Peeps at Many Lands: Canada 8

Peeps at Many Lands: Canada 8

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.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER X

 

WEALTH IN ROCK AND SAND

 

The history of gold and silver has always been romantic and exciting,

and Canada has furnished her full share of adventure and fortune,

riches won in a day and lost in a night. All known minerals are found

scattered here and there over the thousands of miles of north land.

Besides the precious metals, the most important are coal, iron, nickel,

and asbestos, and the deposits of the last two are much the most

important in the world. Gold was first found by the Indians, who made

ornaments of it; they found it in the sands of the rivers, and from

there prospectors followed it to where it was hidden in ore in the

mountains. The most famous deposits are in the Yukon, and no mining

camp had a more exciting history than this, where working men staked

claims that brought them a fortune and lost it in cards and dice

overnight. But the Government saw that rights were respected, and soon

banks were opened to keep the "dust," and the miner everywhere admits

that he gets a "square deal" in Canada. At Cobalt it is said that the

silver deposits were first found when a horse, pawing the rock with his

iron shoe, uncovered the "cobalt bloom," the colour that there is the

sign of silver. Another story is that a man picked up a stone to throw

at a squirrel and found it so heavy that he examined it, to find it

solid silver. If you went there you would be shown the famous "silver

sidewalk" (pavement), 18 inches wide, and running for several hundred

yards, of solid silver. It sounds like a tale from the "Arabian

Nights."

 

[Illustration: MAIN STREET, WINNIPEG. PAGE 50.]

 

Every night in the year for the last seventeen years, halfway up the

side of a lofty mountain overhanging a beautiful lake in Western

Canada, and opposite to one of the most progressive towns of the

interior of the Dominion, a solitary light might be seen burning. The

stranger naturally wonders what the light can mean in such a spot. The

mountain-side consists entirely of bare rock, with a few trees growing

out of the crevices. There is not a blade of grass, not a sign of any

single thing that could be of the slightest use to any human being.

What does that light mean, then, up on the steep and lonely

mountain-side? It does not move. It is always stationary, always

visible, in exactly the same place, and always burning in exactly the same way. What does it mean?