Already settlement has overflowed the northern frontier of the “belt of supposed limited fertility” and many thousands of acres of agricultural land have been surveyed by the Dominion Government immediately north of the North Saskatchewan and in the Peace river valley, and the surveys are being rapidly extended to keep up with the pressure of advancing settlement. While the trend of immigration is turning northward, the eyes of the capitalist are attracted in the same direction. Information concerning the resources of the country once ignored is now sought for. Facts about the climate, the soil, the timber, the rivers, the lakes, the minerals, the fish, the game obtained at the risk of life and limb by fur trader, explorer, missionary, geologist and sportsman, even those facts regarded not so long ago as merely interesting, have now a practical value. The once prevalent notion that the whole of the immense territory north of the North Saskatchewan was a sterile, frost-bound waste destined for all time to remain a wilderness, is now largely a thing of the past, and the opportunities which the latent resources of the silent places of the unexploited northwest afford to the enterprising and adventurous at the present moment challenge the attention of the world. With interest powerfully attracted to the more easterly sections of the country under review by the recent extensions northward of the limits of the prosperous provinces of Ontario and Manitoba, and with easy means of communication with the larger divisions farther west assured, thanks to the progress of the construction of railways northward to Port Nelson on Hudson bay and to McMurray in the Athabaska country, it certainly looks as though the long neglected Northland were coming to its own at last. By connecting with the three thousand miles of almost uninterrupted steamboat communication on Athabaska, Peace, Slave and Mackenzie rivers, and Athabaska and Great Slave lakes, the railway being pushed into the Athabaska country will place the whole of Mackenzie basin within easy reach of the prospector, the explorer, the sportsman and the tourist. The line being constructed to Hudson bay, as soon as steamboat connection is established therewith, will lay the very heart of that alluring El Dorado which we call the Barren Lands, with its herds of musk-oxen and caribou and its mineral wealth, open to the prospector and the sportsman, for, via Chesterfield inlet, Baker lake and the Thelon, there is a splendid, uninterrupted waterway from Hudson bay for a distance of five hundred and fifty miles into the interior.