‘… Only those whose values are entirely material will belittle his efforts because time has proved him wrong. He was a man of boundless energy and he squandered it recklessly in pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp of black gold. But people who know him best like Johnnie Carstairs and Jean Lucas, the young Englishwoman who for the last few years has housekept for him during the summer months, declare that it was not the pursuit of riches that drove him in his later years, but the desire to prove himself right and to recover the losses suffered by so many people who invested in his early ventures.
Like so many of the old-timers, he was a God-fearing man and a great character. His phrase — There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains — has become a part of the oil man’s vocabulary, denoting an area not worth surveying: but who knows? When told of the discovery of the Leduc field Campbell is reported to have said: ‘Sure there’s oil down there. And there’s oil up here, too. The Rockies are young mountains, thrust up out of the same area of inland seas.’ The result of a single survey would not have altered his convictions. He always believed that there was one way to prove an area and that was to drill it.
Some day perhaps he’ll be proved right. In the meantime local people, headed by Mr Will Polder, are organising a fund to raise a monument to the memory of ‘King’ Campbell. It will be erected about a mile from his cabin on the site of the original drilling in 1913. Johnnie Carstairs hopes to pack it up to the Kingdom as soon as the snows melt. It will carry the design of a cable-tool rig and the epitaph There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains.’
I put the cutting down and sat staring at the wall, seeing nothing of the faded picture of Nelson dying at Trafalgar, only the little log cabin high up in the Rockies and the old man whose hopes had died so hard. There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains. The phrase rang in my head. I twisted it round and said it the way the oil men were using it, contemptuously. But still it had a ring about it. I could see the words etched deep on a marble monument and imagine tourists in later years coming there to mock and eat their oranges. It would be something to prove the phrase true, to wipe out the stigma that had haunted me all my early life, to prove him innocent. Why shouldn’t there be oil in the Rocky Mountains? Maybe I was a fool. I knew nothing about geology or the Rockies. But I had something to bite on now — an objective, a purpose. And somehow it lessened the shock of Maclean-Harvey’s pronouncement.
And as I sat there thinking about Campbell’s Kingdom high up in the mountains, trying to picture the place in my mind, I was suddenly possessed with an urge to see it, to discover for myself something of the faith, the indomitable hope, that had sent my grandfather back there after conviction and imprison I
ment. It couldn’t have been an easy decision for him. The newspaper cutting had hinted that many people out there had lost heavily through backing him. It must have been hell for him. And yet he had gone back.
I got up and began to pace back and forth. Failure and twenty-two years of utter loneliness had not destroyed his faith. His letter proved that. If I could take up where he had left off…
I realised with a shock that I had bridged the gap of 6,000 miles that separated me from Campbell’s Kingdom and was imagining myself already up there. It was absurd. I’d no knowledge of oil, no money. And yet… The alternative was to sign the deed of sale. I went over to the table and picked it up. If I signed it Fothergill had said I might get $10,000 out of it in six months’ time. It would pay for my funeral, that was about all the good it would be to me. To sign it was unthinkable. And then it gradually came to me that what had at first seemed absurd was the most reasonable thing for me to do, the only thing. To remain in London, an insurance clerk in the same monotonous rut to the end, was impossible with this prospect, this hope of achievement dangling in front of my eyes. I tore the deed of sale across and flung the pieces on to the floor. I would go to Canada. I would try to carry out the provisions of my grandfather’s will.
CHAPTER TWO
It took me just a week to get to Calgary. Taking into account that this included a night’s flying across the Atlantic and two and a half days by train across Canada I think I did pretty well. It did not take me long to clear up my own affairs, but the major obstacle was foreign exchange. I got over this by emigrating and here I had two slices of luck: Maclean-Harvey knew the High Commissioner and the Canadian Government were subsidising immigrant travel by air via Trans-Canada so that the quickest route as far as Montreal became also the cheapest. I think, too, that my sense of urgency communicated itself to those responsible for clearing my papers.
Throughout the journey I had that queer feeling of detachment that comes to anyone suddenly jerked out of the rut of life and thrust upon a new country. I remember feeling very tired, but physical exhaustion was overlaid by mental excitement. I felt like a pioneer. There was even a touch of the knight errant in the picture I built of myself, tearing across the globe to tilt at the Rocky Mountains and make an old man’s dream come true. It was all a little unreal.
This sense of unreality allowed me to sit back and relax, content to absorb the vastness of Canada from a carriage-window. The only piece of organisation, apart from getting myself on the ‘plane as an immigrant, was to arrange for a friend to look up the newspaper reports of my grandfather’s trial and send a resume of it on to me when I could give him an address. The rest I had left to chance.
The night before we reached Calgary, just after we had left Moose Jaw, the coloured attendant brought a telegram to my sleeper. It was from Donald McCrae and Acheson:
For Bruce Campbell Wetheral, Canadian Pacific Railways, Coach BII, The Dominion, No. 7.
IMPORTANT YOU COME TO OUR OFFICES IMMEDIATELY ON ARRIVAL. PURCHASERS HAVE GIVEN US TILL TOMORROW NIGHT TO COMPLETE DEAL. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO DISPOSE OF PROPERTY. SIGNED — ACHESON.
I lay back and stared at the message, thinking of all the cabling that must have gone on before they were able to locate me on a train halfway across Canada. They were certainly a very thorough and determined firm. They’d have me sell whether I wanted to or not. I crumpled the form up and dropped it on the floor. Like Fothergill they found it impossible to accept my attitude.
We arrived at Calgary at 8.30 a.m. Mountain Time and I went straight to the Pallister Hotel. It was a palatial palace, railway-owned like so many of the Canadian hotels, a symbol of the way the country had been opened up. I had breakfast and then rang Acheson’s office and made an appointment for eleven o’clock. That gave me time to have a look round. Calgary is a cow town, the ranching capital of Alberta, but there was little evidence of this in the streets which were cold and dusty. There were good, solid stone buildings in the centre of the town — stores like the Hudson’s Bay Company Store and offices such as those which housed the Calgary Herald — but they dwindled rapidly as the streets ran out into the flat grey of the sky. It was strangely without atmosphere, a quiet, provincial town going about its business.
The firm of Donald McCrae and Acheson had their offices in an old brick building amongst a litter of oil companies. Blown-up photographs of oil derricks and of the Turner Valley field decorated the stairs and from wooden-partitioned offices on the second floor came the clatter of typewriters and the more staccato clacking of a tape machine. By comparison the third floor was quiet, almost reserved. Mahogany doors surrounded a landing that boasted a carpet, a big black leather settee and a pedestal ash tray, the base of which was formed by the bit of a drill. I sat down for a moment on the settee to get my breath. The names of the various firms who had offices on this floor were painted in black on the frosted glass panels of the doors that faced me. There were four doors, the one on my immediate right being that of Donald McCrae and Acheson. But it was the name on the door to my left that caught my eye, for it was the name of the man who had backed my grandfather. At the top was The Roger Fergus Oil Development Company Ltd., and underneath — operating companies: Fergus Leases Ltd., T.R.F. Concessions Ltd., and T. Stokowski-Fergus Oil Company Ltd. The other two doors were occupied by Louis Winnick, Oil Consultant and Surveyor, and Henry Fergus, Stockbroker. Under the latter and newly painted-in was the name — The Larsen Mining and Development Company Ltd.