of her export trade went out by Canadian
routing. Why was that? The Department of Railroads and Canals in its
annual report explains elaborately that sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian grain went out by the Duluth-Buffalo route instead of Ft.
William-Montreal because the lake rate of the former was cheaper as
three to six cents a bushel; but there is nothing in this argument
because Montreal is tidewater. Buffalo is not. To the cheaper Buffalo
rate you must add five cents to New York, proving the American routing
really two cents a bushel higher. Yet sixty per cent. of Western
Canadian wheat went out by the costlier routing. Why? For the same
reason that if you jam a bag too full it bursts. Because the Canadian
trans-continentals simply could not take care of the traffic blockading
tracks and ports and elevators.

So in spite of the funny man's jokes about a Hudson Bay route being
"iron tonic for the cows," Canada launched on another all-red,
to-the-sea railroad project.

IV

What of the road itself?

I camped in the region a few years ago when the venture was still in
air. The wheat plains terminate just west of Lake Winnipeg in an
interminable swamp region that has been the home of small furs from the
beginning of time. Saskatchewan River here literally widens to seventy
miles of swamp, where you can barely find foot room dry soled except in
winter, when the marsh turns to iron ice twelve feet thick. Through
this swamp country runs a ridge of rock northeasterly to Hudson Bay.
Down this ridge run Nelson and Hayes and Churchill Rivers in a
succession of rapids and lakes, wild rough barren country, where you
can paddle in summer or course by dog-train in winter for four hundred
miles without sight of arable land or human dwelling. Along this ridge
the railroad runs from the wheat plains. It is a route destined for
the present to be barren of local traffic, but that also is true of the
stretches along Lake Superior, or across the desert of the Southwest.
Back from the ridge coal deposits have been found, and traces of
copper, the mines of which have not yet been located. I myself saw
chunks of pure copper from the Churchill River region the size of one's
hand, but the veins from which the Indians brought it have not yet been
located. In time these great deposits may be worked as oil and coal
and gold and silver have been taken from the American Desert, but for
the near future the Hudson Bay Railroad