The city is two days nearer Alaska by steamer than are the Puget Sound ports, and travellers from the eastern parts of Canada and the United States can reach there that much sooner by coming here over the Canadian National. The fisheries of British Columbia are the most valuable in the Dominion. Prince Rupert has become one of the fishing centres of the Pacific and the chief halibut port in the world. It has thirty-five canneries and seven large cold storage plants, and scores of steam vessels, sailing boats, and gasoline launches go back and forth between here and the fishing grounds. About fifty American vessels land their catches at this port every week, and every train that goes eastward over the railway carries carloads of fresh fish to the cities of the United States. Halibut are caught for nine months of the year, twenty million pounds being landed here in a single season. The moment they are taken from the sea they are packed in ice for shipment or put into cold storage. I am told that the fish can be kept perfectly fresh for a month by the present method of packing. During the summer as many as a half dozen carloads are shipped in one day. More than a quarter of a million pounds were recently sent to New York and Boston in a single trainload. [Illustration: Prince Rupert has miles of streets made of planks, upheld by trestle work, or resting on the rock underlying the city. Most of the streets and building sites were blasted by dynamite from the sides of the mountains.] [Illustration: British Columbia leads all Canada in the value of its fisheries, of which Prince Rupert is the centre. More halibut is brought here each season than to any other port in the world.] [Illustration: The animals, birds, and fish surmounting the totem poles are the family crests indicating the different branches of an Indian tribe at Kitwanga, not far from Prince Rupert. The poles number a score or more, and some are a hundred feet high.] The chief salmon fisheries of the Pacific coast are farther north in Alaska, but nevertheless British Columbia’s catch is worth ten million dollars a year. At Vancouver I saw the fleets of salmon trawlers in the mouth of the Fraser. There are many salmon fisheries near the mouth of the Skeena, not far from Prince Rupert, and forty per cent. of all the salmon packed in the province is put up in this city. The fresh fish are shipped only during the summer months, but they are exported in a frozen state from the cold storage plants throughout the winter. CHAPTER XXXI BY MOTOR CAR THROUGH THE WILDERNESS I have come into the Yukon Territory from Alaska. The trip from the land of Uncle Sam to that of John Bull was made over the route followed by thousands of gold seekers in the first great Klondike rush in the winter of 1897, when the prospectors made their way on foot over that frozen pass. It is now summer, and I have come from Skagway to White Horse, where I am now writing, on the White Pass Railway.