in the same way as the ploughs. In many cases the wheat is threshed at the same time that it is cut, and the grain put, not into sacks, but loose straight into the waggons, which are built up like huge bins. The wheat is then hauled to the nearest town where there is an elevator or granary. Here it is graded, or separated into different sizes, by fine riddles or sieves driven by machinery, and the farmer is paid so much a bushel for his wheat, the price varying with the grade, or size and hardness and quality of the grain. The straw is very often burned, as the easiest way to get rid of it. If a North-West farmer has three good years in succession, he can, it is sometimes asserted, retire from business and live on a competency for the rest of his life.

After the harvest the railways of the prairie provinces are exceedingly busy carrying the wheat to the shipping ports, where it can be loaded into ships to be taken across the ocean. The greater part of this wheat is consumed in England and Scotland, and a great deal of it is put on board ship at Port Arthur and Fort William on the northern shore of Lake Superior, whence it goes all the rest of the way by water. A large portion of it is, however, ground into flour before ever it leaves Canada, and the flour is sent to make bread for boys and girls, not only in England and Scotland, but also in Australia, in China, and Japan.

In Alberta, just east of the Rocky Mountains, where the climate is milder than in the heart of the prairie provinces, a large number of cattle are reared and fed, and there a good deal of hay is cut, and sent over the mountains into British Columbia.

For many years the chief agency in opening up the North-West was the cattle-rancher. The life of the cowboy, though not so romantic as it is sometimes represented to be, has, nevertheless, its interesting side to the man who loves the free life of the open air. "The business of ranching has grown from a small beginning of the early days to be one of the great industries of the West. It began when the Mounted Police brought into Southern Alberta a couple of milch cows and a few yokes of oxen for their own use." This was about the year 1873. Three years later a member of the same force bought a small herd, but having no other way of providing for the animals, he turned them loose on the prairie to shift for themselves. There, although without shelter or provision for food, they survived the winter, escaping the wolves, predatory Indians, and prairie fires. Nowadays, cattle are generally left cut of doors on the prairies all the winter in Alberta. Here the winters are neither severe nor prolonged. "The days are bright and cloudless, and the light snowfalls are neither frequent nor lasting. They vanish before the warm Chinook winds, and are followed by days of soft weather. There are cold snaps in January and the early part of February, but the winter breaks up early in March, and before April the prairies are spangled with flowers – false indigo, shooting stars, and violets, with roses, lupines, and vetches, following after – until the prairie is all aglow with wonderful colour."

In Alberta, as well as in the provinces of Eastern Canada, a good deal of cheese and butter are made. The farmers do not make it in their own dairies, but they take it to creameries and to cheese-factories, like those which are run on the co-operative principle in Ireland, Denmark, and other countries.

The principal town of the prairie provinces is Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, which has a good deal of the appearance of a brand-new, go-ahead American city. In 1881 its population was 6,000; twenty-five years later it reached 100,000. It has a very large volume of trade.

In the provinces of Nova Scotia and Ontario large quantities of fruit are grown and exported to England. In Nova Scotia apples are the fruit most extensively raised; the valleys of Annapolis and Cornwallis in that province are especially famous for their fine red apples. In Ontario the fruit-growing region is the peninsula which projects southwards between the great lakes. There apples are not the only fruit produced in large quantity; grapes and peaches are also grown on a large scale, grapes more especially in the neighbourhood of the famous Niagara Falls. But in recent years the distant western province of British Columbia has come rapidly to the front as a producer of fruit, especially of apples, cherries, peaches, and strawberries. These last, strawberries, as well as cherries, are sold principally in the towns of the prairie provinces. The apples are rapidly taking rank as amongst the best in the world. They are of magnificent colour, free from every form of disease or blemish, and travel well for long distances.

In December, 1907, an apple-show was held at New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser River, in British Columbia, where prizes were given (1) for the best display of apples, (2) for the five best packed boxes of apples, and (3) for the single best packed box. Out of these three events, British Columbia apples won two first prizes and one second, although she had for competitors some of the most expert growers in the United States. And again in December of the following year, at a great apple-show held at Spokane, in the American State of Washington, undoubtedly the biggest and most important apple-show ever held in any part of the world, British Columbia covered herself with glory. The prize-money amounted to no less than £7,000, and the separate prizes amounted to as much as £100. In this great show, at which expert fruit-growers from all over the United States, from Eastern Canada, from British Columbia, from England, Germany, and Norway, were pitted one against the other, British Columbia won several of the most important of the prizes, and on the whole, considering the amount of fruit she staged, won a long way more than her proper proportion of prizes. The writer of this book was himself the proud winner of twelve prizes for apples at this great show. Altogether it is estimated that something like 400 tons of apples, all of them, of course, specially picked fruit, were shown on the tables of the Spokane apple-show. What a sight for a British schoolboy! The biggest apple in the show weighed close upon 2 pounds in weight!

The apples of Ontario and Nova Scotia are packed into light wooden barrels; those of British Columbia in oblong boxes holding 40 pounds. No matter what the size or the variety of the apples, all have to be packed in the one sized box. When well packed, with the apples all level and even, and beautifully coloured, as they nearly always are, a box of British Columbia apples is a perfectly lovely sight. And they are as good as they look. But even more appetizing and attractive is a box of Kootenay cherries, Kootenay being the name of the principal cherry-growing district of British Columbia. The boxes into which the cherries are packed are, of course, much smaller than the boxes into which the apples are packed. A cherry box holds only 8 pounds of fruit.

One of the most beautiful of all the beautiful sights on a fruit-ranch is the blossoming of the cherry-trees in May. The waxy white blossoms not only cover – literally and truly cover – the branches from end to end, but they also stick to the trunk and main limbs of the trees, much as the feathers muffle the legs of certain kinds of pullets.

The fruit-ranches in Kootenay, and many of those in the even more famous Valley of Okanagan, occupy some of the most beautiful situations in the world, being strung along the feet of lofty rocky mountains, with a lake washing their lower margin. And how magnificently beautiful are these mountains and the deep, tranquil lakes which nestle in their arms!

CHAPTER IX
CANADIAN TIMBER

The largest share of the natural wealth of Canada is derived from her unlimited acres and square miles of wheat-lands. Next in importance to her wheat is her timber. Considerably more than one-third of the total area of the Dominion is covered with forests. With the exception of the province of Prince Edward Island, all the older provinces are rich in valuable trees. British Columbia is said to have "the greatest compact reserve of timber in the world." The vast prairies of the North-West have never, since the white man set foot on the American continent, been at all well wooded, although to the north of the settled wheat-lands there is a forest region nearly fifty times as big as England, stretching from Labrador on the east to Yukon on the west.

Wood is consequently of vast importance to almost every man in Canada. In one way or another it figures in the daily life of almost every inhabitant of the Dominion. The strange words, "M^3 Shiplap and Rustic," are familiar to the eye and ear of every builder of a house; and who is there in Canada who does not at some time or other build a house, or help to build one? "M^3" means "cubic feet." "Shiplap" and "rustic" are special cuts and pieces of timber used in house-building. Logs and lumber are therefore household words to the Canadian. As Dr. Fernow, head of the Forestry Department of the University of Toronto, puts it: "Our civilization is built on wood. From the cradle to the coffin in some shape or other it surrounds us as a conveyance or a necessity… We are rocked in wooden cradles, play with wooden toys, sit on wooden chairs, … are entertained by music from wooden instruments, enlightened by information printed on wooden paper with black ink made from wood." More than one-half the people of Canada live in wooden houses; more than two-thirds use wood as fuel. Thousands of miles of railway rest on wooden ties, or sleepers. The waters of the Canadian lakes are daily churned by the wooden paddles of wooden steamboats; fleets of wooden vessels ply up and down the coasts. More than 300 years ago the French, who were the first settlers in Canada, began to cut in her forests spars and masts for the royal navy, and later the practice was followed by the British.

The long droning whine of the saw-mill is to-day one of the most familiar sounds beside the lakes and rivers of Canada. Down at the water's edge you may see the woodman "poying" the big logs to the foot of the upward incline that feeds the saw-tables, skilfully guiding them so that the iron teeth of the endless gliding chain which runs up and down the incline may seize hold upon them and carry them up to the edge of the huge, whizzing, groaning, whining circular saw above. At the other end of the mill, or somewhere beside it, you will see the sawn wood stacked up in squares – planks of various widths and thicknesses.

If you turn away from the sawmill and wander alongside the river, you will see a perfect multitude of logs, thousands of them, held together inside a boom of logs, chained or ironed together, like a huge flock of sheep penned within a sheepfold. These immense masses of timber are floated down the streams in spring, when the snows, melting, flood the rivers with swift, eddying, and often turbulent freshets. Occasionally it happens that the stream grows so swift and violent that it causes the logs to burst the boom or log-linked enclosure within which they are confined. Then away career the logs down the bosom of the rebellious torrent, and the owner may esteem himself remarkably lucky if he recovers even a small proportion of them. The breaking of a boom in this way may therefore represent a loss of hundreds, and even thousands, of pounds. In some cases, where these lumber-rafts have to travel long distances, the men in charge of them live on the raft throughout the whole of their journey, which may last some weeks. If you want to read a fascinating story about the men who engage in this work, read "The Man from Glengarry," by the Canadian novelist, Ralph Connor.

If you travel up the stream until you reach one of its higher tributaries, and turn up beside the latter, you may eventually find yourself at one of the lumber-camps which feed the far-off saw-mill in the valley below. In a picturesque clearing in the forest you will see the low but comfortable log cabin and log stable; you will see the timber-slide, with a rill of water flowing down it to make the logs slide more easily as they are shot down into the tributary stream; you will hear the crack of the teamster's whip and his cheery cry as he urges on his horses – four, six, eight, or ten of them – straining at a rough sleigh on which rest the ends of one, two, three, four, or five big logs; you may hear the swish of the big, two-handled cross-cut saw, as the woodmen cut through the trunk of gigantic fir, cedar, or spruce, or the slow, resonant crash as the forest giant totters, falls, smashes prone to the earth; you may hear the ring of the woodmen's axes as they lop away its branches and strip off its bark.

The men who guide these big timber-booms down the broad, swift rivers of the Canadian forest-lands, and pilot them over the boiling rapids, are marvellously clever in keeping their balance on the unsteady, ever-rolling logs. A favourite pastime with them is log-rolling. Wearing boots for the purpose – boots shod with sharp steel spikes – they walk out, each man on a broad log, and set it rolling. Once the log is started, it begins to roll at an increasing speed. Faster and faster go the feet of the raftsman; faster and faster spins the log. With arms outstretched and every muscle tense, the raftsman preserves his balance long after an ordinary landsman would have gone over – souse! – into the stream. That is indeed the fate which overtakes all of the competitors except one, and he – the man who preserves his balance the longest – is, of course, the winner of the game, the envied of his companions, the admired of all the lumber-jacks and their numerous friends. The cleverest men at this sport are the French-Canadians.

Nevertheless, all is not always peace and contentment in a Canadian forest. To say nothing of the wild beasts —e. g., bear, lynx, mountain lion – which live in them, the actual trees of the forest are themselves a source of menace and danger to men. During the hot, dry days of summer an unheeded spark from a woodman's pipe, a red-hot cinder from a passing train, a neglected camp-fire – the ashes left unextinguished – are each enough to ignite the highly inflammable undergrowths of the forest; and once set alight, the moss which carpets the floor of the forest, the broken sticks which litter the ground from many a winter storm, the bushes, the dead trees, all catch up the flame, and after smouldering, it may be for weeks, the whole forest suddenly bursts into flame. If this happens when a strong wind is blowing, nothing hardly can save the town or settlement, the ranch or saw-mill, that may chance to lie on the side of the fire towards which the wind is blowing. And it is indeed not only a grand but also a terrible sight to stand and watch a large "bush" – fire raging over, say, a square mile or two on a mountain-side. You see the red flames towering up like so many gigantic pillars of fire, now leaping up, now sinking down. As the fire appears to die down in one quarter, you see it break out with great and sudden fury in another, and then ere long it takes a fresh lease of life in the direction in which it first died down. A forest fire such as this advances with terrible swiftness, and woe to the houses which lie in its path! In the summer of 1908 the town of Fernie, a place of 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, situated in the Crow's Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains, was almost completely blotted out and extinguished in the course of a few hours; and so sudden was the onset or the fire that the people had literally to flee for their very lives, leaving everything they possessed behind them, and even in some cases in their hurry and confusion losing touch with those who were near and dear to them. A bush-fire is an awful visitation. It also means a very serious loss of valuable timber, no matter where it occurs.

The maple, whose leaf in conjunction with the beaver is the national emblem of Canada, yields in the spring a very sweet sap, which is boiled down to produce a syrup or sugar of a very delicious flavour. Doubtless its qualities were learned from the Indians, and the earlier settlers in the woods depended on it altogether for sugar. Now it is prepared as a luxury. "Sugar-making weather," bright, clear days, with frosty nights, come in March. To the great delight of the children the trees are tapped by boring a small hole in the trunk, and affixing a small iron spout, which leads the sap to a pail. The rate at which it drops varies, but as much as two gallons may be collected from a tree in a day. This is boiled in iron pots, hung over a fire in the woods, or in the up-to-date way in a large flat pan, till it thickens to syrup.

In the old days sugaring off was a great occasion; all the neighbouring boys and girls were asked in, and amid much jollification around the bright fire at night in the forest, the hot sugar was poured off on the snow, forming a delicious taffy, and all "dug in" at the cost of burnt fingers and tongue. Songs were sung, ghost-stories told, the girls were frightened by bears behind the trees, and this unique gathering broke up in groups of two or three, finding their way home in the moonlight through the maple wood.

The Canadian youth has many opportunities for a life in the wilds which all boys enjoy. In order to prevent the occurrence of the destructive forest-fires, fire-rangers are appointed throughout the whole of Northern Ontario, whose duty it is to patrol a certain part of the woods and see that no careless camper has left his fire smouldering when he strikes camp. The young men appointed for this duty are usually students from the colleges who are on their holidays; they work in pairs, and live in a tent pitched at some portage; they see no one but passing tourists or prospectors, and each day they walk over the trail and return – a certain stated distance. The rest of their time they have for fishing and other pleasures of life in the forest. They return in the autumn brown as Indians, and strong and healthy after the most enjoyable and useful of holidays.