It is like going back to prehistoric times to hear Hugh Sutherland tell of how he found it desirable to soothe the Indian mind by representing that the smokestack of an engine that he had brought into the country to saw lumber for the public works, was a cannon. It is amusing to hear him describe how, when treaty was being made with the Cree chief at the place where Battleford was to be built, he invited the Paleface to sit with him on a log; and how the chief, not being too clean, nudged nearer and nearer, until the retreating Sutherland, finding himself at the log’s end, was told that that was what was happening to the Red Man in his own country, and was asked how much further this sort of thing was intended to go? When we have read of wars and rumours of wars because some country like Bulgaria or Serbia wanted access to tidewater, it has seemed a strange perversion of the proprieties of commerce that there should be so much anxiety to control the anchorage of shipping. But the urge to the sea has been a feature of Western Canadian life ever since the difference of five cents on a bushel of wheat has meant the difference between a Windsor chair and a Morris to a Manitoba landowner. Only, instead of longing for the glistening blue of the Aegean or the Adriatic, the prairie country has hungered for the leaden mists of the Bay, which Lord Grey, with a poetic licence not habitual with him, once called the Canadian Mediterranean--thinking, no doubt, of Fort Churchill and York Factory as the Cannes and Mentone of a too quiescent Riviera. To make a grain route of Hudson Bay was an early and a latter ambition of the Winnipeg business man, to whom ice floes are not the same obstacle to business as they are to those who never knew what it is to trade while the thermometer is fluttering between forty and fifty below. When Hugh Sutherland had passed from the unexciting functions of a Government job, and was up to the eyes in developing the country, he became the chief propagandist for a Hudson Bay Railway. While I was pursuing the even tenor of my way at the Portage, he, with an apostolic fervor, was holding meetings and painting pictures in the capital, to the end that the road towards the Bay, through the flat country between Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, might begin. Infinite labour, infinite patience, because of infinite delays, and, in the constructive sense, infinite imagination, went into that launch of an enterprise which has halted men with larger resources and Governments with vaster powers than ever came Hugh Sutherland’s way. But the labour and the patience and the romance that went into a truly heroic adventure did result in forty miles of railway being built, from Winnipeg to Oak Point--and there the money was exhausted, though the desire to spend it on reaching the Bay wasn’t. Since then, as part of the Canadian Northern, the branch was extended practically the whole length of the peninsula, to Gypsumville--a name which tells why.