Twenty years ago, when I visited Cobalt shortly after the discovery of its underground wealth, I rode all day on the Ontario government railway through woods as wild as any on the North American continent. The road wound its way in and out among lakes, sloughs, and swamps. The country was covered with pine and hardwood, and so cut up by water that one could have gone almost all over it in a canoe. Even along the railroad it was so swampy and boggy that the telegraph poles had to be propped up. Outside the swamps it was so rocky that deep holes could not be made, and in such places great piles of rock were built up about the poles to support them. Some of the country was covered with bogs known as muskeg. This is a bottomless swamp under a thin coating of vegetation, through which one sinks down as though in a quicksand, and, if not speedily rescued, is liable to drown. Hunters in travelling over it have to jump from root to root, making their way by means of the trees that grow here and there. There is said to be still much of this muskeg in the region of Hudson Bay and almost everywhere throughout this northland. Much of it has been drained, leaving a land somewhat like that of northwestern Ohio, which was once known as the Black Swamp. Reaching Cobalt, I had to rely on the miners for living accommodations. Log cabins and frame buildings were going up in every direction and a three-story hotel was being started, but many of the people were still living in tents or in shacks covered with tar felt. Even the banks hastily established to take care of the rapidly growing wealth of the settlement were in tents, and the bankers slept at night beside their safes with a gun always within reach. Streets were yet to be built, and the wooden and canvas structures of the town straggled along roads winding this way and that through the stumps. In the centre of the settlement was a beautiful little lake that one could cross in a canoe in a few minutes, and the mining properties extended back into the woods in every direction.