The excellent character of the land in Western Canada is well displayed in the great region opened up by the Grand Trunk Pacific. Following for fifty miles the valley of the Assiniboine River, the line of railway goes through the drainage basin of Qu'Appelle River, and on into the great basin of the south {291} Saskatchewan River, crossing it at Saskatoon, the width of this basin being some 200 miles. Then on through the western part of Saskatchewan and the eastern part of Alberta, the railway makes a gradual ascent through sandhills and ridges until crossing the third steppe it proceeds for the remaining 130 miles, to Edmonton, over a level country. With the exception, and that an inconsiderable one, of these sandhills and ridges, there is no waste land between Winnipeg and Edmonton. In the whole region now opened to civilisation by the Grand Trunk Pacific, there extends a belt of rich farming land from 300 to 500 miles in width from north to south and some 1000 miles in length from east to west. From Winnipeg to the west, the physical properties of the land are found by trained experts to be exceptionally advantageous for the growing of wheat, oats, barley, and flax; "in fact," says Professor Clifford Willis (a recognised authority on soil physics), "the yields of small grain of this type were the best that I have seen anywhere in the best tilled fields of the United States." Professor James H. Pettit, of Cornell University, who won his doctor's degree from the University of Göttingen for work in soil fertility and bacteriology, finds that this recently opened up region possesses some of the richest soils, and that this is due to the alluvial deposits of the large area once covered by the old glacial Lake Agassiz. These deposits have left a soil of silt and clay that is capable of producing {292} thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat, and eighty or ninety bushels of oats to the acre.