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

Along Winisk River,

one eighty miles in length and the other about fifty.

The Winisk is a good large river. Mr. McInnes estimated the flow at some twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second. It runs in size somewhere between the Gatineau and the Ottawa, not quite so large as the Ottawa, but larger than the Gatineau. Over the whole of the country in the last one hundred and fifty miles down to Hudson bay, granting the proper climate and proper drainage, this green clay would make an excellent soil. In fact it is quite the same as the clay in the vicinity of Ottawa, practically clay of the same soil, and is very impervious. There are little streams running into the sides of the river, but they cut very sharp-walled trenches, as steep as boulder clay will stand, and that means an angle of say sixty degrees, eighty to ninety feet high. You get on top of these banks and you have a mossy place, sometimes six feet of moss. It is never peat, never having turned into peat. It is simply a green moss which is pressed into layers of a couple of feet in thickness at the bottom of the six or ten feet, but never apparently oxydized or never carbonized at all, practically unchanged. The growth is going on still. It is merely the successive layers which are pressed down by subsequent layers on top of them, so that in places the thickness is quite ten feet. There are no grasses in that mossy district in the valley of the Winisk. A river of that size in places has some shores, perhaps a quarter of a mile, here and there, beyond the actual shore of the river, and it is grassy there. That is, there are occasional bottom lands, but there is no extent of them. Mr. McInnes did not think there is an agricultural country in that eastern district. It is entirely different from the country of which he had been previously speaking.

Upon Nelson river wheat has been grown successfully at Norway House, and also at Cross lake. The Hudson’s Bay Company grow no grain at any of their Keewatin posts nowadays. In the old days they grew it and ground it in hand mills. Mr. McInnes saw potatoes that were grown about fifty miles north of The Pas. “They were quite showy potatoes, great large fellows like those you see exhibited in fairs—tremendously large, grown on practically new land, and they had a very large crop of them.” There are no settlers in Nelson district. The Indians, however, grow potatoes at several points, even in the northern part of it, as far north as Nelson House, about latitude 55° 50′. On July 11, when Mr. McInnes arrived at Nelson House, the Indian potatoes had vines about eleven inches high, and were almost ready to flower. When he got out on September 6 to the Saskatchewan, at the Hudson’s Bay post there, at The Pas, Indian corn was very well headed out, with very large fine ears quite ready for table use, and there was no frost until September 29. He knew that because he stayed there until then.

With eighteen hours of the daylight, and no frost in the summer, vegetation is rapid. In a country where you can ripen Indian corn you can grow practically anything.

Mr. McInnes explained that he could not closely indicate the isothermal line on the part of the country he had explored the previous year, but he could say that the country averaged in the summer months from four to five degrees higher temperature than the same latitude farther west. He thought that

The Isothermal Line

which would go past the north end of the country he had been speaking of, would come down as far as the north shore of Lake Superior, which would be a very long distance south. He had records kept during all summer of the temperatures through that western country, and he had a summary of the record kept in the preceding summers. He was rather surprised at the warmth of that western country in summer, and at the way heat kept up in the evenings. He kept the thermometer readings morning, noon and six o’clock in the evening, and found the six o’clock temperatures were almost as warm as the noon temperatures. That country has a very long day in summer. The day in those high latitudes is very much longer, and the growing time proportionately longer. In June they have about eighteen hours of daylight.

As to the district where he found the one hundred and seventy miles of agricultural land he had described, he reached there only about the middle of June. There was no frost in the balance of June or in July, and no frost in August, excepting once, on, he thought, the 29th, when the thermometer dropped just to freezing point. There was not enough frost to touch vegetation at all in the valley of the river where he was. He noticed when he got out to the Saskatchewan there was rather a high ridge on which there were a lot of half-breed settlers. He got there on September 6, and noticed on top of the hills where they had potatoes that they had been touched just on the tops, but down in the villages the potatoes in the garden of the Hudson’s Bay post had not been touched at all. He presumed that was the frost on August 29.

Owen O’Sullivan, C.E., of the Geological Survey of Canada, was one of the witnesses before the Senate committee of 1907. He explained that in 1904 he was engaged as assistant to Mr. Wilson in examining the west coast of James bay. They went up the river Kapiskau for one hundred and fifty miles and surveyed it, and found mostly swampy ground, right to about the headwaters of the Kapiskau, longitude 86°. His impression was that the whole coast from the southern extremity of James bay, at the mouth of the Hurricane, up to Cape Henrietta Maria, for an average of one hundred miles in depth, is mostly swampy ground. It is partly peat and wet spagnol (wet moss). There is a bluff of small spruce isolated here and there.