A Motor Tour Through Canada

Date Due fin T Af M il WPjri2no7 m^\ gm Ttwr "• - - >^ Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2009 with funding from Ontario Council of University Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/motortourthroughOOwilb A MOTOR TOUR THROUGH CANADA THE BIG TIMHEKS HAVE GRUDGES AGAINST MEN AND TURN THEM INTO GNOMES A MOTOR TOUR THROUGH CANADA By THOMAS W. WILBY WITH 31 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO : BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXIV FC 74 V56 1914 SCOTT WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLBS TO THE COMPANION OP UNFORGETTABLE MOTOR JOURNEYINGS THROUGH AMERICAN DESERT AND WILDERNESS MY WIFE INTRODUCTION MAETERLINCK'S essay upon riding in a motor-car is a delightful proof that mechanical inventions do not destroy adventure and romance. But the tonneau is no place for a philosopher bent on abstract mental speculations, or indeed for anything else, should there happen to be no road. When I set out to see Canada from the Tonneau, by motoring from Halifax to Victoria, I had grave doubts of ever being able to make my destination. People declared that there was no continuous road across the country, and that the broken chain of highways which was to be my medium of progression had so much of the element of chance and vagueness and uncertainty, so much of the promise of adventure and endemic primitiveness, that I should be compelled to include it also in my " discoveries." Canada, it was naively suggested, might best be seen by suspending my machine from a balloon ^ and turning it into a kind of amphibious creature, which at times could crawl on the earth and at others fly in the air or swim in the lakes and rivers. A study of the map, however, brought me a certain measure of comfort. The choice of route ! vHi INTRODUCTION , was simplicity itself. There was only one way * across. I could motor from Halifax to St. John, N.B., then steer due north for the St. Lawrence at Riviere du Loup, and follow that stately stream to Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa. Continuing westward, my route would bring me to North Bay and Sudbury in Ontario, and thence in a north-westerly direction by the shores of Lake Superior to Port Arthur. By following the line of the Canadian-Pacific Railway, 1 should eventually reach "Winnipeg vid Kenora, on the northern shores of the Lake of the Woods, and I could then continue my journey across the prairies in a more or less direct line to the Crow's Nest Pass, at the entrance of the Rockies, by way of Brandon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Macleod. After that, all that was necessary was to inquire my way to Vancouver of the first man I met This plan successfully carried out, I might modestly claim the possible distinction of being the first rash spirit to cross Canada by motor-car, " the first to penetrate the eternal Rockies, the first to break away from the sacred precedent of coolly and superciliously passing an entire country in critical review from the luxurious chair of a railroad observation car. But Canadians asked me quizzically how I in- tended to get past Lake Superior. The southern shore was American territory, the northern shore a wilderness with only one or two straggling railway settlements. All around and beyond was a path- less region of forest, rock and swamp (muskeg). Far to the north of the lake was the great Clay — INTRODUCTION ix Belt, a timbered, unsettled, and roadless territory- bounded by the forbidding waters of Hudson Bay and threaded only by the unfinished Grand Trunk Railway. Superior, the lake of legend and mystery, edging the immutable wilderness, had defied almost all human invasion of her northern shore, ever since the White Man had dispossessed the Red. The canoe, the steamship, the railroad these had been the sole instruments to men's hands by which to reach the Empire of the Setting Sun. But still the East and West were as far asunder as the Poles, still the wilderness made a mockery of the country's boasted unity and formed a fatal weakness in her political and \/ social evolution. What an impression of remoteness, of " lost- ness " and " neverness " that separation of East and West conveyed ! Then the Rockies ! How, they asked, was I going to surmount them } No wheeled vehicle had successfully challenged from the road or trail the wall of granite and the eternal snows which I should encounter on leaving the level of the western plains. When all these Canadian motor-travel conditions had been duly reviewed, it was clear that touring in Canada was in its infancy ; that Canadians knew very little about their country from the road. Canada, indeed, was apparently a unit only by the good-natured tolerance of the railroad, having none of that true cohesion of human agglomeration which the existence of a ,/ network of continuous and perfected highways a 2 X INTRODUCTION alone can impart. East and West were brought precariously together at their inner borders by an intervening No-Man's Land for which nobody had much use—by a barren waste where Canada's pulsating heart should be. But Canada was new to me—an unopened book which, owing to my familiarity with the United States, combined with the charm of novelty the force of contrast. The anticipated discomforts were more than outweighed by the certain expectation of the Lure of the Open amid unfamiliar things and the play of spiritual laws and forces in the making of a people with whom I claimed kinship. It must be confessed that on the Canadian road the car is not yet a welcome dictator. It has not yet transformed the life of the country- side nor shown potency to change regions primitive and somnolent into things cosmopolitan and wide- awake. It has not yet transformed the village blacksmith's into a garage and repair shop, nor turned the rural grocery store into a motor-fuel emporium. It has not made over the ingenuous country inn or small, comfortless hotel, putting a model bath-room and an ideal sanitary bedroom here, and a neat, willing waitress and an exemplary meal there. Instead, the lesser caravanserai is often obtrusively dominated by the untidy loafer, the badly cooked meal and the indifferent service upstairs and down, the ill-lighted, cheerless entrance, the crowded, rusty stove with its shift- less, human types, the rough and tumble writing- desk, and the undue prominence of uncouth elements, compared with which the pleasures of INTRODUCTION xi the camp fire would be infinitely preferable to the tourist of sorts. The Canadian road, too, is still generally uncharted and unsignposted— negative conditions suggesting that the touring automobile continues to rank in some quarters as one of those infernal " contraptions " imbued with the spirit of the seven devils of perversity which must be stolidly endured but cordially ignored. In one province the rule of the road is to the right, in another to the left, and there is no talk of bringing about uniformity. For the greater part of his trans-continental journeyings, the motorist will find himself on roads innocent of fellow-tourists, and deserted of automobilists except farmers, commercial travellers, and small tradesmen, who have accepted the motor-car as an every-day necessity. But he will be welcome wherever he goes, and be he a true motorist, he will find the battering ordeal of every kind of road more than compensated by the fascination of annihilating illimitable spaces of a vast continent. Here touring takes on that larger significance arising from the ability to motor in one direction for thousands of miles through a country possessing a common language, matchless scenery and immunity from customs boundaries and offering a study of ever-changing living conditions and habits. It has become a habit of mind both with the Canadian and the foreigner to regard Canadian roads as bad as public interest in them is indifferent. That generalisations of this kind may often prove an injustice, a tour of forty-two xii INTRODUCTION hundred miles across Canada without any serious mishap should sufficiently demonstrate. Under- taken primarily with the object of seeing as much of Canada from the tonneau as could be com- pressed into the limited space of about two months, it is hoped that the rough notes of the tour here set down will not only aid intending motorists in making their plans for touring Canada, but will be instrumental in calling public attention to the great need of Canada to-day—a Trans-Canadian Highway. Once completed, this will link the con- fusing trails of the pathfinder and the pioneer in the centre of the country with the excellent scenic roads of the Maritime Provinces on the one hand, and the routes threading the lake and river valleys of British Columbia on the other. But it will do more. It will stimulate good road building throughout the country by the mere force of example. It will form, too, a highway not only of vital importance to Canada, but to the whole of the British Empire. The task of building this perfect highway is a v/ great, a stupendous one. It will be the longest unbroken road in the world. It will literally transform a country whose territorial extent is a series of thinly populated empires. But Canada, young, virile, prosperous, rising steadfastly and confidently to her not distant zenith, will not fail, I believe, to initiate a sound policy of Governmental supervision of this great trunk road from east to west.

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