The most reliable experts unite in the conviction that the Mackenzie Basin is capable of supporting an agricultural population. The soil is rich; and in that part of the Basin alone, lying between Athabasca Lake and the Arctic Ocean, there is a belt of land 940 miles long and over 60 miles wide. Ninety miles south of latitude sixty-three ripe strawberries are found. A little farther to the south currants and other small fruits grow luxuriantly. There are already scanty settlements, remote and apart, in this country, and an increasing population of huntsmen, fur-traders, and tourists to whom sport is the attraction; and the first consideration that would occur to the traveller, or to any student of this almost unmapped region of infinite space, would be as to the ways and means for safeguarding human life and for the maintenance of law and order. For untold centuries this region has been the home and haunt of the Indians and of wild and ferocious animals. The Indian tribes possessed all this district in which to roam at will. Their means of subsistence were hunting and fishing, and their resources for clothing consisted in the skins and furs of captured animals. Any adequate conception of the wildness of this unbroken wilderness is almost impossible to grasp. The primæval forests impenetrable with their dense growth of underbrush, fallen trees, colossal rocks washed bare by the beating storms of {297} centuries, with uncounted and fairly innumerable leagues of lakes, rivers, swamps--how unconquerable this primitive world of Nature! Yet the call of the North-West, even this remote and unknown North-West, has sounded, and the ear of poet, prophet, and priest is that which registers the cry unheard and unheeded by others.