And this great northern country long ago had its champions who challenged the attention of the world by predicting for sections of it, at least, an agricultural and industrial future. Mr. Malcolm McLeod, formerly of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and, as a son of the North, jealous of its reputation, stirred up the thought that in the glamour attached to the original exploitation of the “Fertile Belt” the natural resources of the vaster country to the north would be overlooked, and in the preface of his book, published in 1872, on Sir George Simpson’s canoe voyage from Hudson bay to the Pacific in 1828, wrote:—“The object of the present brochure, at this juncture, is to direct attention—by an account of a canoe voyage through the region—to the fact that =beyond that belt of supposed limited fertility=, which is implied in the term “Fertile Belt,” there is, in our north west, an area, continuous in every direction and easily accessible to its utmost limits, containing over three hundred millions of acres of wheat and pasture lands, with forests of finest timber, and the largest known coal and bitumen, and also probably the richest gold areas in the world—a land teeming with animal and vegetable life, extending to the very Arctic Circle, and owing its wealth in that respect to exceptional causes. I refer to that area—comprised entirely of Silurian and Devonian systems—watered by the great Athabaska, Peace and Mackenzie rivers, with their countless affluents.” The very year of Confederation the attention of the reading public of the world was forcibly drawn to the latent natural wealth of the northland. The writer of an article published in the Westminster Review of July, 1876, (“The Last Monopoly”) pointed out that “nature marching from east to west, showered her bounties on the land of the United States until she reached the Mississippi, but there she turned aside to favour British territory. To the north the good land of the western states is prolonged beyond the forty-ninth parallel, where it enters British territory as the Fertile Zone. The fertile zone curves towards the north as it proceeds westward, so that the western extremity of the belt is several degrees of latitude higher than the eastern, the curves apparently corresponding pretty closely with certain isothermal lines. The forest zone extends to latitude 61° on Hudson bay. Coal crops out at intervals in seams of ten or twelve feet thick from the Mackenzie in the far north to the Saskatchewan. Ironstone has been discovered in the Athabaska. Sulphur abounds on Peace and Smoky rivers. Salt is plentiful near Great Slave lake; plumbago and mineral pitch on Lake Athabaska; copper, native and in the form of malachite, on Coppermine river.” THE NORTHLAND’S FIRST CHAMPIONS.