The Unexploited West / A Compilation of all of the authentic information available at the present time as to the Natural Resources of the Unexploited Regions of Northern Canada

by Ernest J. Chambers

Sit Out all Night and Read.

Mr. H. A. Conroy of the Indian Department (See p. [136]) informed the Senate committee that he had been down at Fort Providence mission in 1902. The missionaries had a splendid farm about latitude 62·30°, and he saw beautiful crops of wheat, oats, barley and peas. He left there on July 28, and their barley was fit to cut, and they were cutting it. Their oats and wheat would be ready to cut in a day or two from the looks of it, and the priest later told him all their grain was cut without a bit of frost. They have lots of sunlight. One could sit out all night and read. The altitude is low, and you can see the reflection of the sunset and sunrise.

W. F. Bredin, M.L.A., (See p. [104]) in his evidence before the committee, remarked that the southern shore of Great Slave lake seems to have good agricultural prospects. One notable place there is Hay river. There they raise barley and all the common vegetables. At the mouth of Great Slave river and at the mouths of all the rivers running in there, large quantities of hay grow. In fact there is a very rank growth of grass along all those streams as far north as one likes to go. Where the ground along the river is not covered with trees, grass grows. At Fort Providence, about forty miles down the Mackenzie from Great Slave lake, they raise barley and all the vegetables every year, and some years wheat and oats.

One hundred and seventy miles below, north of Fort Providence, is Fort Simpson, where Liard river comes in. The Hudson’s Bay Company for many years have raised barley and vegetables at that point. In some years they might raise wheat, but not every year. At all those Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts they always raise vegetables. They do not pretend to raise any other grain regularly but barley, because

They Use Barley for Soups.

They pound the hull of it in a hollow piece of wood and use the grain for soups. At Fort Simpson he saw cauliflowers, cabbages and cucumbers growing under exactly the same conditions as they would grow them in northern Alberta. The cucumbers were simply planted in a hotbed, and allowed to remain there protected in the early spring from the frost, and then allowed to grow in the hotbeds, with the sashes off, in the summer time.

One hundred and forty miles north of Fort Simpson is Fort Wrigley (north latitude 63°). That is where Mr. Bredin stated he once wintered. In the spring they put in a garden there. The Hudson’s Bay Company officials plant gardens every year at that point. The spring that Mr. Bredin was there they got their seed potatoes from Fort Good Hope, which is fourteen miles south of the Arctic circle. They went there for seed because they had none, having used up theirs during the winter. Mr. Bredin saw those potatoes. They were a played-out seed, a white-blue variety. They were not the improved potatoes but they were a fair size. They had the same class of potatoes at Hay river, but since that they got in new seed (the Early Rover) from outside, and they grow very much better crops. The season at Wrigley is quite long enough, because the sun shines there during all the growing season. That is the great secret of the growth in that country. There is not much fertile land at Wrigley. Down there Rocky mountains are on both sides of the river, and there is a great deal of muskeg. The garden at Fort Wrigley

Was Originally Muskeg

and covered with moss. As soon as the timber is cut off a muskeg the moss dies, the frost comes out of the ground, and gardens can be cultivated. The trees throw out their leaves in Mackenzie basin about the middle of May, before the ice goes out of the river. The year Mr. Bredin was there the ice went out of the Mackenzie at Fort Wrigley on May 23, and the trees were all out in leaf before that time. On Mackenzie river the trees leaf out almost in a few hours. The quickness with which the leaves appear on the trees in the spring is simply marvellous.

Mr. Bredin was never up Liard valley, but heard a great deal about it at Fort Simpson, and he had seen the journals of the Hudson’s Bay Company that were kept at Fort Liard, two hundred miles up Liard river. From these sources he gathered that they raised all the cereals there, such as wheat, oats and barley, as well as all the vegetables of the commoner varieties.