‘This is a grand introduction to Canada,’ Luton said. ‘I hope it’s an omen.’
But as he observed the other diners on this first night of his trip across the continent, he saw so much that perplexed him, so many different styles of dress and speech, that he became bewildered. What troubled him most was the breeziness of the people on the train, their informality, their lack, as he expressed it, ‘of any clear-cut social structure.’ He soon learned that he could not easily determine from what level of society a man came: ‘They all speak the same, bottom to top, no differentiation at all, except for those who’ve obviously had their education in England.’ Men pushed and shoved and paid little deference to those of obviously superior status, and when at Fort William several American travelers boarded the train, even what few proprieties the Canadians did observe seemed to fly out the window.
‘At times,’ he told the two young men, ‘you’d hardly know it was a British colony, everything so jumbled.’
Philip said he was pretty sure Canada wasn’t a colony any longer: ‘Didn’t they have a dominion office in London and all that? And their own prime minister?’
‘If it makes them feel good, such concessions do little harm. But when an Englishman travels in India, for example, everything is so clear. There you are, white skin and all, dress easily recognized, officers in spanking new uniforms, women of all ages carrying on the best traditions of the home country. Sharing the place are the Indians. You can’t miss them. Mind you, some of them can buy and sell the average Englishman, Oxford and all that, and they’ve learned to fit into the finest clubs. But Indians are Indians, and no one ever forgets it, isn’t that right, Harry?’
Carpenter grunted agreement, then said that when he served in the Punjab on the Afghan frontier there were no finer troops than Probyn’s Horse: ‘Mostly Indians, and I never fought with better.’
‘But of course they had English officers?’
‘Yes. But I’ll tell you this, Evelyn, if push should come to shove in Europe, and it might, I would expect a Canadian battalion to give a good account of itself, very good indeed.’ He was struck by the fact that the average Canadian man they were seeing seemed an inch or two taller than men of similar status would have been in England: ‘They’re stout chaps, Evelyn, a new type of Empire man,’ but Luton thought the Canadian women dowdy and lacking in refinement.
‘Travel by these trains isn’t cheap, I can tell you that,’ Luton said, ‘so we’ve got to suppose we’re seeing the best of the crop. Not too impressive, I’m afraid.’
He feared that Canada had probably been corrupted by its proximity to the United States, and whenever he spoke of that massive republic lying just to the south he expressed ambivalent feelings: ‘Man would be an ass not to recognize the accomplishments of those energetic people. Remarkable, really. Fine cities and all that, but you must remember we got them off to a flying start during the hundred and fifty years we guided them. But I’m sure their effect on Canada has been destructive.’
Carpenter, laughing at his friend’s reluctance to accept Canada for what it was, said: ‘Evelyn! On this train you’re enjoying a luxury not surpassed anywhere in Europe. Relax. Enjoy it,’ and Luton raised his glass: ‘To Canada, such as it is!’
Tim Fogarty was having a less opulent trip, for he was riding in what the new railway called a Colonial Car, an ingenious affair containing many little alcoves consisting of facing double seats, with between them enough space for the wooden table which when needed could be dropped from its resting place upright against the wall and returned there when the picnic-style meal was finished. But what pleased the Irishman most were the arrangements for sleeping, for he had soon tired of the endless vistas of lakes and trees his window afforded of the land north of the Great Lakes.
At night the space between the seats was filled in with a structure that also came down from the wall, thus forming, with the facing seats, a fine, level bed, upon which two passengers could sleep in relative comfort, especially if they had been forewarned to bring blankets of some kind. And that wasn’t all. If four people occupied an alcove, the sleeping accommodations for two more were arranged for by an invention which simply delighted Fogarty and which he occupied even during daylight hours.
From a spot high up on the walls came strong link chains which supported the outer edges of bedlike platforms. These were thus suspended, as it were, from the ceiling and passengers could climb onto them with the aid of a little ladder. There, high above the others, they could stretch out, adjust their blankets if they had any, and sleep their way across the continent. What made these upper ledges especially homelike was the fact that in the rear of the car stood a well-designed wood-burning stove on which the travelers could cook such food as they had either brought with them or purchased at one of the many station halts. This meant that there was throughout the car, especially near the ceiling, a constant odor of the normal family kitchen.
The only drawback that Fogarty could detect was that the seats were upholstered in the hardest, shiniest, most unforgiving mock leather, only slightly more resilient than a board, and after even one day’s travel, this unrelenting hardness began to tell.
The trip from Montreal to Edmonton traversed an awesome distance broken into four distinct segments: Montreal to Fort William at the head of Lake Superior, 995 miles in 32 hours; Fort William to Winnipeg, capital of western Canada, 427 miles in 14 hours; Winnipeg to the interesting frontier town of Calgary, 840 miles in 30 hours; and Calgary due north to Edmonton, 192 miles in 11 hours. The trip would thus cover 2,454 miles in 87 hours, without allowance for time in the station, time for refueling and taking on water. Since passengers were eager to avail themselves of hotel or inn accommodations at the terminal points of each segment, the journey took at least six days. This was fortunate, because it enabled Canada to introduce itself by conditioning stages; to have thrown the Englishmen direct from French Montreal to frontier Edmonton would have been too disorienting. To break the journey at little Fort William was advantageous, and the Englishmen noted that in a sense the gold rush began here, for this was the beginning of the western reach of the national railroad, and to it had come prospectors from all parts of Canada and especially from the little feeder railroads that came into Canada from the United States. Here also the big ships that plied the Great Lakes terminated their long runs; the traveler could, if he had the time and money, deviate from the normal rail route which traversed northern Ontario, go instead to Toronto and onward to Windsor on the Detroit River, board a luxurious steamer and spend several delightful days transiting Lakes Huron and Superior, disembarking at Fort William to resume the rail trip west to the Pacific.
In the summer of 1897 a constant horde of gold-seekers boarded the trains at Fort William for Winnipeg and Calgary, and the Luton party, seeing such men close up for the first time, judged them to be an ungainly lot, single men mostly, although some came in groups of three or four from some small town in places like Ohio or Michigan, with an occasional man and wife, the woman always big and strong and capable. A surprising number of the Americans who joined the caravan had been in the United States only briefly; they were Germans and Scandinavians, with now and then an Irishman and very rarely an adventurous Frenchman. They were men on the move, most of them in their late twenties or early thirties, sometimes a few in their grizzled forties and fifties. With their rough clothes, pasteboard suitcases and blunt language they were not an appetizing lot.
Some hours before the Englishmen arrived in Winnipeg, where they rested overnight, their train finally emerged from what had seemed to them an endless landscape of dark trees, still lakes and rock, brightened only by the flash of a silver birch tree and an occasional waterfall. Even Blythe, enamored at first with the wildness of this vast forest, had tired of it during the second day. Now the forest had stopped and the prairie stretched unbroken to the far horizon, and they began to comprehend fully both the immensity of Canada and its radical difference from any other part of the B
ritish Empire. ‘It really is a continent,’ Trevor said as he pored over maps, ‘and we’re barely halfway across,’ but Luton dampened this uncritical enthusiasm by asking: ‘Does a thousand miles of empty prairie with no history, no culture, equal a hundred miles in an historical corner like Germany, Holland and Belgium?’ He could express little interest in the vital sprawling new capital of Manitoba, and was unimpressed by the new electric streetcars which rumbled through the city, to the evident pride of its citizens.
West of Winnipeg, when the train halted at towns with names like Moose Jaw, Swift Current and Medicine Hat, the Englishmen saw that the passengers who now boarded the cars bore almost no similarity to types they had known in England and little to those in eastern Canada. Here no one spoke French, and English seemed no more commonly spoken than the foreign tongues of Baltic nations. There were no men’s suits from fashionable London shops. These were men who plowed the prairie, tended cattle, and ran small country stores, and their women looked as competent as their husbands. A surprising number of women were traveling alone or in pairs.
Adding to the jumble of nationalities already on the train were the large numbers of gold-seekers who had come north from the western United States, big uncouth men with squarish faces indicating Slavic origins, or with light-blond hair indicating northern Europeans. Now every car in the train was crowded with would-be miners, many carrying with them all their family goods; the white-and-gold dining car was filled with dialects not heard before, and Fogarty’s Colonial Car was so jammed that he had to share his bed aloft with a Swede who said he came from Montana.
The other Englishmen in his party were amused by the effect of this flood of newcomers on Lord Luton: ‘My word, they’re a vigorous lot! No wonder they wanted to steal Oregon from us and half of Canada. Wonder the old marquess was able to hold them off, because these chaps could fight if they had to.’ Studying the Americans aloofly, he thought: They’re either brash and forward, with no sense of proper social distinctions, or they’re brutish clods recently arrived from some minor European country, little better than the peasants you’d find in any French village. And it irritated him to think that these latter Americans in their rough country clothes were presuming to occupy first-class accommodations, the only ones they were able to obtain on the crowded trains. You’d not find them doing this in England, he thought, and he was increasingly pleased that he had engineered it so that his team could avoid America completely, knowing he’d not feel at ease spending an extended period among such people.
The two young Englishmen, forced to accept what seats were available in the crowded dining car, struck up an easy conversation with their tablemates. ‘I say,’ Trevor asked, ‘where do these people come from?’ and one of the men pointed to one pair of diners after another: ‘They’re German, I happen to know them. That group I would judge to be from a Russian religious group who found refuge near here. The next? They could be anything,’ and he leaned out from the table to ask: ‘Where would you be from?’ but as soon as the man began to speak, Trevor cried: ‘Scandinavian, aren’t you?’ and the man said: ‘Norwegian.’
When Luton’s party disembarked from the main line of the Canadian Pacific in Calgary in order to catch the train to Edmonton, everything changed, for nearly a thousand gold-seekers from all parts of the United States had crowded in to augment the hordes who had streamed in from eastern Canada. When the smaller train started due north to Edmonton, every seat was taken, so three cars normally used for cattle transfers were attached, and more than a hundred people rode the hundred and ninety-two miles to Edmonton standing up, and happy to be doing so.
Lord Luton, surveying this crush of humanity, said: ‘It’s been like the meander of a major river over a long course. Smaller streams keep feeding into it from distant points, until the thing becomes a flood.’ He had scarcely uttered these words when someone heard Fogarty address him as ‘Milord.’ Word flashed through the mob that a real British lord was traveling north. Soon gawking Americans were pushing in to see how a British nobleman looked and more experienced Canadians watched approvingly from a distance.
Seeking refuge, Luton fled to his private saloon, but at dinner several strangers stopped by his table to pay their respects and wish him well. He was so distressed by this that he drew back, took refuge in his silent-sneer, and prayed that the trip would end quickly. Eleven hours later he heard cheering coming from the three cattle cars and looked out to see Edmonton, which had exploded from less than five hundred people last year to more than two thousand in the period since those fatal words were shouted in Seattle: ‘Ship’s in with more than a ton of solid gold!’
Luton’s first impression of Edmonton was of a city of tents, for the gold-seekers had thrown up thousands of temporary canvas dwellings along the flats of the North Saskatchewan River. Shops of every description had mysteriously appeared, most with some bold sign assuring the newcomer that inside these doors he would find all he needed for his forthcoming journey to the Klondike. The burghers of Edmonton reveled in its sudden notoriety, while hawkers pestered strangers on its impromptu streets, seeking to guide them to this shop or that. One man dressed like a carpenter, with overalls and bib containing six pockets for nails, harangued the travelers, and handed out leaflets warning them not to go north without the necessary hardware. He said that a minimal kit could be purchased at his brother’s store for $43, which provided basics such as shovel, pick, whipsaw, hammer, rope, ax, draw-knife, chisel, bucket and gold pan. However, he recommended what he called ‘the complete kit, listed here in detail, more than a hundred and ten necessities, only $125.’ This contained such useful items as a brace and bit, a block and tackle, a magnifying glass and a Dutch oven.
Philip accepted one of the leaflets, and when he returned to the hotel he recommended to his uncle that they buy the $125 assortment, but Luton said: ‘Harry’s doing the buying, and he’s much more practiced in outfitting expeditions than your carpenter friend.’
While the four gentlemen attended to such matters as hardware, Fogarty moved quietly among the Americans and the Edmonton shopkeepers, and as he talked with clerks he began to uncover disquieting news. When he asked who the expert was who had prepared that pamphlet his team had acquired from the Canadian office in London, one sharp-minded fellow working in an outfitting shop asked: ‘What expert?’ and Fogarty said: ‘I think his name was Halverson.’ The clerk sniggered: ‘Oh, him,’ and when Fogarty named the expert on the Mackenzie River, Desbordays, the clerk laughed outright: ‘They’re the same man. Peter Randolph. He works at the newspaper.’
‘Has he ever been to Dawson?’
‘He hasn’t been as far north as the Athabasca River.’
‘What did he do, ask a lot of questions?’
‘About what?’
‘You know, talk with the other men who had been there.’
‘Nobody from here has been anywhere. I mean, down the Mackenzie River a short ways, maybe. On fishing trips, yes.’
‘But to the gold fields?’
‘Nobody. At least not yet. There’s talk that a government expedition might set out next year. But not now, with winter heading in.’
Fogarty, loath to accept such disheartening information, quietly left the outfitter and strolled from one shop to another, asking not proprietors but minor clerks about the trails to the Klondike, and consistently he heard that Peter Randolph had never been out of Edmonton and that no one at present in the town had made the trek to Dawson, for as several pointed out: ‘Dawson wasn’t even there till all this started.’
‘But could they have been to the Klondike?’
‘There was no such place till last year when those Americans gave it that name.’
As Fogarty walked down the dusty back streets of Edmonton, trying to digest his disturbing discoveries, he saw that he must do two things: try to speak with this man Peter Randolph who had written the spurious documents and then inform Lord Luton of his findings. At the office of the town’s newspaper he a
sked for Randolph, and was told: ‘He doesn’t work here anymore.’ When Fogarty asked: ‘What’s he doing?’ he was told: ‘He’s taken a job giving advice to prospectors at a store that opened last week.’
It took Fogarty a while to find which of the many new businesses had hired this imaginative man, and when he did he presented himself as a solitary would-be prospector. ‘Yes indeed!’ salesman Randolph said enthusiastically. ‘You can get to the fields before the ice freezes everything. We’ll provide you with the best clothing and equipment possible, food supplies too, and with one horse, which you supply, you can make it.’
After Fogarty talked with him for some time, he began to suspect that not one word of what the man said was true. The whole Edmonton operation could be a gigantic fraud engineered by a few rapacious businessmen and a group of inattentive town fathers. It looked as if no one, when these pleasant days of summer were still long, stopped to reason that in sending lone travelers north into the teeth of the oncoming winter, a sentence of death was being pronounced, and that in dispatching even carefully prepared teams like Lord Luton’s, disaster was being invited.
With this partial but frightening information, Fogarty returned to the hotel and told Luton: ‘If you’ll excuse me saying so, Milord, we better get the others.’ When they assembled he said: ‘I think we’re in a trap. The two men who wrote those reports you mention so much, they’re one man, a fellow who’s never been out of Edmonton, not even as far as the Peace River. I’ve been told by many men in town that there’s no way people starting now can get to the gold fields before winter.’
‘Fogarty,’ Luton said, with just a show of irritation, ‘are you certain of all this, or is it just a batch of village rumors?’ and when Fogarty protested that he had checked the veracity of his informants as carefully as possible, Lord Luton cut him short and snapped at Carpenter: ‘Harry, go out there and find out what’s happening.’ While Lord Luton was looking the other way, Fogarty slipped up to Carpenter and whispered: ‘His name’s Peter Randolph. You’ll find him tending shop in that place with the stuffed bear in the window’; and Harry went in search.
Journey: A Novel Page 4