Prince Albert (of which the first house is said to have been the log-cabin of a Presbyterian missionary, put up in 1866) is rich in the so-called “white coal,” and before long the city will be supplied with hydro-electric power from the La Colle falls in the Saskatchewan river, which flows past her very doors. The damming of the river to develop the power will serve the purpose of improving its navigability, and it is anticipated that soon there will be steamboat communication between Lake Winnipeg and Edmonton. In the south, just within the borders of the province, near Roche Percée, and away in a north-westerly direction along the eastern escarpment of the “third prairie steppe,” lignite or “brown coal” has been found in many different places, and in Saskatchewan there were thirty mines in 1910, employing in all nearly four hundred persons. It is difficult to exaggerate the part played in Saskatchewan by the railways. Lying almost midway between the Pacific and the communication by means of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence with the Atlantic, this region had no outlet for any of the products of its fertile soil till the coming of the railways. In truth, there were no products, but only possibilities, for the settlers came in after the Canadian Pacific Railway—the pioneer line—which crossed the province on its way to the far west; and since then branch lines and little new towns have grown up together, till now this one great railway has over two thousand four hundred miles of “steel” in Saskatchewan alone, and its single track of 1885 (which it was such a mighty feat to build through the lone prairies and across the rugged western mountains) has become a complicated network. But what this first line meant in binding the separated provinces into a real union was shown in that very year, 1885, when for the second time the half-breeds, led by Louis Riel, rose in revolt. This time the storm centre was in the North-West Territories—from which in 1905 the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were carved out—far west and north of the Red River, but though there were long gaps in the railway, the troops sent from Eastern Canada reached the scene of the disturbance in about a month, or less than half the time which it had taken Wolseley’s force to reach the Red River fifteen years earlier. During the last ten or twelve years a younger railway company, the Canadian Northern, which in 1901 had not a mile of line in operation in Saskatchewan, has been adding line to line, and branch to branch, entering new districts, where farmers had gone in on the promise of its coming, carrying into the country immigrants and “settlers’ effects” by the car-load, and out of it train upon train of wheat. It also is knotting together a network across southern Saskatchewan. Last year its lines in the province had lengthened to 1,785 miles, and it is still reaching forward in many directions, including that of Hudson Bay.