'Have you made your pile?' I asked.
He smiled as the artist smiles - all true prospectors have that lofty
smile - 'Me? No. I've been a prospector most o' my time, but I haven't
lost anything. I've had my fun out of the game. By God, I've had my fun
out of it!
I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grants
could have been picked up for half less than nothing.
'Yes,' he said placidly. 'I reckon if you'd had any kind of an education
you could ha' made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days.
And it's to be made now if you could see where. How? Can you tell me
what the capital of the Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't.
Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise, I get
off here, but if I have my health I'll be out next summer
again - prospectin' North.'
Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear
of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives - a country
where food and water always taste good! He told me curious things about
some fabled gold - the Eternal Mother-lode - out in the North, which is
to humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had
never heard the name of Johannesburg!
As the train swung round the shores of Lake Superior the talk swung over
to Wheat. Oh yes, men said, there were mines in the country - they were
only at the beginning of mines - but that part of the world existed to
clean and grade and handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer.
The track was being duplicated by a few hundred miles to keep abreast of
the floods of it. By and by it might be a four-track road. They were
only at the beginning. Meantime here was the Wheat sprouting, tender
green, a foot high, among a hundred sidings where it had spilled from
the cars; there were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators to
clean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here was new, gaily
painted machinery going forward to reap and bind and thresh the Wheat,
and all those car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more sidings
against the year's delivery of the Wheat.
Two towns stand on the shores of the lake less than a mile apart. What
Lloyd's is to shipping, or the College of Surgeons to medicine, that
they are to the Wheat. Its honour and integrity are in their hands; and
they hate each other with the pure, poisonous, passionate hatred which
makes towns grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the survivor
would pine away and die - a mateless hate-bird. Some day they must unite,
and the question of the composite name they shall then carry already
vexes them. A man there told me that Lake Superior was 'a useful piece
of water,' in that it lay so handy to the C.P.R. tracks. There is a
quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them.
Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down
and pushing up the hulls of big steamers; no right to tread the slow,
deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to roar in on weed and
sand beaches between vast headlands that run out for leagues into haze
and sea-fog. Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what towns pay taxes
for, but it engulfs and wrecks and drives ashore, like a fully
accredited ocean - a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.
Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has produced a breed
of sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as a
snake-charmer does to a lion-tamer.
Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water.
NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY
Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithic
tribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded the
chosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe,
so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets the
first tribal need after warmth, food, and women.
In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the Tribal
Herald. A tribe thinly occupying large spaces feels lonely. It desires
to hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort
itself with the knowledge that there are companions just below the
horizon. It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all who
pass. That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageously
personal. The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge of
everything that touches on its daily life in the big spaces - earth, air,
and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them. That is why
its newspapers so often seem so laboriously trivial.
For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O'Halloran, comes in
thirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes the
king-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The Tribal
Herald - a thin weekly, with a patent inside - connects the red nose and
the breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel.
But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of the
tribe may use that road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether the
accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to the
neglected state of the road. Fifteen men happen to know that Pete's nose
is an affliction, not an indication.
