The term “Fertile Area” proved a very loadstone to the settler and the capitalist. Ever since the settlement of the troubles which accompanied the transfer of the great northwest to the Dominion of Canada there has been a stream of immigration flowing into the country, and up to the past few years the Fertile Belt has been the settler’s Mecca and El Dorado.
In the summer of 1874 the region west of the original province of Manitoba was ‘opened up’ by the Northwest Mounted Police as far as Macleod in the south, and Edmonton in the north. In 1885 the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway main line gave western Canada direct communication with the eastern provinces, and a fair chance to develop her natural resources, particularly in the Fertile Belt, through which the line was constructed.
In 1870 the population of the whole region east of Rocky mountains over which the Great Company had so recently relinquished its rule as Lord Proprietor amounted to but a few hundred; at the present time (census of 1911) it amounts to no less than one million, three hundred and forty-eight thousand, one hundred and seventy two. And with the exception of the partially settled areas in Beaver, Athabaska and Peace districts, and a few small, isolated posts on Hudson bay and along Mackenzie river, the whole of this population is located within the “Fertile Belt” as defined in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s agreement of 1869. This is not to be wondered at considering the undoubted natural attractiveness of the zone, its rapidly developed advantages in the way of railway communication, and the benefit it derived from being originally introduced to the world as a future paradise of agricultural enterprise under such an apt and alluring designation as “The Fertile Belt.”
But while the united energies of the capitalist, the railroad builder and the agriculturist have been devoted to the exploration of the Fertile Belt, the much larger area of virgin country extending from the northern limits of the strip in question to Arctic sea and lying between Hudson bay and Rocky mountains has been neglected.
This (not including the Yukon), the most northern section of the vast western region formerly ruled by the big fur-trading company, comprises no less than one and one-half million square miles of country, or considerably more than the combined territory (on March 1, 1912) of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Manitoba. Its very vastness, coupled with its remoteness from the great centres of population, has tended to keep it, as far as the world at large is concerned, comparatively
A Terra Incognita.
The word “comparatively” is used advisedly, for while it is true that the greater part of the unexploited northland is unexplored and unknown, we have in one way or another obtained considerable useful information about it. Now and again word has come from some missionary station or trading post somewhere up in the far north, hundreds of miles beyond the northern limits of the “Fertile Belt,” of root crops, barley, oats, and even wheat being raised during a long succession of years with phenomenal success. Explorers returned from the great north have related how they were regaled upon potatoes and other vegetables grown a few miles from Arctic Circle. A sample of wheat grown at Fort Vermilion in north latitude 58·4°, three hundred and fifty miles north of Edmonton, was awarded First Prize at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, in 1876, in competition with the whole world. Geological explorers have reported vast deposits of coal and other minerals underlying immense areas in the far north. Adventurous travellers, back from the least promising regions of Canada’s great northland have disclosed the existence of timber areas and of game and fish preserves of fabulous richness.
And this great northern country long ago had its champions who challenged the attention of the world by predicting for sections of it, at least, an agricultural and industrial future. Mr. Malcolm McLeod, formerly of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and, as a son of the North, jealous of its reputation, stirred up the thought that in the glamour attached to the original exploitation of the “Fertile Belt” the natural resources of the vaster country to the north would be overlooked, and in the preface of his book, published in 1872, on Sir George Simpson’s canoe voyage from Hudson bay to the Pacific in 1828, wrote:—“The object of the present brochure, at this juncture, is to direct attention—by an account of a canoe voyage through the region—to the fact that beyond that belt of supposed limited fertility, which is implied in the term “Fertile Belt,” there is, in our north west, an area, continuous in every direction and easily accessible to its utmost limits, containing over three hundred millions of acres of wheat and pasture lands, with forests of finest timber, and the largest known coal and bitumen, and also probably the richest gold areas in the world—a land teeming with animal and vegetable life, extending to the very Arctic Circle, and owing its wealth in that respect to exceptional causes. I refer to that area—comprised entirely of Silurian and Devonian systems—watered by the great Athabaska, Peace and Mackenzie rivers, with their countless affluents.”
The very year of Confederation the attention of the reading public of the world was forcibly drawn to the latent natural wealth of the northland. The writer of an article published in the Westminster Review of July, 1876, (“The Last Monopoly”) pointed out that “nature marching from east to west, showered her bounties on the land of the United States until she reached the Mississippi, but there she turned aside to favour British territory. To the north the good land of the western states is prolonged beyond the forty-ninth parallel, where it enters British territory as the Fertile Zone. The fertile zone curves towards the north as it proceeds westward, so that the western extremity of the belt is several degrees of latitude higher than the eastern, the curves apparently corresponding pretty closely with certain isothermal lines. The forest zone extends to latitude 61° on Hudson bay. Coal crops out at intervals in seams of ten or twelve feet thick from the Mackenzie in the far north to the Saskatchewan. Ironstone has been discovered in the Athabaska. Sulphur abounds on Peace and Smoky rivers. Salt is plentiful near Great Slave lake; plumbago and mineral pitch on Lake Athabaska; copper, native and in the form of malachite, on Coppermine river.”
The Northland’s First Champions.