Canada and the British immigrant

During summer, in the Kootenay district, which lies in the south-east of the province, the temperature sometimes reaches eighty or ninety degrees in the shade, and in winter occasionally falls below zero, and the rainfall is usually sufficient to secure good crops of various descriptions; but much of the southern part of the interior of British Columbia consists of an elevated region, which, though deeply cut into by lakes and rivers, is described as a plateau, lying between mountain ranges on the east and west. It has an average altitude of three thousand five hundred feet, and here the rainfall is not superabundant. Indeed, in some districts irrigation is resorted to, with the result of great improvement in the crops. Altogether, however, there are many good farming and fruit districts in the valleys.

The Cariboo country, west and north of the Kootenay, has a more severe climate; but still further north lies the famous Peace River valley, partly in British Columbia and partly in Alberta, for which such great things are now being prophesied in agriculture. This region, though far north of Winnipeg, has a milder autumn and a shorter winter than Manitoba; and experts say that generally in the northern part of the province the clearing of the forests, which now prevent evaporation, will result in rendering milder the climate of this land of marsh and swamp and rigorous winter, which seems to resemble what the now progressive Germany was in the days of the Romans.

British Columbia has many rivers navigable in parts of their course, some of which, like the Columbia in the Kootenay, broaden into lakes, upon which ply quaint-looking, stern-paddle steamers drawing very little water. The Fraser, which rises in the Rocky Mountains and is navigable, though not uninterruptedly, for about six hundred miles, is the largest river, whose course is wholly within the province. It is a stream which every traveller on the Canadian Pacific Railway must remember, for the trains journey, for one hundred and thirty miles, with the rushing waters down the terrific, sharply-cut canyons, till, almost within sight of salt water, the river broadens into calm and the railway turns aside to reach Vancouver.

Far north, near Prince Rupert, the Skeena River, which is navigable for about seven months each year for two hundred miles from its mouth, enters the sea. It is the second in size of wholly British Columbian rivers, and is destined before long to become almost as well-known to travellers and tourists as the Fraser itself, for the Grand Trunk Pacific has taken advantage of the way it has cut through the mountains to gain the sea. Other notable rivers are the Thompson, the Naas and the Kootenay, within the province; and the Columbia, the Peace, the Stikine, and the Laird, which rise and flow within it for considerable distances, but pass beyond its boundaries before reaching the sea.

The rivers of British Columbia are swarming with fish, and so are the waters which wash the mainland coasts—some seven thousand miles in length, if the shores of inlets and bays are taken into account. In 1911-12 the value of the catch, amounting to over thirteen and a half million dollars, exceeded that of the preceding year by four and a half millions, and for the first time British Columbia was the leading province of the Dominion in the fisheries. She owes her supremacy in this respect to salmon, though vast numbers of halibut, herring, sturgeon and other varieties of fish are taken in her waters. Amongst these are the oolachan or candle fish, a small oily fish from which the Indians make a substitute for butter.

Much of British Columbia’s catch of herrings goes to China, and some of her sturgeon are sent, strange to say, to her great rival in the fisheries, Nova Scotia. As for her salmon, when canned it goes all over the world. Chinamen do much work in the salmon canneries and a machine recently introduced is known as “the Iron Chink,” from the fact that it does the work of many Chinamen in cleaning and cutting the fish. Lobsters are not found in British Columbian waters, but crabs and shrimps and prawns are plentiful. The Japanese do much fishing along the coasts, and from Vancouver many of their gasoline launches go out. A whaling company which uses fast steamers and machine guns has several stations on Vancouver Island; and parts of the monsters, taken chiefly for the sake of the whalebone and oil, are exported as food to Japan.

I have, however, begun to discuss the great groups of industries at the wrong end. Important and rapidly increasing as are the fisheries of this ocean-washed province, the value of their annual product is at present far surpassed by that of the mines, then of the forests, and thirdly, by that of the farms and orchards taken together.

The discovery of gold played a great part in the making of the province. In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century British Columbia was occupied only by the Indians and by the traders of the Hudson Bay Company, with posts scattered at wide intervals through the wilderness. About 1839 a few Scotch and Canadian farmers were brought out to supply the traders with some of the necessaries that had hitherto been brought round by Cape Horn from England.

Meanwhile, the United States was casting envious eyes on the country; but after noisy demands on the part of some Americans for the whole coast as far north as the Alaskan boundary, it was agreed by the Treaty of Oregon in 1846 that the 49th parallel of north latitude should be the mainland boundary, and that the whole of the island of Vancouver should remain under the British flag.

In 1849 that great island was granted to the Hudson Bay Company, on condition that they should bring in settlers. The conditions were not fulfilled, and as late as 1854 there were scarcely five hundred white people on the island, including the traders; but in 1857 it became known that gold had been discovered along some of the rivers of the mainland (New Caledonia, as it was then called), and in the following spring thousands of prospectors arrived at Victoria. The little town was soon surrounded by an encampment of rude huts and tents, and the newcomers swarmed across to the new “Eldorado” in all kinds of craft, some paying for their temerity with their lives.

The rush of gold seekers caused the government to try to open roads to the mining country, and the traveller on the railway through the Thompson and Fraser valleys catches many a glimpse of the old “Cariboo road,” sometimes clinging to the cliff as much as a thousand feet above the water. This road has been practically abandoned since the opening of the railway; but now government is again occupied with the project of a highway from Alberta to the Pacific coast.

In the first decade, after the rush to the “diggings” began, about fifty million dollars’ worth of the precious metal was obtained in the Cariboo and Cassiar country, and still gold is being obtained there by more scientific methods of working. There are also valuable deposits of silver, lead, copper, zinc, coal, building stone and brick clay, all of which are worked more or less; and the different mining camps employ a large number of men. The value of the mining output for 1912 was about thirty-two and a half million dollars.

This was followed pretty closely by the value of the lumber of the year, which equalled $28,000,000 (£5,600,000). The forest area, including that covered by small trees, has been estimated at over one hundred and eighty-two million acres. Along the coast and up the river valleys of the mainland and on Vancouver island are many magnificent trees. The most valuable commercially are Douglas fir, cypress, red cedar, white spruce and western hemlock. On the coast the trees are larger than further inland; and it is said that the climate is so favourable to their growth that they increase in size very much more rapidly than in most other parts of America. British Columbia, like other provinces, has begun to realize the immense value of its forests, and is taking steps to preserve them, but about a third of the “cut” of the Dominion comes from this province, and thousands of men find employment in the woods and the saw mills.

Not many years ago the agricultural possibilities of this region were scarcely regarded seriously, but it has a splendid home market for all the products of the farm; and last year the value of the agricultural produce (including fruit, of which British Columbia is beginning to make a specialty) was equal to more than three-quarters of the lumber output. But this is only a beginning. A recent estimate gives the area of known cultivable land at twenty-four million acres, of which about ten millions is in the Peace River country, but hardly one-eighth of this land is at present in use, and much of the interior of the country is practically unexplored. There are districts in the Kootenay, about the Okanagan lake, in the neighbourhood of New Westminster, upon Vancouver island and in some other regions, which are fairly well settled, and in these is grown a vast quantity of beautiful apples and other fruit. In fact, fruit is the greatest agricultural product of British Columbia, and last year the yield of the orchards and fruit “ranches” was estimated at $14,000,000, or about equal to that of the fisheries. This is the only farm product which at present goes out of the province; but the estimated value of cereals, beef, dairy produce and all the other miscellaneous yield of the farms accounted only for another eight million dollars. Government is making efforts in various ways to stimulate agriculture. For instance, it aids the establishment of co-operative creameries; but millions of dollars are spent annually outside the province for meat, cheese, butter, poultry, eggs and articles of food, which might well be supplied from the prolific soil of British Columbia were there only more hands to work it.

At present, however, this province is in the somewhat peculiar and unsatisfactory position of having a mere fraction of its people (one-quarter) living on the land. The population was put down in the last census year as 392,480 (of whom the males were in excess of the females by nearly one hundred and eleven thousand), and of this number the two cities of Vancouver and Victoria accounted for over one hundred and fifty thousand. Now these cities, with their suburbs, are said to have a population of two hundred thousand, or nearly half the total for the province.

Both Vancouver and Victoria are already extremely important ports, and expect much additional ocean trade when the Panama Canal is opened. The northern port of Prince Rupert is also busy, although the railway, of which it is the terminal, is not yet completed. There are many other ports and inland towns; mining, railway construction, and lumbering camps all needing supplies; and the man who understands dairying or market-gardening or fruit growing has a choice of opportunities in British Columbia.

In the Peace River district is a block of Dominion lands which may be taken up by homesteaders on the same terms as the free grants in the other western provinces. (See Appendix, pg. 297, Note B.) A strip of land twenty miles wide on each side of the Canadian Pacific Railway main line belongs to the crown, and until December, 1911, was administered by the Minister of the Interior at Ottawa, but is now under the management of the provincial government.

Provincial crown lands are offered for sale at from $5 (£1) to $10 (£2) the acre, or for lease for cutting hay or other purposes. They may be pre-empted by settlers—in which case there are conditions of improvement and residence, in addition to the payment of $1 (4s. 2d.) per acre in four equal annual instalments. Pre-emptions are limited to one hundred and sixty acres of agricultural lands, and no one may hold more than one claim at a time; nor can an alien obtain title deeds for a pre-emption; but anyone desiring full and reliable information as to how to obtain provincial land should write to the Chief Commissioner of Lands, Victoria, British Columbia.

The Canadian Pacific Railway and other companies and private persons also offer unimproved or improved agricultural lands for sale at prices ranging from $5 (£1) the acre up to $500 (£100) for irrigated land in a good situation, while bearing orchards may cost as much as from $1,000 (£200) to $12,000 (£2,400) an acre.

By clauses recently added to the land regulations of British Columbia it is provided that any self-supporting woman over eighteen years of age (except a wife living with her husband) may pre-empt one hundred and sixty acres of agricultural land on the same conditions as men; and this provision is made applicable to deserted wives, and women whose husbands have not contributed to their support for two years, as well as to spinsters and widows.

It is most important, however, that it should be understood that the agricultural lands available for pre-emption or purchase direct from the government are situated almost entirely in districts difficult of access and ill-provided with roads and bridges, whilst a considerable amount of capital is necessary for the purchase of good land in well-settled districts.

The government of British Columbia reserves one-quarter of all town sites and of lands divided into small lots (of one acre or less), and these are usually sold by public auction.

It seems very natural that along the coast and amongst the mountains the population should be gathered into centres, larger or smaller, where they can enjoy some of the comforts of civilized life unattainable by isolated settlers, and the practice certainly has its advantages with regard to social and church life, and the education of the young. In British Columbia, by the way, free government schools are established where twenty children between the ages of six and sixteen can be brought together. In 1912 there were 538 schools in operation, including twenty-three high schools. At Vancouver there is a provincial Normal School; also a number of private schools and colleges; while the Vancouver and Victoria colleges are in affiliation with McGill University, Montreal, and provision has been made for the endowment of a university of British Columbia, by the setting apart of two million acres of public lands.

Men of small capital are strongly advised to go in for “intensive” culture of a small farm, rather than to attempt to take a large piece of land or to devote themselves solely to fruit culture, for orchards in bearing are expensive, and to wait for returns till a newly-planted orchard becomes productive is also costly; but quick returns can be obtained from the keeping of poultry and pigs, and the growing of early vegetables for a town or mining camp.

Small holdings simplify the labour problem, which is acute in British Columbia, and complicated by the difficulties attendant on Oriental labour. This is much employed, in spite of the feeling that, for the sake of Canada’s future, the unrestricted admission of Orientals would be a grave mistake. That is a question, however, which it does not belong to the purpose of this book to discuss.