It arrested public attention in England and in Canada. That which had often been asserted by independent travellers, and more often stoutly denied by those whose sole interests were centred in the fur trade[1], had been found by scientific explorers of unquestioned veracity to be an actual fact. As Captain Palliser put it in his report:—“The whole of the region of country would be valuable not only for agriculturists but also for mixed purposes. I have seen not only excellent wheat, but also Indian corn (which will not succeed in England or Ireland) ripening on Mr. Pratt’s farm at the Qu’Appelle lakes in 1857.” Professor Hind, in his report, quoted interviews with enthusiastic settlers, who, on their prairie farms in Assiniboine valley, had for years been successfully raising prime wheat at a yield of thirty to forty bushels to the acre, “corn, barley, oats, flax, hemp, hops, turnips, tobacco and anything you wish.” He showed that similar conditions of soil and climate extended far to the westward, and, quite naturally, he wrote of this area as the “FERTILE BELT.” THE OLDER INFLUENCES. The Right Honourable Edward Ellice, one of the oldest governors of Hudson’s Bay Company, asked, when being examined before the British Parliamentary Committee of 1857, what probability there was of a settlement being made within the southern territories of the company, replied:—“None, in the lifetime of the youngest man now alive.” (“The Great Company”, p. 480). Sir George Simpson, who was for forty years governor of the Hudson Bay territories and had visited every portion of them, was examined before the select committee of the British House of Commons appointed in 1857 at the instance of Mr. Labouchere, on the eve of the expiration of the license for exclusive Indian trade issued to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1838, to investigate the state of the British possessions administered by the Company. Sir George, being asked his opinion as to the general fitness of Rupert’s Land for colonization, replied:—“I do not think that any part of the Hudson Bay territories is well adapted for settlement; the crops are very uncertain.”