320 Sport and Life. 



were richer in land, cattle, or timber, for all of which there was 

 then but little demand, than in cash balances at their bank. 

 Mails via the Isthmus every three weeks or so, and a peaceful 

 absence of telegraphs added to the country's somnolence. 

 Gradually, with the completion of the various transcontinental 

 railways, communication with the old and new world became 

 more rapid ; but it was not till the completion of the Canadian 

 Pacific Railway, fourteen years ago, that British Columbia, 

 which in the meanwhile (1871) had joined the eastern provinces 

 of Canada in the general scheme of confederation, of which 

 the Dominion of Canada was the outcome, really awoke 

 and began to realise what vast resources Nature had bestowed 

 upon her. To prove her treasures to the outside world has been 

 an uphill game, and one fraught with some bitter experiences, 

 for the baby " boomlet " that swept over the country soon after 

 the opening of the railway which she had so dearly bought, 

 brought ruin to many. 



British capitalists who entered the lists during the first 

 awakening of British Columbia, had, as a rule, good reason to 

 deplore their haste, for, with only very few exceptions, not a 

 single enterprise started or sustained by British capital in the 

 earlier days ended otherwise than disastrously. It was this which 

 gave British Columbia the name of being the land of unfulfilled 

 promises. Smelters erected by English Trust Companies in 

 impossible places before a ton of ore had been found in the 

 neighbourhood ; steamer lines that ran nowhere, and started from 

 nowhere ; mines which only a balloon or a mountain goat could 

 reach ; quartz claims that consisted of fine quartz, but narry 

 an ounce of the precious metal ; alluvial gold mines, where the 

 quicksilver employed in the clean-up came out of the riffles 

 as bright and silvery as it went in ; land companies that owned 

 more acres than shillings, and who, having started with insufficient 

 capital, were done to death by the exorbitant wild-land tax and the 

 absence of purchasers ; paper pulp-mills, land reclamation schemes, 

 and timber businesses that either lacked proper local management, 



