Pioneering in Kootenay. 271 



"town," from whose depredations it was necessary to guard the 

 goods day and night, made things the reverse of pleasant. How 

 high-handed are the proceedings of railway companies in a 

 new country, where the absence of all competition makes them 

 lords supreme, can be seen from the fact that although I had 

 insured the rapid transit of the goods by paying a higher rate 

 of freight, a delay of weeks on the journey, which caused me 

 very serious loss, was laughed out of court by the company. I 

 was, moreover, obliged to sign for the goods before I was allowed 

 to take them over, thus preventing me from making any claims 

 for things stolen during transit. One of the valuable horses I 

 had on one of the cars was so injured by an accident to the 

 train that it died, but never a penny was to be obtained from 

 the company.* 



But let us hie back to the sweet solitude of the Columbia. The 

 most unpleasant result of the railway's tardy delivery of my 

 machinery was that the water in the Columbia, at all times pre- 

 cariously low for steamer navigation, had by the end of August 

 sunk to such a low level that the one existing steamer could not 

 reach points higher than half-way up the river. Indeed, her last 

 trip had ended disastrously, and she was now lying in the deepest 

 hole she could find in the river, with a huge snag through her 

 bottom, and all but her smoke-stack under water. Matters looked 

 serious, for it meant a delay of quite eight months in getting the 

 sawmill to the spot, which would have been fatal to my enterprise 

 for the completion of which the Government had fixed two years. 



Help, however, came from an unexpected quarter. To realise 

 the primitive means of travel in those days, it must be remembered 

 that there was no road up the Columbia from Golden to Canal Flat, 

 and the few existing row-boats were far too small to take the big 



* In another case a big box full of new clothes, sent to me from England to 

 Victoria, vid the C.P.R., arrived broken open and a lot of things abstracted, 

 and though I drew the attention of the officials to the condition in which I 

 received the box when I signed for it, I never received any compensation. 

 Numerous other instances of such thefts could be cited. See Appendix, Note VI. 



