As suggested above, some of us have seen much development since the railway came. I recall the small fields of grain in the original colony along the Red River and the somewhat larger ones that began to open out on the prairie. When reaping was done with the sickle and cradle, and threshing with the flail and the two horse treadmill, the acreage under cultivation could not be large. And though, in my time, our people began to bring in reapers from St. Paul by cart-train, even to that wonder which we called the “self-raker,” there was little inducement to grow much, because there was only a small local market and no way of exporting. Things were in that condition when the Governor-General, Lord Dufferin, and Lady Dufferin, visited Manitoba and drove the first spikes in the Pembina Branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway on September 29th, 1877. That branch was on the east of the Red River and some years went by before the steel crossed at Winnipeg and reached the prairies. But even in 1877 there was more grain being grown than could be marketed at home. And the eloquent Dufferin referred to the situation in his own sympathetic way when he said, near the conclusion of his famous address in Winnipeg, “You have been blessed with an abundant harvest, and soon, I trust, will a railway come to carry to those who need it, the surplus of your produce, now, as my own eyes have witnessed, imprisoned in your storehouses _for want of the means of transport_. May the expanding finances of the country soon place the Government in a position to gratify your just and natural expectations.” Meanwhile, as they waited for the longed-for and greatly needed railway to come, some of the early settlers were experimenting in growing grain that would be adapted to the soil and the climate. There were some who thought that wheat could not be grown to perfection very far west and north of the Red River. But there were others who felt differently. I recall that excellent man, eloquent of speech and graceful in manner, J. W. Taylor, the United States Consul at Winnipeg, often called “Saskatchewan” Taylor, by reason of his personal knowledge of our North-West country. Despite the fact that some of his countrymen to the south might not like it, Consul Taylor persisted in saying that north of the international boundary was “the very home of the wheat plant.” And had he lived to see it, his kindly heart would have rejoiced when wheat grown at Fort Vermillion on the Peace River, a thousand miles north-west of Winnipeg, took the first prize at a World’s Fair in his own country.