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 will carry little traffic but that received at its terminals.
The western terminal connecting with the wheat railroads is the Pas, an old, very old fur post of the French wood-runner days, on the Saskatchewan west of Lake Winnipeg. Here the railroad touches the Canada Northern and will doubtless later connect with the Canadian Pacific Railroad and Grand Trunk. To any one who knows the region well it seems almost a pity that the western terminus could not have been Grand Rapids just northwest of Lake Winnipeg. Here is a fine wooded high park country with the unlimited water power of nine miles of a continental river walled into a canyon half a mile wide. But the country west of Lake Winnipeg is as yet untouched by a railroad, though one can hardly conceive of a city not some day springing up at this the head of Manitoba navigation. Eastward from the Pas to Hudson Bay it is four hundred miles plus. Construction presents no great difficulties except bridging, and that can hardly be compared to the difficulties of canyons in the Rockies and drouth in the desert.
For years there was sharp contest whether the terminus on the Bay should be Nelson or Churchill. Churchill is one of the best harbors in the world, land locked, rock protected and fathomless; and Nelson is probably one of the worst—shallow, with sand bars caused by the confluence of the two great rivers emptying here, exposed to open sea. But the balance of favor on the Bay is how long can navigation be kept open. Navigation is open a month earlier and a month later at Nelson than at Churchill; so the Dominion dredges have gone to work to make Nelson a fit harbor.
How long is navigation open on the Bay? The Dominion government has sent three expeditions to ascertain this, though data might have been obtained from the Archives of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company covering the record of over two hundred years. Both the Archives and the official expeditions record the same—navigation opens between the middle of May and the first of June, and closes about the end of October. Seasons have been known when navigation remained open till New Year's, but this was unusual. So as far as the opening and closing of navigation is considered, the Hudson Bay route is not far different from the Great Lakes.
Hudson Bay itself is in area about the size of the Mediterranean. Because it is so far north the impression prevails that it is afloat with ice. This is a false impression. Hudson Bay lies in the same latitude as the North Sea and the Baltic, which are freighted with Russian and German commerce, but the climate, of course, is colder. The ice, which has given the great inland sea its ill repute, comes from the Pole and goes out through the Straits, seldom coming down the Bay in the season of navigation.
The Straits are the real crux of the Hudson Bay route to Europe, and there is no narrow neck of land to cut a way of escape through to open sea as at Kiel and Cape Cod. The Straits have been navigated by fur-traders since 1670, but the fur-traders could take a week or a month to the four hundred and fifty miles of Straits. They could afford the time to float back and forward with the ice packs for six weeks, and as many as seven vessels have been wrecked in ten years. To this tale of wreckage in the Straits, friends of the Hudson Bay route answer as follows:
First, the fur-traders' vessels were little discarded admiralty vessels of small tonnage and rickety construction. Give us ice jammers such as the Russians use on the Baltic, built narrow and high of oak, not steel, to ride and crush down through the ice; and we can take care of high insurance rates. Second, the Straits are still an utterly uncharted sea four hundred and fifty miles long and from seventy to one hundred and fifty wide. This is not so long as the passage up the St. Lawrence. In such an inland sea as these Straits there must exist safe as well as unsafe channels, shelters, smooth reaches. Let us get the Straits charted and marked with buoys, with telegraph and cable points, and we shall navigate these four hundred and fifty miles. The questions of lighthouses need not bother the Straits, for the season of navigation is also the season of long daylight.
V
Three advantages must be put on the credit side of the Hudson Bay route: