These Valleys Mark The Courses
Of The Olympic Glaciers At The Period Of Their Greatest Extension,
When They Poured Their
Tribute into that portion of the great northern
ice sheet that overswept the south end of Vancouver Island and filled
The strait with flowing ice as it is now filled with ocean water.
The steamers of the Sound usually stop at Esquimalt on their way up,
thus affording tourists an opportunity to visit the interesting town
of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. The Victoria harbor is
too narrow and difficult of access for the larger class of ships;
therefore a landing has to be made at Esquimalt. The distance,
however, is only about three miles, and the way is delightful, winding
on through a charming forest of Douglas spruce, with here and there
groves of oak and madrone, and a rich undergrowth of hazel, dogwood,
willow, alder, spiraea, rubus, huckleberry, and wild rose. Pretty
cottages occur at intervals along the road, covered with honeysuckle,
and many an upswelling rock, freshly glaciated and furred with yellow
mosses and lichen, telling interesting stories of the icy past.
Victoria is a quiet, handsome, breezy town, beautifully located on
finely modulated ground at the mouth of the Canal de Haro, with
charming views in front, of islands and mountains and far-reaching
waters, ever changing in the shifting lights and shades of the clouds
and sunshine. In the background there are a mile or two of field and
forest and sunny oak openings; then comes the forest primeval, dense
and shaggy and well-nigh impenetrable.
Notwithstanding the importance claimed for Victoria as a commercial
center and the capital of British Columbia, it has a rather young,
loose-jointed appearance. The government buildings and some of the
business blocks on the main streets are well built and imposing in
bulk and architecture. These are far less interesting and
characteristic, however, than the mansions set in the midst of
spacious pleasure grounds and the lovely home cottages embowered in
honeysuckle and climbing roses. One soon discovers that this is no
Yankee town. The English faces and the way that English is spoken
alone would tell that; while in business quarters there is a staid
dignity and moderation that is very noticeable, and a want of American
push and hurrah. Love of land and of privacy in homes is made manifest
in the residences, many of which are built in the middle of fields and
orchards or large city blocks, and in the loving care with which these
home grounds are planted. They are very beautiful. The fineness of
the climate, with its copious measure of warm moisture distilling in
dew and fog, and gentle, bathing, laving rain, give them a freshness
and floweriness that is worth going far to see.
Victoria is noted for its fine drives, and every one who can should
either walk or drive around the outskirts of the town, not only for
the fine views out over the water but to see the cascades of bloom
pouring over the gables of the cottages, and the fresh wild woods with
their flowery, fragrant underbrush. Wild roses abound almost
everywhere. One species, blooming freely along the woodland paths, is
from two to three inches in diameter, and more fragrant than any other
wild rose I ever saw excepting the sweetbriar. This rose and three
species of spiraea fairly fill the air with fragrance after a shower.
And how brightly then do the red berries of the dogwood shine out from
the warm yellow-green of leaves and mosses!
But still more interesting and significant are the glacial phenomena
displayed hereabouts. All this exuberant tree, bush, and herbaceous
vegetation, cultivated or wild, is growing upon moraine beds outspread
by waters that issued from the ancient glaciers at the time of their
recession, and scarcely at all moved or in any way modified by post-glacial agencies. The town streets and the roads are graded in
moraine material, among scratched and grooved rock bosses that are as
unweathered and telling as any to be found in the glacier channels of
Alaska. The harbor also is clearly of glacial origin. The rock
islets that rise here and there, forming so marked a feature of the
harbor, are unchanged roches moutonnees, and the shores are grooved,
scratched, and rounded, and in every way as glacial in all their
characteristics as those of a newborn glacial lake.
Most visitors to Victoria go to the stores of the Hudson's Bay
Company, presumably on account of the romantic associations, or to
purchase a bit of fur or some other wild-Indianish trinket as a
memento. At certain seasons of the year, when the hairy harvests are
gathered in, immense bales of skins may be seen in these unsavory
warehouses, the spoils of many thousand hunts over mountain and plain,
by lonely river and shore. The skins of bears, wolves, beavers,
otters, fishers, martens, lynxes, panthers, wolverine, reindeer,
moose, elk, wild goats, sheep, foxes, squirrels, and many others of
our "poor earth-born companions and fellow mortals" may here be found.
Vancouver is the southmost and the largest of the countless islands
forming the great archipelago that stretches a thousand miles to the
northward. Its shores have been known a long time, but little is
known of the lofty mountainous interior on account of the difficulties
in the way of explorations - lake, bogs, and shaggy tangled forests.
It is mostly a pure, savage wilderness, without roads or clearings,
and silent so far as man is concerned. Even the Indians keep close to
the shore, getting a living by fishing, dwelling together in villages,
and traveling almost wholly by canoes. White settlements are few and
far between. Good agricultural lands occur here and there on the edge
of the wilderness, but they are hard to clear, and have received but
little attention thus far. Gold, the grand attraction that lights the
way into all kinds of wildernesses and makes rough places smooth, has
been found, but only in small quantities, too small to make much
motion.
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