Pax Britannica (42 page)

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N 1897 the most-frequented route into the goldfields of the Klondike, in the north-west corner of Canada, ran from the coast of Alaska, in United States territory, over the White Pass to Lake Bennett and the tributaries of the Yukon River. To thousands of adventurers of every nationality this terrible journey was a memorable introduction to the Pax Britannica.

Skagway, the Alaskan port at the foot of the trail, was perhaps the most lawless town on earth. It was one enormous confidence trick, a municipal swindle, totally beyond the control of Washington and run by a villain of superlative skill called Jefferson Randall Smith—‘Soapy’ Smith to history. Almost everything in town was geared to the fleecing of innocent new-comers, as they spilled hopefully off the ships from the south. Teams of rogues met them on Smith’s behalf—‘The Reverend’ Charles Bowers, ‘Slim Jim’ Foster or ‘Old Man’ Tripp—posing as philanthropists of one kind or another, and exquisitely skilled in techniques of robbery, fraud or extortion. Skagway was infested with Smith’s spies, stooges, tame lawyers and sham charities. The Merchants’ Exchange, the Cut Rate Ticket Office, the Civic Information Bureau, the firm called Reliable Packers—all were front organizations for Soapy Smith. So was the Telegraph Office, across whose counter many a new-comer passed his safe arrival message and his fee, for there was in fact no telegraph line to Skagway. The fates seemed mysteriously to conspire against the gullible new arrival: and when at last he found himself, bruised, dazed, cheated of all he had, homeless and destitute in the streets of Skagway, sometimes Soapy Smith himself, breathing shocked and charitable concern, would offer him just enough cash to get him back to Seattle again, grateful at the last and well out of the way.

From this dream-like Gomorrah, where nothing was what it
seemed, the more resolute or sceptical prospectors set out nevertheless for the Klondike, shouldering what was left of their gear, and labouring up the long steep mountain trail, deep in snow, that was to remain for ever in the world’s memory.
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Up they stumbled, boot to boot, shrouded in dark greatcoats, loaded with bales and packs and crates, dragging their tortured pack-horses up the ice like figures out of Dante. Thousands of pack-animals died on the way, to be pushed over the brink or trampled underfoot: but so long as the pass was open the rush continued, the rabble behind forcing on those in front, so that the line of stampeders seldom stopped or broke, but moved inexorably, day after day, towards the bleak and windswept summit of the pass.

On that summit flew the Union Jack. There the Queen’s territories began. In a wooden hut half-buried in the snow waited the officers of the North West Mounted Police, very British, staunch and gentlemanly, with their Queen’s Regulations, their files and their always gleaming brass buttons. They had a Maxim gun to keep villains out, and in that cruel semi-Arctic setting they diligently imposed the imperial standards. Nobody could enter Canada over the White Pass unless he had a year’s supply of food and all the necessary equipment to survive. Horses with sores or injuries were shot at once, to prevent unnecessary suffering. The injured were given first-aid, the perplexed were advised, Smith’s men were sent packing back to the coast, all were checked and counted. Massive in their fiir hats and immense beaver coats, the Mounties were like images of order up there, sure and incorruptible. After the fantasies of Skagway they must have seemed wonderfully substantial.

The Mounties had moved into these regions only three years before, when the first prospectors reached the Yukon. It was debatable whether they really had a right to control the White Pass, for the frontier between Canada and the United States was not demarcated:
but their presence in the Yukon, and the tradition of British authority which they represented, made the Klondike gold rush like no other. Violence was almost unknown, even in the gaudiest days of the stampede. In Dawson City, the most extravagant of the boom towns, with its clapboard saloons along the Klondike River, its gambling joints and its brothels, its flamboyant millionaires and its fabulous consumption of liquor—even in Dawson City the proprieties were scrupulously balanced. A girl might set up as a prostitute indeed, in her crib on Paradise Alley, but she certainly might not flaunt herself in a belly-dance, or show her knickers on the music-hall stage. A man could get roaring drunk six nights a week, but he must not talk obscenely, brawl, or speak disrespectfully of the Queen. Children might not be employed in saloons, spirits might not be sold to minors, ‘using vile language’ was one of the most frequent charges in the police courts—a well-known badman from Kansas was once ejected from a Dawson saloon simply for talking too loud.

As for Sundays in that rip-roaring little metropolis, they were as absolutely sacred as Victoria herself could demand. The bars, theatres and dance halls closed at a minute before midnight every Saturday night, and not a whisky was sold again, not a hip was wriggled, not a bet was placed, until two in the morning on Monday. The Sunday sounds of Dawson City were psalms and snores. No kind of work was allowed. Men were arrested for fishing on a Sunday, or for sawing wood. The only hope of living it up, between Saturday night and Monday morning, was to take a boat downriver and slip across the line into the States—out of reach of the Pax Britannica and its stern schoolmarm values.

Canada was still a colony of the British Empire. The greatest and oldest of the self-governing overseas territories, far bigger than the whole of Europe, it still possessed no absolute sovereignty of its own. Its laws, signed in the name of the Queen, could theoretically be overridden by the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. Its foreign policies were decreed by London, and it was represented abroad by
British Ambassadors—the only Canadian overseas agent lived in London and was accredited to the Colonial Office. When Canada concluded a trade agreement with a foreign Power the British Government appended its signature, too, like a trustee with a juvenile ward. The Governor-General in Ottawa, Lord Aberdeen, behaved partly as the president of an autonomous confederation, Canada, but partly as the representative of the imperial Power, reporting back to the Colonial Office in London—a kind of super-Ambassador, empowered to intervene even in the internal affairs of Canada. Canada’s very title recognized this ambiguous status. When the Confederation was formed in 1867 its chief architect, John Macdonald, proposed to call it the Canadian Kingdom, but the British Government of the day had insisted on a less absolute definition: the Dominion of Canada.

To Canada, as everywhere, the British had transferred such of their institutions as seemed suitable. No two countries could be much more different than England and Canada, but it was an English Constitution that governed the Confederation. Its Governor-General played the part of the monarch, advised by a Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Its Senate was non-elective, like the House of Lords, and real power lay, as it did at Westminster, in the House of Commons. There was no hereditary aristocracy, but Canadian statesmen still received honours from London, and knights abounded in these forest glades. The imperial forces maintained their bases at Halifax and Esquimalt, ships of the Royal Navy regularly sailed up the St Lawrence as far as Montreal, and from end to end of Canada memorials stood in witness to the imperial tradition: the enormous cenotaph in Halifax commemorating the two Nova Scotian officers killed in the Crimean War; or the memorial at Ottawa to Wm. B. Osgood and John Rodgers, of the Guards Company of Sharpshooters, killed in action at Cutknife Hill in 1885; or the monument at Fort Walsh, far in the west, which honoured those men of the Mounted Police who, ‘by defeating hunting bands of Blackfoot, Crees, Assiniboines, Salteaux and Sioux, imposed the Queen’s law upon a fretful realm’.

The Queen’s law! This is how a police proclamation read, in the Canada of the 1890s:

Threatened with such solemnity, Soapy Smith himself might momentarily have blenched, before relieving Our Right Trusty Cousin of his Grand Cross.

The imperial hegemony was tactfully exerted. Nobody in London wanted to bully the Canadians, still less goad them into republicanism. In practice the Governor-General seldom intervened, obligingly assenting sometimes to legislation frankly directed against
British trade, and the imperial Government politely consulted the Canadians, before signing foreign treaties that might affect them. Canada had been Britain’s first experiment in colonial emancipation—the forerunner, it was hoped, of noble things to come, as the other white colonies of the Empire advanced to proper nationhood. It was the famous report brought home from Canada by Lord Durham, in 1839, that had led in the end to the establishment of cabinet Government, on the Westminster pattern, in the white colonies of the Empire. Since then, so the British liked to think, Canada had stood as proof that looser imperial ties would dissuade the colonies from seceding like the Americans—that they would not gallivant away with independence, but would actually cling closer to the Mother Country, like ever-grateful daughters about a never-ageing Mama.

The real relationship between London and Ottawa could not easily be defined. One could not look it up in a reference book. It was a
modus
vivendi,
based upon ambivalences, sympathies and the realities of power, and very difficult for foreigners to master. The imperial links were maintained in twilight, sometimes relaxed, sometimes stiffened, so subtle that few people really knew just how independent Canada was, and while Englishmen generally supposed it to be virtually a sovereign State, Americans and continentals generally regarded it simply as a colonial outpost, behaving as Britain told it to.
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Canada had become a nation, of a sort, just thirty years before, when the Confederation was formed. It was geographically united, in a way, when the Hudson’s Bay Company gave up its rights of sovereignty, in 1870, and handed over the half-explored regions of the west and north. The Dominion now comprised six Provinces, each with its elected Assembly, plus the inconceivable wildernesses of conifer, tundra and ice which faded away into the unknown Arctic. In the north-west Alaska was American. In the north-east
Newfoundland and its dependency Labrador staunchly maintained their own autonomy: 

For the rest, Canada looked a logical sort of slab on the map: self-contained, huge, very solid.

In reality it was a flabby State, tenuously strung together, and racked by inner tensions. Canada was only inhabited in patches along the American frontier: thick clusters in the east and west, scattered clusters in the middle, almost nobody at all in the north. Between one settlement and the next there extended a wasteland, sometimes of forest, sometimes of empty prairie—mile upon mile of dark green and brown, totally uninhabited, deep in snow for half the year, and relieved only by gloomy fly-infested lakes. No Canadian town was far from the wilderness, and up every Canadian road, just beyond every horizon, lay the frozen immensities of the north. In the interior the winters were terrible and the summers stifling: Everywhere the gigantic emptiness of the place made its presence felt—so big that forty Mother Countries could be squeezed into its mass, and the most grandiloquently imperial mind could hardly imagine the One Race peopling all its corners.