A few hours after passing the Soo Canal, we had left the flat banks behind us, and passed out on to the ocean-like waters of Lake Superior, across which we steamed for ten hours.
At eight o'clock there is the great purple promontory of Cape Thunder in sight. It is a bold outline against the pale morning sky, clear, with a keen north wind. It shelters inside the circular bay of Thunder, with Port Arthur at its head. We pass Silver Island, where thousands of dollars' worth of silver have been raised and sunk again.
After the mine had been opened, the sea broke in, and a crib had to be constructed. The silver is there, but the difficulties in raising it seem insuperable. The whole of Cape Thunder is formed of mineral deposits.
We land at Port Arthur. It is a sad place. The C.P.R. has ruined the rising town by choosing Fort William, five miles further up the river, for its lake port. The once thriving place is deserted, the shops closing, the large hotel empty. Such is the power of a great monopoly; it creates and destroys by a stroke of the pen.
Before leaving the Alberta at Fort William, the time is put back an hour. It recedes as we travel westward, and advances for east-bound travellers. The time of the Dominion is taken from Montreal, and is numbered, for convenience and business purposes, consecutively, that is to say, they have no a.m. or p.m. to confuse their train-service, and their watches have the double numbers, and one p.m. becomes thirteen, and two p.m. fourteen, and so on. A proposition has just been made in the Dominion Parliament to equalize the time, but it will not pass, at all events, this session.
Fort William was one of the advanced posts of the Hudson Bay Company. It is now a swamp laid out in streets at right angles, with wooden houses, overshadowed by some enormous grain elevators. Doubtless it has a great future before it. We wait here five long hours for the west-bound train.
CHAPTER III.
BY THE GOLDEN WAVE TO THE FAR WEST
Our journey to the Far West, through golden wheat, began at Fort William; from there the Canadian Pacific takes us across to the ocean.
The C.P.R., with its 2990 miles of railway, is the iron girdle that binds Canada together from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. She gives cohesion to this conglomerate whole, with its varieties of climate and production. Every mile of the line is worth a mile of gold to the country, for at every place where she lays down a station, that place becomes a town, a centre of population, civilization, and wealth to the surrounding district. This railway has been the great explorer, the great colonizer, the great wealth producer of Canada. It is the artery of the body of the Dominion.
One has constantly to remember that six or seven years ago all this country through which we are passing was an unexplored wilderness. A little band of plate-layers, headed by a surveyor, true pioneers, must have forced their way through, hewing trees, blasting rock, and making the silent woods resound with the voice of civilization, occasionally coming across the track of some Indian encampment or the marks of a bear. It must have required great forethought and organization from headquarters to have the plant and stores ready to push on day by day, whilst the railway in rear acted as the pioneers' single communication with the outside world, as they plunged deeper and deeper into the forests. The average speed of construction was about five miles a day, and the greatest length laid in one day was twelve and a half miles. The portion of line between Port Arthur and Fort William was the most difficult to devise. Indeed, several times the engineers despaired. The railway is divided into divisional sections, with a superintendent at each. These again are divided into sections, with a surveyor in charge; and we frequently pass their lonely section houses. Every portion of the line is inspected once a day, the workmen using a trolly, which can be lifted on and off the track. It is a single line, and there is only one passenger train daily east and west.
The trains are very long and heavy, often consisting of eight or nine cars some eighty feet in length, weighing as much as fifty tons each. They would jump the track if lighter. Our train to-day was of this length, and carried a human freight of 286 persons, exclusive of the numerous officials. The sleepers or sleeping-cars are most elegant, with their polished pine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and their pale sea-green brocade hangings.
The colonist cars on these trains are excellent, and always, we noticed, well filled. They have berths like the sleeper, only with no upholstery, but the colonist can buy a mattress and pillow at Montreal for a dollar or two. They have a stove where they can cook their own provisions, and on landing from the ocean steamers they get into this car, live in it, and come as far west as they want to without change or stoppage.
From Fort William we passed through a wild, rocky country, following the line of the Kaministiquia, a shallow river scrambling over a rocky course. There are a few of these soft liquid Indian names, embodying some symbolical or romantic ideal, still left; but they are fast dying out, and the practical settler is changing them to a more prosaic but pronounceable nomenclature.
It was through this lonely district, then, unexplored by white man, that for ninety-five days Wolseley, in 1870, led his troops against the Indians. They marched 1000 miles from Fort William to Fort Garry, utilizing the waterway of the lakes and rivers where possible. At Savanne we see two of his flat-bottomed boats, lying rotting in the stream near an Indian village.
We have dinner in the private car of Mr. Howland and Mr. Wilkie, the chairman and general manager of the Imperial Bank of Toronto. Seated at the end of the train, we watch the twin lines of railway uncoiling themselves in a straight line for mile after mile. An occasional section-house, a station, which is often only a wooden shed on a platform, a board with the number of the section on it, and, at long intervals, a huge red tank for watering the engine, is all we see. Night closes in on this lonely country, and we sleep in our berths, while the engine steams and pants along into the darkness, hour after hour through the long, long night.
In the cold early morning we reach Rat Portage, passing from the state of Ontario into Manitoba. Rat Portage is a wooden village of 1400 inhabitants (this is considered quite a goodly population for this sparsely-peopled country); and has the largest flour mill in Canada. It lies at the outlet of the beautiful Lake of the Woods, which is forty miles long and studded with islands.
A brake has broken and the train is divided, the first half taking on the dining-car. Hungry and impatient, the passengers wait for another to be attached, and stand on the carriage platform ready to rush on board. But, as it passes, a howl of disappointed hunger goes up, for some knowing ones have jumped off the cars, and filled it before it leaves the siding.
We are still travelling through the same rock-bound country, ungainly masses of rock protruding through a scrub growth of dwarf trees. We continually pass beautiful lakes, placid sheets of water hidden away in hollows. This is succeeded by a run through some "muskeg" or black peaty bog land, where flourish rank grasses against a background of bushy poplar trees.
Thirty or forty miles from Winnipeg the country opens out and gradually assumes a prairie character. The land is quite flat now, covered with coarse yellow grasses, and sprinkled with wild flowers. It is a rich feast of colours. There are great patches of gorgeous wild sunflowers, masses of purple and white michaelmas daisies, growing more plenteously here on the open prairie, than when cultivated in our cottage gardens at home; there are bluebells and lupins, blue, pink, and white, marsh mallows, cyclamen, and acres of that weed-like growth, the golden rod. Isolated houses, becoming more frequent, tell us we are nearing Winnipeg. We cross the Red river and are in the station.
Winnipeg is the old Fort Garry settlement of the Hudson Bay Company. Twenty years ago, or in 1871, population was 100, now, in 1891, it is 30,000.
The town is set down in the midst of the prairie. Main street follows the winding of the old Indian trail which takes in the deep bend of the Red river. The City Hall in this street, or "on" as the Canadians would say, is a very handsome new-looking structure. It front of it stands the column erected to the memory of the soldiers who fell in the North-West rebellion of 1870. It is surmounted by a volunteer on guard,