By officially establishing the existence of this rich, arable area in the southern part of the territories governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and by associating it with such an apt designation, the Palliser and Hind expeditions brought strong popular support to those who in Britain and Canada were at that particular period actively working to secure the introduction of Canadian jurisdiction over the whole of the western part of British North America, and materially contributed to the success of the protracted negotiations which resulted in the ultimate surrender of its rights of government, etc., by the Hudson’s Bay Company. If any other proof was required to establish in the popular mind the attractiveness of the “Fertile Belt” as a desirable section for settlement, it was furnished by the written agreement under which the country was handed over to the Dominion of Canada, the term “Fertile Belt” therein receiving the stamp of the highest official recognition, and by the Hudson’s Bay Company, famous as a shrewdly managed corporation, stipulating that the grants of land to be made them were to be located within the area so designated. SETTLEMENT OF “THE FERTILE BELT.” The term “Fertile Area” proved a very loadstone to the settler and the capitalist. Ever since the settlement of the troubles which accompanied the transfer of the great northwest to the Dominion of Canada there has been a stream of immigration flowing into the country, and up to the past few years the Fertile Belt has been the settler’s Mecca and El Dorado. In the summer of 1874 the region west of the original province of Manitoba was ‘opened up’ by the Northwest Mounted Police as far as Macleod in the south, and Edmonton in the north. In 1885 the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway main line gave western Canada direct communication with the eastern provinces, and a fair chance to develop her natural resources, particularly in the Fertile Belt, through which the line was constructed. In 1870 the population of the whole region east of Rocky mountains over which the Great Company had so recently relinquished its rule as Lord Proprietor amounted to but a few hundred; at the present time (census of 1911) it amounts to no less than one million, three hundred and forty-eight thousand, one hundred and seventy two. And with the exception of the partially settled areas in Beaver, Athabaska and Peace districts, and a few small, isolated posts on Hudson bay and along Mackenzie river, the whole of this population is located within the “Fertile Belt” as defined in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s agreement of 1869. This is not to be wondered at considering the undoubted natural attractiveness of the zone, its rapidly developed advantages in the way of railway communication, and the benefit it derived from being originally introduced to the world as a future paradise of agricultural enterprise under such an apt and alluring designation as “The Fertile Belt.”