The Canadian Commonwealth Part 16

Including Quebec, Montreal, old Port Royal, Annapolis, Louisburg and the forts on Hudson Bay, Canada's chief strongholds of defense have been taken and retaken seven times by European enemies in one hundred and sixty years--between 1629 and 1789. Day was when Quebec fortifications cost so much that the King of France wanted to know if they were laid in gold. Before the fall of Quebec in 1759, Louisburg--a forgotten fortress of Cape Breton--was considered one of France's strongholds. Have Canadians forgotten the frightful wreck of the British fleet in the St. Lawrence in 1711 under Sir Havender Walker; or the defeat of the admiralty s.h.i.+ps manned by the Hudson's Bay fur-traders up off Port Nelson in 1697 by Lemoyne d' Iberville? Before La Perouse reduced Churchill it was regarded as a second Gibraltar.

Yet Churchill and Nelson and Quebec and Louisburg all fell before a foreign foe, and Europe is nearer to-day than she was in those eras of terrible defeat. What additional fortifications or defenses has Canada to be so c.o.c.ksure that history can never repeat itself? She is not resting under the Monroe Doctrine. It is a safe wager that many Canadians have never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Besides, the minute Canada voluntarily enters a European war, does she forfeit American "protection" under that Monroe Doctrine? The idea of being "protected"

by any power but her own--and Britain's--right arm Canada would scout to derision. Yet what are her own national defenses?

Her regular forces ordinarily consist of less than three thousand men; her volunteer forces of forty-five to sixty thousand. By law it is provided that the Dominion militia consist of all male inhabitants of the age of eighteen and under sixty, divided into four cla.s.ses: from eighteen to thirty years of age unmarried or widowers; from thirty to forty-five unmarried or widowers; from eighteen to forty-five married or widowers; men of all cla.s.ses between forty-five and sixty. In emergency, those liable to service would be called in this order. The period of service is three years. Up to the present service has been voluntary, and the period of drill lasts sixteen days. Except for fis.h.i.+ng patrols and insignificant cruisers, Canada has no marine force, absolutely none, though she can requisition the big merchant liners which she subsidizes. Canada has an excellent military school in Kingston and a course of instruction at Quebec, but the majority of graduates from these centers go into service in the British army simply because there is no scope for them in their own land. At Esquimalt off Victoria, British Columbia, and at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before the outbreak of the present war, were Imperial naval stations; but these were being reduced to a minimum. Perhaps to these defenders should be added some thirty thousand juvenile cadets trained in the public schools, but if one is to set down facts not fictions, much of the training of the volunteers resolves itself into a yearly picnic. One wonders on what Canada is pinning her faith in security from attack in case disaster should come to the British navy. Whether Canada is conscious of it or not, her greatest defense is in the virility of her manhood. Her men are neither professorial nor an office type. They are big outdoor men who shoot well because they have shot from boyhood and lived a life in the open. All this, however, is not national defense. It is unused but splendid material for national defense.

Up to the outbreak of the present war Canada has not spent ten million a year on national defense. That is--for the security of peace for a century, she has spent less than one dollar and fifty cents per head a year. A year ago naval bills were rejected. To-day there are few people in Canada who would not acknowledge that Canada is spending too little on defense. Stirred profoundly but, as is the British way, saying little, the Dominion is setting herself in earnest to the big new problem. To the European War, Canada has sent sixty thousand men; and she has promised one hundred thousand more. A nation that can unpreparedly deliver on such promises to the drop of the hat can take care of her defense, and that may be Canada's next national job.

Would any power have an object in crippling Canada? The question is answered best by another. If Suez were cut off and Canada were cut off, where would England look for her food supply? And if it were to the advantage of a hostile power to cripple Canada, could she be conquered? Any one familiar with Canada will answer without a moment's hesitation. She could be attacked. Her coastal cities could be laid waste as the cities of Belgium. To reach the interior of Canada, an enemy must do one of three things, all next to impossible: penetrate the St. Lawrence--a treacherous current--for a thousand miles exposed to submarine and mine and attack from each side; cross the United States and so violate American sovereignty, cross the Rockies to reach inland. Any one of these feats is as impossible as the conquest of Switzerland or the Scottish Highlands. Canada could be attacked and laid waste; she could be financially ruined by attack and set back fifty years in her progress; but she could no more be conquered than Napoleon conquered Russia. The conquest would be at a cost to destroy the conqueror, and the conqueror could no more stay than Napoleon stayed in Moscow. Canada has a vast, an illimitable back country--the area of all Russia; and to the lakes and wild rivers and mountain pa.s.ses of that country her people are born and bred. To her climate her people are born and bred. The climate would take care of the rest.

You can't exactly despatch motors and motor guns down swamps for a hundred miles and over cataracts and through mountain pa.s.ses on the perpendicular. Canada's back country is her perpetual city of refuge.

Nevertheless, the day of dependence on false security is past.

National status implies national defense, and at time of writing the indications are that the whole military system of the Dominion will be put on a new basis, training to patriotism and defense and service from the public school up through the university.

"Then what becomes of your co-eds and woman movement?" a militarist asked.

The question can be answered in the words of a great doctor--more men die on the field of battle from lack of women nurses than ever die from the bullet of the enemy. The time seems to have come for woman's place on the firing line. That womanhood which gives of life to create life now claims the right to go out on the field of danger to conserve and protect life; and in the embodiment of military training in public education that, too, may be part of Canada's new national defense.

When an admiral's fleet is sunk within ten days' sail of Victoria and Vancouver, Laurier's naval policy to build war vessels, and Borden's to contribute to their purchase for service in the British Navy take on different aspect to Canada; and the Dominion enters a new era in her development, as one of the dominant powers in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. That is--she must prepare to enter; or sit back the helpless Korea of America. A country with a billion dollars of commerce a year to defend cuts economy down to the danger line when she spends not one per cent. of the value of her foreign commerce to protect it. Like the United States, Canada has been inclined to sit back detached from world entanglements and perplexities. That day has pa.s.sed for Canada. She must take her place and defend her place or lose her ident.i.ty as a nation. The awakening has gone over Canada in a wave. One awaits to see what will come of it.

Much, of course, depends upon the outcome of the great war. If Britain and her allies triumph--and particularly if peace brings partial disarmament--the urgency of preparation on Canada's part will be lessened. But should Germany win or the duel be a draw, then may Canada well gird up her loins and look to her safety.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH

I

Canada does not like any reference to her fur trade as a national occupation. Of course, it is no longer a national occupation. It occupies, perhaps, two thousand whites and it may be twenty or thirty thousand Indians. More Indians in Canada earn their living farming the reserves than catching fur, but the Indians north of Athabasca and Churchill and in Labrador must always earn their living fur hunting.

Of them there is no census, but they hardly exceed thirty thousand all told. The treaty Indians on reserves now number a hundred thousand.

Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. Both streams of settlers came from idealistic motives, but both had to live, and they did it at first by fur hunting. Jean Ba'tiste, the Frenchman, who might have been a courtier when he came, promptly doffed court trappings and donned moccasins and exchanged a soldier's saber for a camp frying-pan and kept pointing his canoe up the St. Lawrence till he had threaded every river and lake from Tadousac to Hudson Bay and the Rockies. It was the pursuit of the little beaver that paid the piper for all the discovering and exploring of Canada. When John Bull came--also in pursuit of ideals--he, too, in a more prosperous way promptly exchanged the pursuit of ideals for the pursuit of the little beaver. It was the little beaver that led the way for Radisson, for La Salle, for La Verandrye, for MacKenzie, for Fraser, for Peter Skene Ogden, from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia, from the Athabasca to the Sacramento.

While all this is of the past, the heritage of a fur-hunting ancestry has entered into the very blood and brawn and brain of Canada in a kind of iron dauntlessness that makes for manhood. Some of her greatest leaders--like Strathcona and MacKenzie--have been known as "Men of the North"; and whether they have fur-traded or not, nearly all those "Men of the North" who have made their mark have had the iron dauntlessness of the hunter in their blood. It is a sort of tonic from the out-of-doors, like the ozone you breathe, which fills body and soul with zest. Canada is sensitive to any reference to her fur trade for fear the world regard her as a perpetual fur domain. Her northern zones are a perpetual fur domain--we may as well acknowledge that--they can never be anything else; and Canada should serve notice on the softer races of the world that she does not want them. They can stand up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under a board. She will always have her s.p.a.cious domain of the North--a perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death; and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life.

II

The last chapter of the fur trade has not been written--as many a.s.sert.

The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against the elements--against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of Evil with which northern myth has personified Cold--fur hunting, fur-trading, will last long as man lasts. We are entering, not on the extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fas.h.i.+onable. Mink is fas.h.i.+onable to-day; hence the absurd and fabulous prices. Long ago, when ermine as miniver--the garb of n.o.bility--was fas.h.i.+onable and exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the exclusive garb of royalty, and ermine fell to four cents a pelt, advanced to twenty-five cents and has sold at one dollar. To-day, mink is the fas.h.i.+on, and the little mink is pursued; but to-morrow fas.h.i.+on will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into favor, and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine has multiplied.

In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the world than ever before in the history of the race--forty million dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions pa.s.sing through Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670 to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars'

worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions, or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' s.h.i.+ps bears to Europe from Canada yearly.

"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when trapping entails such hards.h.i.+p and poverty on the part of the hunter.

"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will cost from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade, the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them, according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."

"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader.

If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America--down MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.

"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought in to each of the traders there."

I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.

III

The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.

Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it--not just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles of free land. Lat.i.tudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River (barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow wheat all right--splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world.

That is, twenty hours of sunlight--not daylight but sunlight--force growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does exist? Cataracts countless--Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs--areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coa.r.s.e goose gra.s.s and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a ta.s.seled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high--areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region above c.u.mberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the ground would not hold the tent pegs.

It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by settlement--does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air--it might almost have been a Harvard air--if these distances were "as the crow flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me too often--he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.

"There ain't no distances as the crow flies in this country," he answered. "You got to travel 'cording as the waters collect or the ice goes out."

Well, here is your country, three thousand by two thousand miles, a great fur preserve. What exists in it? Very little wood, and that small. Undoubtedly some minerals. What else exists? A very spa.r.s.e population of Indians, whose census no man knows, for it has never been taken; but it is a pretty safe guess to say there are not thirty thousand Indians all told in the north fur country. I put this guess tentatively and should be glad of information from any one in a position to guess closer. I have asked the Hudson's Bay Company and I have asked Revillons how many white hunters and traders they think are in the fur country of the North. I have never met any one who placed the number in the North at more than two thousand. Spread two thousand white hunters with ten thousand Indians--for of the total Indian population two-thirds are women and children--over an area the size of two-thirds of Europe--I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally and degenerate.

Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve--Labrador, which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox--the finest in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands--cross fox almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat, coa.r.s.e harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter!

The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals exist--as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day discoveries of Cobalt prove--and there is also heavy timber; but north of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the impenetrable and--I think--indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur preserve similar in climate to Labrador.

Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front of the camp at night? The Indian calls that "a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."

Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a river--it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and goose gra.s.s--ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game.

Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the ground of the little fellows--waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts--hundreds of thousands of muskrat are taken out of this muskeg alone--exceed by a hundredfold the profits on the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten.

Look at the map again! North of c.u.mberland Lake to the next fur post is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake--more muskeg cut by limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a straight stretch of one thousand miles--nothing but rocks and cataracts and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them--and sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking muskeg goose gra.s.s and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by the amber water ways.

IV

If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south end of this field.

We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran.

Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains--such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South--the skeleton of a moose, come to its death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big game; and presently the river was lost--not in a lake--but in a swamp.

A red fox came scurrying through the goose gra.s.s, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie.

We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it--leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.

"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop that lying."

Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by the b.u.t.t of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose gra.s.s, kindled fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ash.o.r.e. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of b.u.t.ter. The cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first birch tree affording a new strip of bark.

Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian families to prevent lapses to barbarism.

Again and again we pa.s.sed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks above the reach of animal marauders--testimony to the honesty of the pa.s.sing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city can not boast of its denizens.

"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times,"

declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians who were pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing under the food in those trees were starving owing to the rabbit famine."