Tyrrell’s reports to the Geological Survey of his work in 1889 and 1890 make it clear that Lake Manitoba is the remainder of a much vaster inland sea, which was pretty deep--its shores were high in the present Riding and Duck Mountains. On the high water line are deposits of phosphatic shale, the product of immense accumulations of fish bones, Tyrrell believes. The leaching from these deposits to the plains below has made the farms in the Dauphin and Gilbert Plains districts so remarkably fertile that it was found undesirable to permit the land to lie fallow every third year as in most of the prairie country. Allow a Dauphin field an idle, clean summer and the following years the wheat crops will most likely be hopelessly lodged. It is therefore customary, in order to keep the land clean, to allow the weeds to get a good start in the spring, plow them in at the beginning of June, and take off a crop of barley so as to prevent the following season’s wheat crop from choking itself into unprofitability. One summer the Canadian Northern superintendent of publicity was taking a party of journalists from Winnipeg to Edmonton, and, as his custom was, he brought aboard the train, at different points, local men who could tell about their district. The National Editorial Association of the United States after leaving Dauphin were bidden to a testimony meeting in the forward coach of the special train. The publicity superintendent offered a few remarks on the quality of the landscape the party was viewing, and told of the phosphatic shale derived from fishbones deposited in the hills, perhaps five million years ago. He received some attenuated applause for this narration; but was not flattered later to learn that it was bestowed for the most colossal, most imaginative fish story that so seasoned a bunch of newspapermen had ever heard. The connoisseurs of descriptive narrative were in the mood, though not the condition, of a distinguished visitor at the Quebec Garrison Club several years ago, who, having assiduously sampled the visions that come gaily through the rye, saw, as he was leaving, an enormous stuffed Lake St. John salmon on the wall, at the stair’s foot. He gazed at it for a full minute and remarked: “That’s a d----d lie!” Parliaments may authorize, but financiers may refuse to finance. Though the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal charter, land grant and all, had been obtained by the Davis firm of contractors, they could induce nobody to furnish the money to build the line and possess the land. They tried to sell the charter, and in 1892 or 1893 D. D. Mann began negotiations to buy it. He took an option for a thousand dollars, and allowed it to expire. He renewed the option for two thousand dollars, and that also ran out. He figured that, in the end, the rights could be acquired more advantageously by that form of attrition of attractiveness.