largely by American stockholders, operates the Hidden Creek copper mines at Anyox, the biggest in British Columbia. They are located on the coast near the Portland Canal, hundreds of miles to the northward and only a short distance from Alaska. In one year they produced thirty million pounds of copper. Other mines are worked on Vancouver Island and on Howe Sound north of the city of Vancouver. Although the deposits of the Boundary District have been practically worked out after yielding twenty million tons of copper ore, British Columbia still has more than half the copper output of the Dominion. Its total annual mineral production is worth more than six hundred million dollars. Of this, coal and coke make up about one third. Silver, lead, zinc, and platinum are also mined. Gold was first discovered in British Columbia on the Fraser River. That was around 1857, just as the California placers had begun to play out, and thousands of prospectors rushed here from our Pacific coast. Many fortunes were made in a single season, and by 1863 the placer mines had an annual yield of more than three million dollars' worth of gold. The total production to the present time has been valued at more than seventyfive million dollars. All of this gold was recovered by the pick and shovel and without the aid of machinery. Hydraulic mining was not introduced until the easily accessible gold had been washed out by primitive methods. The lode mines were not worked to any extent until 1893, but these are now producing more than the placers. Northwest of the Boundary District we take a flying trip through the Okanagan Valley, famous as a fruit-grow ing region. Apples from here are shipped all over the Dominion. They are sold three thousand miles away in eastern Canada in competition with those grown in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. The region has been developed largely through irrigation, and as we travel through it the green of the watered areas stands out in sharp contrast to the sun-baked dry lands of the hills. British Columbia has forty thousand acres in fruit, and it ships more than a million boxes of apples a season. The interior valleys have been found to be well adapted to raising peaches, plums, grapes, and small fruits as well. The chief city of British Columbia, as well as Canada's most important Pacific port, is Vancouver. It is beautifully situated on Burrard Inlet on a site discovered in 1792 by Captain John Vancouver. In 1865 a lumber mill was started on the inlet and a settlement grew up here. About twenty years later the town was entirely destroyed by fire, so that the city of to-day was really founded in 1886. Vancouver is about the same size as Omaha, and is the fourth largest city of the Dominion. It is the terminal of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways, and of several roads from the States. It has steamship lines to Hawaii and China and Japan and also to the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. There are coast lines to Seattle, Victoria, Prince Rupert, and Alaska. Let us go for a motor ride about the city. The Vancouver climate is warmer and more moist than that of the south of England, and flowers can be seen blooming in the gardens all the year round. On Shaughnessy Heights are the beautiful homes of Vancouver's millionaires, and farther out is Stanley Park. Here, overlooking the Narrows through which the ships enter the harbour, are thousands of giant cedars and Douglas firs, some of them one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet high. We find Vancouver's commercial districts busy and crowded. At the wharves we see twenty ocean steamers loading lumber to be carried to all parts of the world, and learn that sixteen million feet are shipped from here in one month. Vancouver is increasing in importance as wheat-shipping port. It sends a million bushels or more to the Orient, and twice as much to Europe by way of the Panama Canal. Eighty miles across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver is Victoria, British Columbia's capital, noted for the architectural beauty of the provincial government buildings. It lies at the southern end of Vancouver Island, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the snowcapped Olympic Mountains on the mainland. It is considered one of the most English of Canadian cities, not only in climate and aspect, but in the customs and traditions of its residents. It is the site of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, one of the largest of its kind in the world. CHAPTER XXX PRINCE RUPERT AM at the north terminal of the Canadian National Railways and the port of the shortest Pacific route to the Orient. Prince Rupert is located on an island in a beautiful bay five hundred miles north of Vancouver and only thirty miles south of our Alaskan boundary. Its harbour is open all the year round. It is fourteen miles long, is sheltered by the mountains and islands about it, and large enough for all the demands of travel. The town reminds me of Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem. It is right on the sea, and the buildings climb up and down the mountains of rock close to the shore. The chief difference is that the hills of Jaffa are bleak and bare, while those of Prince Rupert are wooded and clad in perpetual green. Until 1912, when the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, now a part of the Canadian National lines, chose this point for its western terminus, this place was a forest. Pines and cedars covered the mountains above, and the stumps still rising out of the vacant lots look like the black bristles of an unshaven chin. The town has several thousand people, and I venture it has thousands of stumps. They are rooted in the crevices of the rock, and the ground between them is matted with muskeg, which holds water like a sponge and makes it impossible to go across country without thick boots or rubbers. The muskeg was one of the difficulties that had to be |