The Winisk is a good large river. Mr. McInnes estimated the flow at some twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second. It runs in size somewhere between the Gatineau and the Ottawa, not quite so large as the Ottawa, but larger than the Gatineau. Over the whole of the country in the last one hundred and fifty miles down to Hudson bay, granting the proper climate and proper drainage, this green clay would make an excellent soil. In fact it is quite the same as the clay in the vicinity of Ottawa, practically clay of the same soil, and is very impervious. There are little streams running into the sides of the river, but they cut very sharp-walled trenches, as steep as boulder clay will stand, and that means an angle of say sixty degrees, eighty to ninety feet high. You get on top of these banks and you have a mossy place, sometimes six feet of moss. It is never peat, never having turned into peat. It is simply a green moss which is pressed into layers of a couple of feet in thickness at the bottom of the six or ten feet, but never apparently oxydized or never carbonized at all, practically unchanged. The growth is going on still. It is merely the successive layers which are pressed down by subsequent layers on top of them, so that in places the thickness is quite ten feet. There are no grasses in that mossy district in the valley of the Winisk. A river of that size in places has some shores, perhaps a quarter of a mile, here and there, beyond the actual shore of the river, and it is grassy there. That is, there are occasional bottom lands, but there is no extent of them. Mr. McInnes did not think there is an agricultural country in that eastern district. It is entirely different from the country of which he had been previously speaking. Upon Nelson river wheat has been grown successfully at Norway House, and also at Cross lake. The Hudson’s Bay Company grow no grain at any of their Keewatin posts nowadays. In the old days they grew it and ground it in hand mills. Mr. McInnes saw potatoes that were grown about fifty miles north of The Pas. “They were quite showy potatoes, great large fellows like those you see exhibited in fairs—tremendously large, grown on practically new land, and they had a very large crop of them.” There are no settlers in Nelson district. The Indians, however, grow potatoes at several points, even in the northern part of it, as far north as Nelson House, about latitude 55° 50′. On July 11, when Mr. McInnes arrived at Nelson House, the Indian potatoes had vines about eleven inches high, and were almost ready to flower. When he got out on September 6 to the Saskatchewan, at the Hudson’s Bay post there, at The Pas, Indian corn was very well headed out, with very large fine ears quite ready for table use, and there was no frost until September 29. He knew that because he stayed there until then.