In Those
Days, Too, Wheat Will Be Grown For The English Market Four Hundred Miles
North Of The Present Fields
On the west side; and British Columbia,
perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will have
Her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British
investor will no longer throw away his money on hellicat South American
republics, or give it as a hostage to the States. He will keep it in the
family as a wise man should. Then the towns that are to-day the only
names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map
as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because - but it is hopeless to make
people understand that actually and indeed, we do possess an Empire of
which Canada is only one portion - an Empire which is not bounded by
election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South - an
Empire that has not yet been scratched.
[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]
Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune
come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the
steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.
But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a
desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be
compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral,
because you do fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and
perspiration and sitting up far into the night - by working like a fiend,
as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it! The headlong
stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for
merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw
material of a city - men, lumber, and shingle - are shot on to the not yet
nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the
blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of
the city's one electric light - a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked
pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar
of 'Let the woman have it!' that stops all bidding when the one other
woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate
offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious
imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the
bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its
heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground'
scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost
his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates
six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken
contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom,' and, therefore, utterly
vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where
stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and,
shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G - d! Isn't it
grand? Isn't it glorious? 'and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out men,
three in each room of the shanty hotel: 'All meals two dollars. All
drinks thirty-five cents. No washing done here. The manager not
responsible for anything.' Does the bald catalogue of these recitals
leave you cold? It is possible; but it is also possible after three days
in a new town to set the full half of a truck-load of archbishops
fighting for corner lots as they never fought for mitre or crozier.
There is a contagion in a boom as irresistible as that of a panic in a
theatre.
After a while things settle down, and then the carpenter, who is also an
architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to the
highest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.
The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building means
backing your belief in your town - yours to you and peculiarly. Confound
all other towns whatsoever. Behind the crowd of business men the weekly
town paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle. There is
honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good - the employer of
labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse,
savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,'
the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and
invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world
which prefers to live in cities other than Ours.
Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a
patriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few years
later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.
Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was
clapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but
permanent. The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodation
for two hundred guests. The manager who served you in his shirt-sleeves
as his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to be
reminded of the first meeting. Suburban villas more or less adorn the
flats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early
days) hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used to
stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon;
and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends.
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