Prince Rupert is also on the route of the celebrated “Sail up
the Sound” which, for wild grandeur, excels almost anything to
be found in the world from the deck of a seagoing ship, while
the trains of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway will traverse some
of the finest scenery to be found on the American continent. From
the wooded lake-lands of Quebec and Ontario, across the wide and
fertile fields of the Prairie provinces, by the banks of the mighty
rivers of the North, through Yellowhead Pass, through deep, dark
canons, where in mid-summer, from beneath the north windows
of a west-bound train, will come the sweet fragrance of wild
roses, while from the south windows the traveler can look out
upon a glinting glacier whose cold shroud trails to the margin
of the mountain stream, along the banks of which the trains will
travel over this short cut across Canada. And this same train
will take the traveler by the base of Mt. Robson, said to be
the highest mountain in the Dominion.

And over these rails, and down to Prince Rupert, will flow
the commerce of all that new West, bound for the East by the
Western way, as surely as the waters of the Pacific slope flow
into the Pacific Ocean; but this commercial water-shed will ex-
tend hundreds of miles further east than the natural water-shed
extends. The mineral wealth of all that vast mountain region,
the forest products, the coal, the copper and iron ore of Northern
British Columbia and the Yukon, as well as the food products of
the Prairie provinces, and the fish and fur of the far North—in
short, all the export wealth of that resourceful region, west-
bound, must find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert.

Prince Rupert is surrounded by a country whose natural re-
sources are more rich and varied than those of any other country
known to the present generation. And her sphere is ever widen-
ing, her natural trade zone is daily being extended north, and
still further north.

It is but a little over half a century since a Congressional Com-
mission, sitting in Chicago, declared that the State of Illinois
marked the Northern limit of the profitable wheat-growing area
of this continent. In spite of this the little pink bread-berry
spread north and west to Minnesota, the Dakotas, crawled up the
Red River of the North, to Portage Plains, spread over Saskatch-
ewan to Alberta, where the miller came into competition with
the flour of the Peace River, and where, not having heard of the
Chicago Commission, men had been sowing and reaping for a
generation or more.

Fifty years ago, when the United States was seeking a possi-
ble rail route to the Pacific, the Northern Pacific route was put
aside with scant consideration as being impracticable, owing to
its northerly location. The same argument delayed for years the
construction of Canada’s first transcontinental line, but now we
know more of the north country.

Every traveler and explorer who goes into the far North comes
out with new stories of that much maligned land until their song