The steady progress of that old colony on the Red River and the somewhat hectic development of British Columbia, the latter not through colonization so much as by gold rushes and trade exploitations, were the leading factors in drawing the attention of Eastern statesmen to the enormous possibilities of the West. In consequence the Canada that was formed by the four old provinces in the East felt that the wide West-land must also be brought into the Dominion that was to stretch from sea to sea. As one born in that old Selkirk Colony, where my father was one of the original settlers, I confess to finding some amusement in the theories of later arrivals as to the opening up of the West. Some, for instance, allege that the Hudson’s Bay Company had kept the West closed against colonization and gave out the impression that the country was not fit for agriculture. In refutation of that charge we have the fact that it was the Hudson’s Bay Company that founded the first colony and protected it through all the difficult years till it demonstrated that the country was worth while. And it was the Hudson’s Bay men at posts all over the vast North-west who cultivated plots around their posts and sent to scientific schools evidences of the country’s fertility. It matters not that Sir George Simpson, or some other individual man of the old company, said that the prairie country was exposed to dangers as to grain crops. In our own day people in Eastern Canada said the same thing and commiserated their friends who left Ontario to settle in what they called “hyper-borean regions.” The real fact is that settlers would not come into the country until some railway communication was assured, and no lesser force than that of Confederation in Canada could undertake to build a railway into the West. Until that was done the country was closed by an isolation which could not be remedied except as indicated above. Few people would care to face the hardships and sufferings of the Selkirk colonists, who were nearly ten years in the country before they got enough from the soil to furnish subsistence. But they, as stated already, endured till they demonstrated the value of the country. And when the statesmen who saw and understood, conceived the plan of the Canadian Pacific Railway to traverse and develop the West I feel that a new glory was shed on the work of the old pioneers. I am glad to remember that my father, one of the last survivors of that early colony, lived long enough to see the iron horses pass the Red River on the steel trail to the Pacific across the plains where he had seen the buffalo roaming, and on over the mountains where some of his intimate friends, like Robert Campbell, of the Yukon, had gone on their great explorations. These early settlers had done their part, and rejoiced to know that others were making real the things of which they, in the pioneer days, had so daringly dreamed.