This route was across sections of the prairie country marked on the Government map, printed in Sandford Fleming’s great report of 1880, as having “soil of rich quality and pasture land more or less fertile.” The map is the first in which, to quote from its superscription, “An attempt has been made to distinguish the general physical character of the country, on the routes followed by different explorers and scientific travelers.” The map is one of the most interesting proofs of the wisdom with which the Canadian Northern lines in the West were planned; taking in, as they do, the territory first pre-empted by the Canadian Pacific main line, which was also commonly known as “The Fertile Belt”. There was a second location of the C.P.R. main line, which was to leave Portage la Prairie eight miles to the south, and was to swing round the Riding Mountains, virtually on the route afterwards taken by the Manitoba North Western, and was to cross the Assiniboine a little below where Kamsack now is, and pick up the original location at Nut Hill, about twelve miles straight north of the present little station of Rama on the Canadian Northern main line, two hundred and forty miles from Winnipeg. The Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company was chartered to enter this originally selected territory of the Canadian Pacific main line. Nervy farmers, knowing good country when they saw it, went into the district around Lake Dauphin, through which the C.P.R. was to come. Some stuck to their places, even after it seemed that hope of a railway in their time was vain. There were others, known as the judgment-proof settlers. They had fled from conditions which made it impossible for them to profit by their experience, and had come from hard times to harder. The wonderful fertility of the Dauphin and Gilbert Plains country, and the abundance of wood within reach of everywhere made it an ideal farming territory. One is able to report that J. B. Tyrrell, whose Western surveys for the Dominion Government began in 1883, and have covered the country between the Kootenays and Dawson city, between Edmonton and Chesterfield Inlet, and from Fort Churchill to Winnipeg and included two summers in northwestern Manitoba, says that if he were choosing a farm location he would go to the Dauphin country. Apropos that preference, consider an illustration of how the sober truth of a scientific bluebook can be regarded as the fiction of a romancing propagandist.