Winnipeg lies on a plain about midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific and sixty miles from the United States boundary. The city is built on the banks of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North, which here come together. The confluence of the two rivers was the site of numerous Indian camps and trading posts, and the scene of many of the early struggles between the rival fur companies. Fort Garry was finally established here in 1820 by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a settlement that sprang up a half mile away was called Winnipeg, after the lake of the same name about fifty miles to the north. The word is a contraction of the Cree Indian “Ouinipigon,” meaning “muddy waters.” In 1870, at the time of the Red River Rebellion against the creation of Manitoba as a province of the Dominion and its occupation by the Dominion government, Winnipeg, including Fort Garry, had two hundred and forty inhabitants. Ten years later its population was seven thousand, and in another ten years, following the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway, it had about thirty thousand people. Since then it has grown steadily, until it is now the third city in Canada, outranked only by Montreal and Toronto. It is an important industrial centre, manufacturing more than one hundred million dollars worth of goods in one year. Situated at the gateway of Western Canada, and the vast wheatfields of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Winnipeg is the largest grain market not only of the Dominion but of the whole British Empire. It is the neck of the bottle, as it were, for practically the entire crop of the prairie provinces. Every carload of wheat bound eastward for Fort William or Port Arthur is opened here and sampled to determine its grade, a report on which is sent on to the elevator as soon as the car is reclosed and sealed. Hence, when the carload of wheat arrives at the elevator it can be binned in its proper place without any delay. Winnipeg is the distributing point for western Canada for immigrants and settlers. There are people here of almost every nationality in Christendom, and I am told that the Bible is circulated through a local society in fifty different languages and dialects. Across the Red River from the city is the town of St. Boniface, where live several thousand French Canadians whose fathers came here years ago. For a long time the settlement was typically and wholly French, but many new people have come in, and not long since, for the first time in its history, an English-speaking mayor was elected.