The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎73v] (151/244)

636
THE NINETEENTH
April
River, I visited the salmon canneries of McEwan & Co., where some
200 Indians are employed. I saw by the books of the estab
lishment that some of these earned as much as $ 900 in a six weeks'
fishing last year. Those who worked within the cannery earned
over two dollars a day, while squaws were paid one and a quarter.
The manager assured me that the Indians were better workers than
the Chinese, and earned more money. During the close season for
salmon and game, the Indians are by law allowed to fish and shoot
for ' the pot.' On completing a most interesting inspection of
Mr. McEwan's establishment, I was ' serenaded' by a brass band,
composed entirely of full-breed Indians, with
through Tara's Halls —admirably rendered, too, from written music!
No description, however full and eloquent, can do justice to the
scenery of the Canadian Eockies and British Columbia. The human
eye alone can do so. The countless giant peaks, clothed in everlast
ing robes of snow, the glaciers, waterfalls, lakes, rivers, valleys, and
pine woods which pass before the gaze of the bewildered traveller
from Banff, in Alberta, to Vancouver would make half-a-dozen
Switzerlands, and leave enough of Alpine material and glacier
wonders over to supply every other country in Europe with as much
of the marvellous and the sublime in nature as would suffice for home
admiration. Groing down the enchanting canon of the Eraser, one
is puzzled which to marvel at most—the variety and beauty and
wild extravagance of scenic grandeur, or the daring genius of man,
as seen in the construction of a railway through a region where pre
cipitous, but timber-clad, mountains and roaring torrent were appar
ently intended by nature to reign supreme. Lamartine, in his
Voyage en Orient, writing of the effect which the first sight of the
ruins of Balbec made upon his mind, said that if a language existed
which would convey in a word as much as the eye could take in at a
glance, it alone would enable him to describe the views before him
in a manner that would interpret his impressions of them to his
readers. A language of this compass would be needed in order to
give a true conception of the five hundred miles continuation of
every possible combination of natural scenery along which the
Canadian Pacific Railway carries the tourist, from Banff, on the
summit of the Eockies, to Vancouver, on the banks of Burrard
Inlet.
Everybody you meet, from Winnipeg to Victoria, talks emigration.
In the trains, hotels, and streets it is the one subject a stranger will
have introduced to him by whomever he asks for information. You
cannot help sympathising with this feeling, although, to a large
extent, its source is found in land speculation. Apart from this
sympathy, however, it was profoundly discouraging to find the evil
hand of landlord absenteeism holding its grip upon the country and
keeping back its development. The lands granted by the Dominion