Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.

We are in latitude 55° North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
Chimerical? Why so?

Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
55° westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
about to enter does not enjoy.

Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by