But it will not do to become more garrulous about a Manitoba town of nearly forty years ago. In 1893 the North Western was handed over to a receiver, the present Sir Augustus Nanton. The accountant and auditor was transferred to Winnipeg, whence the salvage operations were more effectively directed by the future knight, whose railway experience frequently made him certain that it is sometimes more blessed to give than to receive. CHAPTER VI. _Remembering when farming in the West was misunderstood, and land could not be sold._ In some respects, the Winnipeg of thirty years ago was a truer reflection of the conditions in the country from which it drew its sustenance than it has been during the last two decades. The boom had broken so disastrously that people asked whether the prairie region could ever be a country. Immigration fell to almost nothing. Beyond Manitoba, for several years, there were more abandoned than occupied homesteads. We said: “The greatest of these is Hope,” but we didn’t say “Hope” with capital letters during most of the ten years I was with the Manitoba North Western, the last three of which were spent in Winnipeg. The census of 1891, in the midst of that period, gave only 152,000 people for all Manitoba, and 98,000 for the Northwest Territories. This quarter of a million, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and from the American boundary to the Arctic ocean, included about forty-five thousand Indians and Eskimos. From 1881 to 1891, the natural increase among the whites, and immigration to the present provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta--leaving out of this the present North West Territories--increased the population by only forty-two thousand. Winnipeg, then, was the only city for about three-quarters of a million habitable square miles. When the first locomotive entered the city on Christmas Eve, in 1879, on rails laid over double-length ties across the Red River ice, under the supervision of Mr. D. D. Mann, about six thousand people were within it. At the height of the boom, in 1882, the population was estimated at 33,000. When I first saw it in 1886 the people were said to number 20,000, of whom probably 2,000 were creditable to Hope. By 1891 the total had crept to 25,000. The growth was puny until later than the twentieth century came in, for in 1901, five years after the Canadian Northern was begun, the enumerators found only 42,000 people in Winnipeg. The explanation, of course, is that prairie agriculture had not developed as rapidly as the prophets of Hope had foretold. The abandoned homestead told an eloquent story, but not the whole story. The conditions governing crop production on the plains were imperfectly understood. The conditions underlying permanent settlement were not appreciated by the Governments or by the business people who were largely interested in colonization.