It is not alone, however, for the romance of beauty that Prince Rupert is notable. This brilliant young city is destined to be a traffic centre of great { 194} proportions and of cosmopolitan importance. It will inevitably become the emporium of Alaska and of all the great Northern region. The port is but thirty miles south of the Alaskan boundary, and it is thus the natural starting-point for Dawson, Nome, and other of the Alaskan and Yukon centres. From Prince Rupert to New York or to Boston or to Chicago there is now this direct line through Edmonton and Winnipeg, and thus it cannot but become a great international port. Prince Rupert is four hundred miles nearer to Yokohama than is Vancouver, and it is six hundred miles less than by way of San Francisco. Since the completion of the Grand Trunk Pacific this route has offered the shortest and most direct route to the Yukon and to Alaska. The first train over the new extension of the Grand Trunk from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert arrived at this port on April 9, 1914, a date not unimportant in the history of progress in Canada, as it initiated conditions which inaugurate an entirely new era in its prosperous development.
This romantic young city has the distinction of having had more time and money devoted to its design than has perhaps ever before been bestowed upon a town seen only in vision. Henri Bergson might almost point to it as an illustration of his creative evolution. Before the opening of the town site, plank sidewalks and roadways, sewers and water mains, and other municipal facilities for the sanitary welfare and the comfort of ten thousand { 195} people were constructed. At the present time in this city, which only celebrated its ninth birthday in January 1917, there are already seven thousand inhabitants. There are three daily newspapers, the _News_, _Journal_, and _Empire_. There are five banks, branches of the Bank of Montreal, Canadian Bank of Commerce, Union Bank of Canada, the Royal, and the Bank of British North America. Two clubs, the Prince Rupert and the Pioneer, have each attractive houses of their own, and include in their membership the leading professional and business men of the city.
The harbour is equipped for the most modern and exacting requirements. It might well be called the harbour for the ships from the Seven Seas. The Grand Trunk Pacific Steamship Company have also established a splendid service between Skagway, Prince Rupert, and Seattle, the _Prince Rupert_ and the _Prince George_ providing all the comforts of the best ocean liners, and offering scenery on the voyage that is so resplendent a feature with its perpetual surprises. Prince Rupert has an exceptionally high order of population, people of education, refinement, energy, and enterprise. Churches abound; the schools are the pride of the city; the social life is interesting and especially distinctive in having so large a preponderance of cultivated people.