At the End of the Line

I

THERE has always been a seductive magic to me in the railway track. As a child I would follow those long, remotely-converging lines of steel, in the hope of finding at last the meeting-point of the infinitely elongated V; and the fact that not even my occasional rides on the train ever brought me to it, and that from the rear of an observation-car the meeting-point of the rails seemed somehow to have slipped in behind us without our passing over it, — this came to be classed with the end of the rainbow as a part of the natural magic of which the queer world seemed so full. And since I have grown to man’s estate, the track has still lured me with its uncompromising directness in the face of the deviousness of nature, and with the sense of the indestructibility of the bond by which the unceasing steel links settlement and distant settlement together.

To my earlier and in a sense to my later experience, as well, the most impressive fact of the railroad line was that it never stopped. Seem to converge it might, but it never stopped. Dweller as I was, sometimes in small towns and sometimes in the country, the train seemed to thunder down that infinite parallel and pause for a moment beside the little station and the telegraphtower and the water-tank, only to go on to infinity again. And this sense, as it were, of the both-way infinity of the line came to be not only its most impressive, but also its most characteristic and inalienable, quality.

And then suddenly, not long ago, all theoldanchors of experience were lifted or broken, and the train bore me out of my familiar haunts, out of my native country, over the Canadian border, and ever westward and northward on and on to a point whither the insatiable adventure-lust of man had pushed the frontier of civilization. And there the train stopped and I got out. In sooth, there was nothing else to do. It was the end of the line.

Only gradually did the full significance of this fact dawn upon me. At first, life was blurred with detail. I saw too much to see anything. But slowly, as the process of adjustment went on, it became clear that the key to the new life on which I had entered, the explanation of this sense of difference which time and experience were proving powerless to alleviate, lay in the fact that we were all living and working and thinking and feeling at the end of the line. This realization came to me first through the perception that the arrival and the departure of trains was not an incident. It was an event. The old boyhood lure of the train returned; but now it was not due to the dim consciousness of a both-way infinity,—

Rather had I reached a spot where the line had at once its end and its beginning. When the train came in and stopped with the finality which was at first so strange to me, I could see with the eye of recollection what the disembarking passengers had just been through— the day after day of journey over the otherwise trackless prairie, the semioccasional stop at a point where a great grain-elevator and a cluster of houses marked the nucleus of settlement, the glimpse now and then of the red coat of a Royal Northwest Mounted Policeman as he paced his hundred-mile ‘beat.’ I could recall too the thrill of a certain moment when the train was passing a lonely cabin on the prairie, and the denizen of the little cabin had stepped to his door and waved to the passing train — had waved not with the turn of the wrist to which I was accustomed, but with a long, slow sweep of the full arm which was instinct with the majesty of the limitless silent prairie round about him. These things the new arrivals too had seen. They too were not the casual traffickersof some near-by station, but, like me, had sustained the unremitting journey of many days to reach the strange new life where the train came to a stop.

And so, too, with the starting of the train. These men who swung aboard at the warning of the whistle, to a chorus of farewells from those who knew them, and from those who, knowing them not, yet wished them bon voyage on their long journey — these men were to view the trackless prairie for many days, until at last the unending rails would bear them into a world becoming ever less spacious and more crowded, — would bear them on and on until they were lost somewhere in the swarming welter of the East. But the train, ah, the train would never stop.

And thus, as I have said, it came to me out of these daily arrivals and departures, these events of the train which, however repeated, never lost their significance, that the key to this new life lay in the fact that it was at the end of the line. Everywhere in the day’s work and in the day’s play, at the desk, in the shop, in the countinghouse, on the farm, one felt the underlying consciousness that routine, tradition, the treadmill of blind habit, lay back there in a country where the rails had already past. Back there, life was an accomplished fact, a finished machine into which you must be content to fit as a cog into its groove. But here life was in the making, still to be hammered into shape and use. And you were not merely a cog. Instead, you wielded the hammer. And so you bared your arms with a thrill, and struck and struck, — blunderingly it may be, fruitlessly sometimes it seemed, but with a perseverance and a strength born of the feeling that you were in at the making of life, and that, in the casting off of the old and the shaping of the new, you had found yourself.

II

But if the life lived here has a deeper significance, it is not wanting either in picturesque details; and these picturesque details, again, are implicit in the fact that here the railway ends. The magic of civilization which flows along these threads of steel has erected, with almost the abruptness of an Aladdin palace, a rich and thriving city. On one side of the mighty river which rolls down from the Rocky Mountains is rising a great structure of granite and marble, which will house the legislative activities of the province. On the other side of the river, the ground is being broken for a splendid group of buildings which will be the home of the Provincial University. Over the bridges which span the stream ply the trolley-cars; the business streets are alive with commerce, and the residence sections of the twin-cities blossom with well-built dwellings. Law and order, wisdom and culture, industry and finance, — these are the products of civilization, these are the result of the magic which flows along the lines of steel.

But cheek-by-jowl with these evidences of a highly developed life are evidences of the primitive world on the edge of which we dwell. The developed life is here because the railroad comes here. The primitive life is here because the railroad stops here. The one has taken the other by surprise.

This juxtaposition of extremes, this sense of contrast, finds its most effective symbol in a long low structure of whitewashed logs within a few rods of the great Parliament building. The rambling two-story log hut is the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort. Twenty-odd years ago, it shared with other western posts the shock of Riel’s Rebellion, and the bullets of even more recent Indian forays are still imbedded in its walls. But now the high stockade which once surrounded it has been torn down, the old fort is tenantless, and, in the great Parliament building which is rising beside it, the quondam guardians of a frontier post are soon to be solving the legislative problems of a complex civilization.

There are other such material contrasts also: the wretched little shack wherein ‘school kept’ a few years ago, is only a ten-minutes’ walk from the site of the Provincial University; the Edmonton City Club, with its elaborate building and all the appointments of club luxury, crowns a hill on the slopeof which burrows a primitive dugout with its crude roof half-earthed in the hillside; and tents, the mushroom growth of a night, are interspersed on the residence-streets with houses whose graceful proportions are a credit to the local architects. Some of the tents too are enriched with fine furnishings; while others, although the flimsy walls must bear the fifty-degrees-below of this far northern winter, lack even the bare necessaries of decent comfort. And as if purposely to heighten the contrasts, a few of these primitive dwellings display the ‘shingle’ of a manicurist or a masseuse.

Equally replete with contrasts is the passing throng on the streets. Englishmen, Scotchmen, Frenchmen, Americans, of cosmopolitan experience and of cosmopolitan garb, rub shoulders with the ‘silent smoky Indian.’ Not infrequently, indeed, the contrast of costume is even more sharply drawn, when in the bitter winter the ‘tailormade’ man follows the example of his copper brother and dons the warm moccasin instead of the unyielding and unprotecting shoe of civilization. The trap drawn by the high-stepping hackney crowds the primitive ox-cart on the thoroughfares. Within the department stores, with their rich and varied equipment, the woman of unmistakable ton and social background shops side by side with the Indian squaw and the swarthy half-breed woman of the prairies. The Indian leaves his ox-cart to take his first ride on a trolley-car; and the immigrant, bringing his numerous family into the same conveyance, shrewdly essays a ‘dicker’ with the conductor for wholesale rates on his large consignment of passengers.

It was on the very trolley-ride on which I witnessed this futile effort at striking a bargain, that I saw an even more typical instance of the extremes which meet at the end of the line. A rough, unkempt, and — frankly — rather malodorous person, whose speech betrayed the recency of his transplanting from the central European ‘mother-country,’ handed me an envelope, and asked me to direct him to the address upon it. I recognized the address at once as the residence of a man of culture whose daughter had just taken her degree at an eastern college. The immigrant, it appeared, had recently been appointed a ‘ school trustee ’ of the district in which he lived. The daughter of the gentleman whose address was on the letter was in search of local experience as a public-school teacher. She had answered an advertisement from this district; and in response this uncouth trustee had journeyed to the city to inspect the applicant. The young lady, I knew, was shy, refined, totally inexperienced in ‘roughing it.’ What an experience was in store for her! Difficult — but how salutary it might be for both parties to the compact!

III

It is such incidents as these that keep one constantly reminded of the fact that this is the end of the line. But far more stimulating to the imagination, if less a matter of everyday experience, are the occasional reminders that, beyond this point where the line ends, stretch the ‘silent places,’ the great, dim, mysterious terra incognita of the Farther North. Turn to the maps, even the most recent ones, of the Province of Alberta, and compare the wealth of detail concerning the country over which the steel stretches, with the meagre information beyond the point where the steel ends. What a sense of unfathomed mystery, of unplumbed depths, of unmounted heights, in this Northland! Less and less grow the records as your finger follows the broad band of the province northward. And when you reach its northern boundary, you find yourself on the edge of a country in which facts vanish altogether, and uncertainty wavers to an interrogation-point.

Does it not give you a vivid sense of ‘the little done, the undone vast,’ to learn that our knowledge to-day of the great tract lying between Great Slave Lake (just north of Alberta) and Dubawnt Lake, far, far to the eastward, is gained from the recorded wanderings of an eighteenth-century explorer, Samuel Hearne, — his casual jottings, — and nothing else? And to be here at the end of the line is to be in some sense a sharer in this mystery, this lure of the unknown.

For here, as in the past, still come the swarthy trappers with their season’s gleanings, every pelt an item in the record of hardship and adventure. Pro pelle cutem reads the stern motto on the coat of arms of the Hudson’s Bay Company; and all the willingness of the hardy adventurer to barter comfort and safety, and life itself, for the priceless fur is suggested in that pregnant phrase. Here they come, these quiet heroes of the wild, here to the end of the line. And from here, too, set out the men who have hearkened to

And listening to the Everlasting Whisper, they go to explore the Unknown for the pure joy of discovery.

From here, too, go the mails for the remote posts and forts in the Farther North — to the nearer ones as often as every few weeks, but to the farther ones, only twice a year; and these goings if they are a mere incident to the careless sojourner at the end of the line, are surely an epoch to him who can see in spirit the eager hearts in those distant lonely posts.

From here, too, in the feverish Klondike days which have passed into history, the gold-seekers outfitted and started on their long journey. The men who lived here then and saw them go will tell you laughingly of their misfit outfits which bitterly-won experience taught them so soon to cast aside — stories the humor of which lies very close to tears. There were many tragedies in those days; and indeed if the tragedies to-day are fewer, they are none the less terrible. Hunger and cold still dog the heels of him who dares the pitiless North; and Death waits ever by the trail.

But if life in the Farther North wears a grim face, it is not always untouched with humor. The pioneer has learned perforce the art of taking hardship gallantly. When the Provincial Legislature met in 1909, the member from the Far North came to Edmonton in a ‘caboose,’ and brought his family and his servant with him. The thermometer stood at fifty below for a part of the time during which their little house on runners was moving slowly through the snow toward the Provincial capital. It was a picnic under difficulties, but it was a picnic still. And though the member and his family lived in a hotel during the session, his wife rose to the occasion by entertaining her friends at afternoon tea in the ‘caboose.’ The M. P. P. and his family went serenely back again by the same conveyance when the session was over; and in the following summer, fate intervened again to save them from the commonplace; for the contest in which the member sought reëlection was delayed two weeks, because the official counter from Edmonton found the rivers unnavigable on account of ice, and had to walk the last one hundred and fifty miles to the Riding.

These are some of the contrasts and some of the elements that make life at the end of the line a spur to the imagination and a healthful, heartening, stirring thing. It is good to be here, and it is especially good to be here now. For, while the lifeof this Far Northwest will never lose its zest and bigness, it will lose—as the indomitable industry of man pushes the railroad beyond and ever beyond — the unique charm that rests ever at the end of the line.