The all-water route and the combined rail-and-water route from the head of the Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard are much cheaper than the all-rail route, due to high railway freight rates in eastern Canada. A bushel of wheat can be sent over the thirteen hundred miles between Calgary and Fort William for about fifteen cents, while the overland freight rate from Fort William to Quebec or Montreal, a distance of only a thousand miles, is twenty-one cents. The rate on the all-water route from Fort William to Montreal is ten cents cheaper, or eleven cents. From Fort William to New York via Buffalo it is fourteen cents, but vessels sailing from New York offer lower ocean rates and can get cheaper marine insurance, so that more than half of Canada’s export wheat is shipped abroad via the United States. Whenever we have put a high tariff on Canadian wheat, the amount exported to our country declines. We now admit Canadian wheat free of duty on condition that none shall be consumed in the United States. This does not mean that it may not be manufactured. At present fifty per cent. of all that is imported is made into flour, and then reëxported. Some of the lake freighters in the Port Arthur and Fort William harbours are like no other craft I have seen. They have an elevated forecastle at the bow for the crew, with the engines and officers’ quarters in the stern. In rough weather one can pass from bow to stern only by means of a life rope, and orders and reports are given by telephone. In the stretch of deck between is a series of hatches, sometimes thirty or more, through which the cargoes are loaded or discharged. A single vessel will often carry three hundred thousand bushels of wheat, or the equivalent of six or seven trainloads of forty cars each. Among the boats in the lake grain trade this season were a number of small ocean-going freighters from Norway, attracted here by the cargoes available at profitable rates. Besides the great fleet of grain-carrying ships, passenger steamers run from Port Arthur and Fort William to Georgian Bay, touching at all the important ports on the route. I steamed for eighteen hours through Lake Superior coming here on one of the boats from the “Soo.” That lake is so large that at times we lost sight of land and it seemed as though we were in mid-ocean. At other times we could see the irregular coastline, which is rock-bound and picturesque. The water of Lake Superior is as clear as crystal; it is icy cold the year round. CHAPTER XX WINNIPEG--WHERE THE PRAIRIES BEGIN