They Will Not Run Trains On Sunday At Montreal, And This Is Wednesday.
Therefore, The Canadian Pacific Makes Up A Train For Vancouver At
Winnipeg.
This is worth remembering, because few people travel in that
train, and you escape any rush of tourists running westward to catch the
Yokohama boat.
The car is your own, and with it the service of the
porter. Our porter, seeing things were slack, beguiled himself with a
guitar, which gave a triumphal and festive touch to the journey,
ridiculously out of keeping with the view. For eight-and-twenty long
hours did the bored locomotive trail us through a flat and hairy land,
powdered, ribbed, and speckled with snow, small snow that drives like
dust-shot in the wind - the land of Assiniboia. Now and again, for no
obvious reason to the outside mind, there was a town. Then the towns
gave place to 'section so and so'; then there were trails of the
buffalo, where he once walked in his pride; then there was a mound of
white bones, supposed to belong to the said buffalo, and then the
wilderness took up the tale. Some of it was good ground, but most of it
seemed to have fallen by the wayside, and the tedium of it was eternal.
At twilight - an unearthly sort of twilight - there came another curious
picture. Thus - a wooden town shut in among low, treeless, rolling
ground, a calling river that ran unseen between scarped banks; barracks
of a detachment of mounted police, a little cemetery where ex-troopers
rested, a painfully formal public garden with pebble paths and foot-high
fir trees, a few lines of railway buildings, white women walking up and
down in the bitter cold with their bonnets off, some Indians in red
blanketing with buffalo horns for sale trailing along the platform, and,
not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a young grizzly
standing up with extended arms in their pens and begging for food. It
was strange beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest - opening
a door into a new world. The only commonplace thing about the spot was
its name - Medicine Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible
name such a town could carry. This is that place which later became a
town; but I had seen it three years before when it was even smaller and
was reached by me in a freight-car, ticket unpaid for.
That next morning brought us the Canadian Pacific Railway as one reads
about it. No pen of man could do justice to the scenery there. The
guide-books struggle desperately with descriptions, adapted for summer
reading, of rushing cascades, lichened rocks, waving pines, and
snow-capped mountains; but in April these things are not there. The
place is locked up - dead as a frozen corpse. The mountain torrent is a
boss of palest emerald ice against the dazzle of the snow; the
pine-stumps are capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of snow; the
rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, the fallen trees, and the
lichens together, and the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in
the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles.
You may listen in vain when the train stops for the least sign of breath
or power among the hills. The snow has smothered the rivers, and the
great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge
wash-tub. The old snow near by is blackened and smirched with the smoke
of locomotives, and its dulness is grateful to aching eyes. But the men
who live upon the line have no consideration for these things. At a
halting-place in a gigantic gorge walled in by the snows, one of them
reels from a tiny saloon into the middle of the track where half-a-dozen
dogs are chasing a pig off the metals. He is beautifully and eloquently
drunk. He sings, waves his hands, and collapses behind a shunting
engine, while four of the loveliest peaks that the Almighty ever moulded
look down upon him. The landslide that should have wiped that saloon
into kindlings has missed its mark and has struck a few miles down the
line. One of the hillsides moved a little in dreaming of the spring and
caught a passing freight train. Our cars grind cautiously by, for the
wrecking engine has only just come through. The deceased engine is
standing on its head in soft earth thirty or forty feet down the slide,
and two long cars loaded with shingles are dropped carelessly atop of
it. It looks so marvellously like a toy train flung aside by a child,
that one cannot realise what it means till a voice cries, 'Any one
killed?' The answer comes back, 'No; all jumped'; and you perceive with
a sense of personal insult that this slovenliness of the mountain is an
affair which may touch your own sacred self. In which case.... But the
train is out on a trestle, into a tunnel, and out on a trestle again. It
was here that every one began to despair of the line when it was under
construction, because there seemed to be no outlet. But a man came, as a
man always will, and put a descent thus and a curve in this manner, and
a trestle so; and behold, the line went on. It is in this place that we
heard the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway told as men tell a
many-times-repeated tale, with exaggerations and omissions, but an
imposing tale, none the less. In the beginning, when they would federate
the Dominion of Canada, it was British Columbia who saw objections to
coming in, and the Prime Minister of those days promised it for a bribe,
an iron band between tidewater and tidewater that should not break. Then
everybody laughed, which seems necessary to the health of most big
enterprises, and while they were laughing, things were being done.
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