Foreword —continued

it gets transportation, will set in one of the historic land rushes
of modern days. Already the advance guard, hundreds strong, are
spying out the land and selecting for themselves its choicest acres.

This great region contains, according to evidence given before
the Senate of the Dominion of Canada, 60,000,000 acres, and of
this immense area 40,000,000 acres is reported as first class agri-
cultural land. Wheat grown in this rich counuy took the cham-
pionship of the world at the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876, and
again at the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1895. Climate and
soil combine to make the conditions for grain-growing ideal, and
for mixed farming the conditions are equally favorable.

Nor are its agricultural possibilities the only natural riches of
which the Peace River can boast. There are vast timber and pulp
forests, and apparently limitless supplies of coal and limestone.
On one particular asphalt claim the official government estimate
gives the number of tons of asphalt as 1,400,000,000, while all
indications point to the Peace River being one of the world’s
future oil fields.

Into this rich district three railways are now under present
or immediate construction. ‘The Canadian Northern is building
from Edmonton through Athabasca Landing to Dunvegan. The
Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway, running south
of Lesser Slave Lake, is under agreement with the Alberta Goy-
ernment to start construction immediately. The Pacific and Hudson
Bay will go through Fort George into the Peace, and on to Fort
Churchill on Hudson’s Bay. ‘These roads will link up at Fort
George with the Grand Trunk and the Pacific and Great Eastern
through the Pine River Pass, and their construction is one of the
immediate certainties of railway building.

When the roads are built the products of the rich Peace River
country will come down through Fort George to Pacific tidewater.
If the reader will consult the map, printed on the inside cover of this
Album, showing the distances in Fort George’s tributary commer-
cial territory, the geographical facts that underlie this statement
will be at once made plain—especially when the facts are con-

Page Four

sidered in their relation to the early completion of the Panama
Canal. Ton for ton, rail freight rates cannot compete with water
transport. Dunvegan, by way of Fort George, is some 800 miles
from Pacific salt water. From Montreal it is over 3,000 miles, and
of this distance Peace River eastbound produce must be hauled for
1,100 miles—to Port Arthur or Fort William—behind a locomotive.
Will Peace River grain go east to Montreal, four times the distance,
to a sea-going ship, or will it take the shorter, quicker, and much
less costly route via Fort George to the Pacific? No person will
hesitate a moment in deciding that it will take the easy, natural
westward route through Fort George.

And, for precisely the same reasons, the supplies for the Peace
River country will be made from Fort George, through its two
main sea bases—Vancouver and Prince Rupert.

Fort George, in short, occupies the same strategic commercial
location in relation to its own territory as Chicago and Winnipeg.
From the Rocky Mountains east to Lake Michigan—a territory
comprising eight of the largest cities in the Union—Chicago sits
at the gate, and takes toll of all that goes in or comes out. It is
the bung of the barrel—the place where the currents of trade must
pass. North of the International boundary, Winnipeg occupies a
similar strategic commercial position. It is the door through which
every bushel of grain, every hoof of stock, every pound of mer-
chandise raised or required for a territory one-third the area of
the whole of Europe must go or come, and all are helping to build
it up into one of the great cities of the continent.

Similar causes will produce similar results at Fort George.
If-——as I have already shown—the products of the rich Peace River
district must come westward to the Pacific, they must flow through
Fort George in one ever-increasing stream, the currents there
splitting, one going straight west to Prince Rupert, the other
straight south down the Fraser Valley to Vancouver. Think what
it will mean when there passes through Fort George the imports
for a rich and prosperous country as large as New York and
Pennsylvania combined. ‘Think of the enormous return trafic—