SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 19, 7 May 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

VIII.—VANCOUVER, B.C.

By the Editor,

Two weeks ago I told how the first Vancouver—Vancouver of the weather-board stores, the slab huts, and the wooden shacks or shanties— arose among the cedars and the pines as the western terminus of the CanadianPacific Railway. Slabs, studs, and weather-boards were ripped from the freshly-felled trees and placed in hot haste— clammy with bleeding sap— in the rude dwellings that constituted the new city. And thus the Vancouver of the wooden age grew up as swiftly as Jack's beanstalk—a city of fresh green timber walls and iron and shingle roofs in a wilderness of massive stumps that studded the ground like rugged headstones. It arose in the Canadian spring of 3 886, when May had come ' To make The paths of June more beautiful.' humming tune of the flying circular saws a month humming tune of the flying circular saws two months later, when, one warm day in June, a fire started in the forest close by It tore through the trees like a hunted elephant, pursued by a swift-footed wind, and tiod out Vancouver of the wooden age from the lace of the earth. One building alone was spaied. It still stands— the sohtaiy relic of the city's early da.vs. This is the cus- ■ tomary evolution of towrs and cities m the north-west i.nd west of Canada and the United States r J hey never rise to a high order of commercial importance till they have been burned down ' We Pass Through Flames to brick, and mortar,' said a Vancouver pioneer to me, as he pointed out the track of that locally historic fire on our way by ti oily-car to New Westminster. Fire may be described as the measles ol western citvhood. The fortunate placis get it over early in life, and, therefore, lightly It. comes upon others, as it came upon Chicago, when they aie full grown, and it has wider room and veige for destiuction and mote to k'ed and i age upon. Somebody has remaiked that the wounds of fire are hard to heal Vancouver, howe\er, recoveied fast. Its citi/ons pulhd of! their coats— if they happened to have saved them from the fames— and set to work to raise up a new and finer Vancouver upon the ashes of the old. Its em bets wcvq still smouldei ing- and the smoke-haze lingering in the foiest thickets when gieat train-loads of building materials v\eie pulling westwaid from Ontario on the Canadian I'acilic Company's freight cars, and on the sites of the modest and has-tily-raised structures ol the buined-down city there rapidly i osc tall and solid buildings in iron and brick and stone In th<> meantime the city fathers mot and tiansacted public business in a tent, rude shanties were imptovised, and auctioneers, storekeepers, and boarding-house proprietors transleired themselves to mipiovised homes in gteat hollow trees, the gaping stumps of some of which are still to lie) set n, like decayed molais, m the side streets and outer areas of Vancouver r l he Canadian Pacific Company pouted money freely into the place , the fine fienzy of A Building- Boom set its compelling gup upon the rising city : its boulevatds and streets fast took shape and comeliness , and in four yearb it had tl number ol thot oughkues as broad as tnose ol" Melbourne, stately banks and other edifices in

Kranite and brick, and a population of some 16,000 souls. At the time of my visit, a little over twelve months ago, the number of its inhabitants must have been close on 30,000. It would be difficult to find anything more lovely than the situation . and setting of Vancouver. Like Queenstown, the city sits -' Leaning its back against the hills And bathing its feet in the ocean ' The city front faces Burrard Inlet, which is a long, deep fiord, shaped like a boomerang, and penetrating the tall Cascade Mountains for & distance of over three score miles from the Straits of Georgia — ' the Mediterranean of the West.' The city bestrides the refund saddle-back of a long peninsula roughly shaped like the sole of a boot. On the wider part — which is joined to the mainland by a narrow neck — Vancouver Bits. The greater part of it is on the northern slope, which is lapped by the waters of Burrard's Inlet. But it also scrambles across to English Bay, a favorite and fast-growing bathing resort, which you can reach in fifteen minutes by the electric street cars. The heel, or seaward bulb of the peninsula on which Vancouver is built, is occupied by the beautiful bit of primeval forest known as Stanley Park, lit is nine or ten miles round, and, like the town and city ' belts ' in New Zealand, is preserved in its native state, but pierced in various directions by broad carriage ways and shady forest tracks that lead to the taller trees. Here you can see in all their massive splendor the „. Giant Trees of British Columbia They do not attain the dizzy heights that are reached by the stately sequoias of tho Yosemite Valley, which are out-topped only by the Australian giant gumtrees that, at Mount Baw-baw and tho Cape Otway Ranges, have soared to an elevation of 415 to 471 feet. But the ' brotherhood of venerable trees ' in Stanley Park are, nevertheless, in good sooth, sturdy specimens of the forest growths of a sturdy youngland. One cedar there has the portly girth of fifty-six feet abo\e the roots. Several spiuces, Pouglas firs, etc., measure forty feet round ; trees with a circumference of twenty to thirty feet around the boll are fairly common. The taller ones rise as straight as a Doric column from two hundred to three hundred feet. The lesser trees of the kind in the province are in demand for the masts of sailing \essels. Under a rocky bluff, not far from a group of soaring cedars, lies the wreck of the ' Beaver ' : a histouc little ciaft, for it waltzed over the waves of Cape Horn some sixty yeais ago and was tho first steamer that ever cut a furrow in the waters of the Pacific. >H Is now gored by the rocks, is going to pieces, and lies a sheer hulk, like poor Tom Bowling. In Stanley Park, and, generally, in tho forests of British Columbia and the Rockies, you miss the many tints that make the Now Zealand bush a ' Crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, Of every hue from wan declining green To sooty dark.' Its color is almost as monotonous as that ofl tho Australian forest : the sombre green of pine and cedar and fir, relieved by the bright emerald of poplars and maples that are few and far between, and by a close and matted undergrowth of tall mountain fern, Juniper, lianas, flowering currant, n creeping plant known locally as the blackbetry (but different from the thorny fruitbearer of that name with which we are so familiar), and other trailing and climbing plants that are reminiscent of the undergrowth that one sees in the forests of Gippsland,,.Tasmania, and New Zealand. One misses, too, tho loud bird-talk of the open Australian woodlands and the more subdued whispering notes which befit the dim, religious light that penetrates the Jungle undergrowth of clematis and fuschia and lawyer-vine in tho forests of New Zealand The West Canadian forests are almost as voiceless as net and snore and shotgun have left tho thickets of tho French Pyrenees. When the wind is down and the tree-tops sleep and the leaves of the poplar cease to dance, a solemn stillness pervades the forestaisles, and there falls upon the soul a sense of the majesty and grandeur of God's created things that soothes the mind and raises it to the contemplation of higher things. Vancouver spreads out over several gentle slopes. They face towards various points of the compass, and afford diverse and Exquisite Pictures of mountain, forest, and inland sea. Northward, across Burrard Inlet, the Cascade Ranges rise, heavily-wooded below, snow-tipped and cone-shaped above, to heights of more than 9000 feet. East : still they run in an endless chain of white-caps, like a frozen sea with its tossing waves lifted on high. South-east : they are still

there, and above the wild confusion of their densely crowded summits rises Mount Baker. It seems to be peering down at Vancouver over the shoulders of the neighboring hills. Jn reality, it is over seventy miles away, in the Washington territory, and its blunt, arrowhead cone pierces the sky-line at an elevation of 10,700 feet. South and south-west : mountains and ever more mountains— the white-headed legions of the Olympian Range. Westward : mountains again. These are the sheltering highlands of Vancouver Jsland, which forms a gigantic breakwater and shoulders off the long Pacific swells from the young city to which nature has been so prodigal of gifts. Under those western mountains across the Strait, and almost opposite Vancouver, a faint and distant smudge of smoke indicates the site of the great coal-mines of Nanaimo. It is the only place on the Pacific coast where this precious fuel is found in great quantities and of good quality from Cape Horn to Puget Sound. Both for purposes of commerce and defence, Vancouver Island is a treasure well worth guarding at the western gate of the King's Great Highway to China and Japan. The many British Columbians with whom I conversed are proud of their province, and in their mind's eye its future is circled round about with a rose-tinted halo. Vancouver, for instance, is built with an eye to vast further expansion. Like Melbourne, it is laid out on generous lines. It has broad streets, city-blocks laid out on the chess-board pattern, handsome and solidly-built banks, offices, stores, hotels, and public buildings. From the electroplated taps in your bed-room there flows a stream of sparkling mountain water that has come in great mains across Burrard Inlet from an inexhaustible river supply in a steep ravine in the mountains beyond. In the early forties, the Pasha of Belgrade, in Kinglake's ' Eothen,' could not find words to adequately voice his astonishment at the wonders wrought by the steam-engine on Biitish commerce. He could merely repeat as a sort of a formula learned by rote : ' Whirr ! Whirr ! all by wheels ! Whizz ! whizz ! all by steam !* But a new giant has been set the work since the days of Kinglake's droll interview with the Turkish Pasha. Electric Power is fast invading the realm long consecrate to steam, and finding ever and ever more fresh fields for its expansive and mysterious energies. In Australia, electricity as a source of light and heat and power is barely in its infancy. It is even more neglected in New Zealand, a land of mountain lakes and bountifail rhers and tumbling waterfalls sufficient to supply electric energy for a continent. Even a casual visit to Victoria and Vancouver, to the mining towns of British Columbia, to Niagara, or to any Canadian or American city, would suffice to show to the most superficial observer from these countries that so far as applied electric science is concerned, we are almost as far behind our northern trans-Pacific kith and kin as Turkey of the days of the wondering old Pasha of Belgrade was behind the England of the early forties in the use of steam. Young Vancouver, for instance, has a splendid service of up-to-date electric street cars (furnished with electric light, electric signal bells, etc.), electric lighting on a generous scale, two or three daily papers printed by electric pow.er, factories, etc, worked by electricity, and a busy and far-reaching telephone exchange. On the other hand, our Canadian and American cousins have much to learn from us in the matter oi street and road construction. No city in Australasia would, for instance, tolerate for four-and-twenty hours the 'uneven, rutty, and slushy condition of the sett^paved streets in some of the most crowded business, quarters of Chicago and New York. In Vancouver the principal thoroughfaies are well paved. In others a streak of macadamised wheel-track runs down between two line 9 of green sward. In the rest, the surface for wheel-traffic is the virgin sod — a pleasant, springy carpet in summer and autumn ; a.v oceanic quagmire when winter brings its weeping skies over Vancouver. For mud is cheap and plentiful in and around Vancouver. In damp weather it attaches itself, like a homeless cur, to anyone that makies overtures to it ; and it possesses the clinging quality of the dark surface-mud of Winnipeg, which curls around your boot-uppers like the tip of a black ostrich-plume. But timber is also happily cheap and abundant at Vancouver. In Australia and New Zealand wo moke the roadway first ; the finished sidewalk is a municipal afterthought, In Canada, The Side-walk is the first consideration ; the street formation comes at last, after, perhaps, many years have passed away. All, or nearly all, the side-walks of Vancouver, as of Victoria, 8.C., are wooden. They run through every street,

and are built on little blocks a few inches above the surface of the ground. There are scores of miles of them as well as some odd hundreds of wooden crossings' Timber still remains the principal building material for the neat and handsome homes in the outskirts of the city. The three finest buildings in Vancouver are the tall and finely situated Church of the Holy Rosary— the city's most striking architectural landmark— the Canadian Pacific Railway Depot, and the Canadian I'uliuc Company's Hotel, which we made our tempoiary headquarters. It is, I think, larger than any hotel in Australasia, and is said to be the best in Canada west of Montreal. The Canadian Pacific Railway— lamiliarly known all over Canada as ' the C P.R.'— created Vancouver. It still remains Vancouver's tutelary deity. ' Everything in Vancouver,' says Douglas Sladen, ' "is C.P.R., from the big hotel downwards. When we landed at Vancouver by a coasting steamer from San Francisco, on our return flroni Japan, an American working man landed likewise. The fiist thing he did, being accustomed to ruling a great country, was to inquire of a man working on the wharf : " What's the Government heie ?' ' "The C.r.R.'s the Government here,' was the sage reply and virtual truth.'