When Monsieur Labori, a distinguished visitor from Paris, the defender of Zola and Dreyfus, by the way, was in Vancouver some years ago, he was struck by the curious effect which the mere situation of the city produces. “Next to Paris,” he said, “I am ready to give my affection and my wonder to this strange young Colossus on the shores of Burrard Inlet. Wonderful transformation will take place here, for the destiny of the world must lie in the hands of those on the Pacific Coast, where the civilization of the Occident will have to be subjected to the survival test of the ancient civilization of the Orient.”
The approach to Vancouver from the East is startlingly dramatic. You come down to the coast through a great day and night of mountains—the Rockies, brown and terrible, and the green Selkirks. Then through crowded gorges and beside swift rivers until the hand of the sea, felt from far off, seems to reach out and soften the air; the altitudes melt away, and the darkness falls. At dawning there is flat country with a glimpse of wider, tidal rivers, and presently the guard [page 209] calls “Vancouver” and the train runs into a splendid modern station.
If you are fortunate you may get your first impressions from some place high enough to overlook the harbour, which the opening of the Panama Canal has made one of the world ports for the export of grain. You will see the masts and funnels of almost every kind of sea-faring vessel, and reaching out farther than the eye can vision you will feel the East, to which so much of this traffic is bound.
Vancouver is too young to possess much definite history beside the stories of the lumber camps, before the year 1886, when the first wooden shacks emerged out of the enormous trees of the virgin forest.
The decade following saw the first railway train arrive from the East, the first C.P.R. steamship anchored in port, the Klondike boom, and the great mining industries of British Columbia well under way. Then the wooden houses were replaced by “solid brick,” those in turn giving way to the more fashionable stone or plaster and clapboard. Already there was the older settlement of Victoria, over on Vancouver Island, to set an example in architecture, and Vancouver, blessed or cursed as may be by cheap-priced Oriental labour, began to lay out good streets and acquire “residences.” In an incredibly short time it mounted to [page 210] Shaughnessy Heights, with its fine modern houses and beautiful gardens.
Vancouver is by far the most fascinating new city that I have ever known. There is a freshness and charm about it that comes from something more than sea air or the beauty of mountains, that even its recent commercial prosperity has failed to impair.
Of history so little—of tradition so much. But that the most romantic of all, Indian tradition. For the legends of Vancouver relate to time uncounted by any calendar, when the Pacific Coast, still unknown to white peoples, was ruled by a copper-coloured race.
In 1910, the last of the great chiefs of the Squamish tribes, Chief Capilano, died in Vancouver. But not before he had given to a sympathetic interpreter fabled stories of the coast, as fascinating as any in the traditions of Eastern and European countries. At the Court of King Edward and Queen Alexandra he met the Canadian poet of Indian ancestry, Pauline Johnson, and it was a delight to the old chief to be greeted in the Chinook, his native tongue. The friendship then formed continued, when a few years later Miss Johnson went to live in Vancouver. Capilano gave into her keeping some of the sacred legends of his tribe, the writing of which she completed shortly before her own death. Now, in permanent book form [page 211] live these early-world stories, precious to Canadians because they symbolize not only landmarks but the qualities that make and keep a country heroic.
Twin mountain peaks that rise over the city and guard the harbour were named by early residents of [page 212] Vancouver after Landseer’s stone lions in Trafalgar Square. But they are known as the Two Sisters to the Indians, who centuries before made them the symbols of Peace and Brotherhood. The story goes that a Great Tyee was at war with the Upper Coast Indians. Pledged, as was the custom, to celebrate the coming into womanhood of his two beautiful daughters, he decided that war must cease for the moment. Then came to him to ask the old favour of women—a peaceful feast, a feast in honour of joy, an interlude of war to which everyone, even the enemy, might be invited. Because he loved them the Great Tyee listened, and ordered his tribemen to build fires of welcome at sunset. And when the northern tribes got this invitation they flocked down the coast and brought their women and their children and filled the canoes with game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles and wonderful woven blankets as gifts to the Great Tyee. He in turn gave such a potlatch “that nothing in tradition can vie with it.” The hostile war songs ceased, and in their places were heard the soft shuffle of dancing feet and the singing voices of women.
“I will make these young-eyed maidens immortal,” said the Sagalie Tyee. And he lifted the chief’s two daughters and set them forever in a high place, for they [page 213] had borne two offspring—Peace and Brotherhood—each of which is now a Great Tyee guarding the welfare of the Pacific Coast.
The familiar landmark, Siwash Rock, near which Pauline Johnson is buried, looms up at the entrance to the Narrows, a symmetrical column of solid, gray stone with the crest of a small green tree nodding over its brow. There is no similar formation anywhere about, for it stands straight like a man.
“It is a man,” says Capilano, “a warrior who fought for everything that is noble.” And he tells of a young chief who defied the gods and swam across the course of their Great Canoe and would not leave it even at their command, for the sake of his coming child, that tribal law of vicarious purity might be obeyed. As he touched land he was immortalized in stone as a saviour of the race.
So with the Cathedral Trees in Stanley Park, that group of some half dozen giants unique among great Douglas Firs. No one can stand close to them without feeling their protective power. The Coast Indians say that they harbour human souls: great beneficent persons chosen to protect humanity from a secret influence that lies somewhere in the depths of the Park. This is an evil “lure,” the condemned soul of a witch woman whom the Saglie Tyee (the great God) punished, [page 214] turning her into a bare, white stone shunned by moss and vine and lichen. Pauline Johnson says, “Nothing in this nor yet the next world would tempt a Coast Indian into the compact centres of the wild portions of the park where lies the “lure” they all believe in, for there is not a tribe in the entire district that does not know of this strange legend. No one will volunteer to be your guide, for having once come within the circle of the “lure” it is a human impossibility to leave it. Your will-power is dwarfed, your intelligence blighted, your feet will refuse to lead you out by a straight trail, you will circle, circle for evermore about this magnet, for if death kindly comes to your aid your immortal spirit will go on in that endless circling that will bar it from entering the Happy Hunting Grounds.”
These things lie behind the history of Vancouver and follow you to-day. One evening, after hours in the Capilano Canyon, we found ourselves on a melancholy little street of the Indian village at its foot. A twilight woven of violet and grey was drifting over the Inlet, and this might have been a street of the Lost Tribes. There was an air of futitlity about it all, as though nothing could stay the course of change even in this primitive little settlement of a disappearing people. I remember one old woman who was limping [page 215] about in the twilight and seemed to follow us like an entreating cry.
Much of modern Vancouver spends its summer evenings by English Bay, enjoying the lovely colours of the sunset. Here you see all sorts and conditions of men and women, from ’Arry and ’Arriet to the American tourist or the turbaned Moor. In a place where East is found to mingle with West in the long run the element of romance is never lacking, yet strangely enough it remains largely unrecorded. There are those who have come to the farthest West to make money and have a good time, and there are others who have come to make money and remain English. The first are progressive, the second are picturesque and they make a strange combination. In the golf clubs you meet Vancouver at its favourite sport.
The eastern phase of western life is interesting if controversial. I should like to have seen Vancouver before pigtails were taboo and when there was a real Chinatown. What is left, and that is very little, is amusing. Five minutes from the business centre will bring you into a section of small streets, sparsely enough peopled in the evening when a Chinaman plays Fan-Tan with due secrecy. We went in and out of dingy little shops where stoical merchants had to be induced to produce hidden treasures and where the [page 216] odours were not those of Araby. As we came out of one shop there was a thin far-off sound as if some ancient viol were being carelessly tuned. It drew us near an open door which chanced to be that of a Chinese theatre. There we saw a part of an act of one of the interminable Chinese plays done by an excellent company.
Yachting about Vancouver is a constant pleasure. As we go south we see the profile of Siwash Rock at the end of the wooded peninsula that is Stanley Park. To the north the shore line of West Vancouver and the village of Caulfields. Around Point Atkinson you enter Howe Sound, one of the loveliest places in the world, where are bays and islands and always the distant view of mountains. These mountains of Vancouver are sometimes southern in warmth of colour, though often after a rain they hold great armfuls of wisp-like clouds against their somber breasts. But always they are a fulfillment of some beauty, always they hold surprise.
On account of the great natural magnificence of her setting and the soft sea airs that surround her, airs more equable than those of England, there is a sort of late-blooming rose quality about the whole place that should make a natural setting for work that above all thing requires leisure. And Vancouver is and will [page 217] more and more be sought by artists, musicians and writers. Amongst the latter is one who will always be remembered for the great beauty of her work, Marjorie Pickthall, the exquisite lyrist who lived on the coast for several years and whose death occurred in 1922 in Vancouver. Julia Henshaw, Mrs. Lefevre, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Lionel Haweis, Elspeth Honeyman, Robert Allison Hood and Wilson MacDonald are only a few of the well-known writers who have come under the spell of Vancouver.
Vancouver is now the third largest city in Canada. It is a sea port whose future importance can hardly be estimated. But it is besides all this magic a city. At a turn of the busiest streets you will meet the mountains and the sea, half hidden in misty rain or soft and pure in the sunlight. And commerce may come or go but glamour will remain, and adventure, and poetry that sails strange seas. [page 218] |
