Yes, he was well posted in the farming business, Rod. McKenzie. He had learned it in the timber country before he took to it in the land of long grass. At eleven years of age he was plowing with a yoke of oxen on the stump lands of Huron, helping his father to scratch a living out of the bush farm for a family of nine and between whiles attending a little log schoolhouse, going on cedar-gum expeditions, getting lost in the bush and indulging in other pioneer pastimes. Along in 1877, when people were talking a lot about Dakota as a farming country, McKenzie took a notion to go West; but he preferred to stay under the British flag and Winnipeg was his objective. A friend of his was running a flour-mill at Gladstone (then called Palestine), Manitoba, and young McKenzie decided to take a little walk out that way to visit him. It was a wade, rather than a walk! It was the year the country was flooded and during the first thirty days after his arrival he could count only three consecutive days without rain. In places the water was up to his hips and when he reached the flour-mill there was four feet of water inside of it. Such conditions were abnormal, of course, and due to lack of settlement and drainage. After helping to build the first railway through the country Roderick McKenzie eventually located his farm near Brandon and so far as the rich land and the climate were concerned he was entirely satisfied. Not so with the early marketing of his grain, though. He disposed of two loads of wheat at one of the elevators in Brandon one day and was given a grade and price which he considered fair enough. When he came in with two more loads of the same kind of wheat next day, however, the elevator man told him that he had sent a sample to Winnipeg and found out that it was not grading the grade he had given him the day before. "The train service wouldn't allow of such fast work, sir," said Roderick McKenzie. "I suppose you sent it by wire!" He picked up the reins. "That five cents a bushel you want me to give you looks just as good in my pocket as in yours." So he drove up town where the other buyers were and three of them looked at the wheat but refused to give a price for it. One of them was a son of the first elevator man to whom he had gone and, said he: "The Old Man gave you a knockdown for it, didn't he?" "Yes, but----" "Well, we're not going to bid against him and if you want to sell it at all, haul it back to him." As there was nothing else he could do under the conditions that prevailed, McKenzie was forced to pocket his loss without recourse.