From the Pacific to Hudson's Bay. 307 



then be passed with very favourable gradients, and with works not 

 exceeding in magnitude those generally required on other portions 

 of the line. 



" In addition to the manifest advantages offered by this route, 

 there is, further, the important consideration that in the place of 

 a bleak, sterile country, wherein settlement is an impossibility for 

 hundreds of miles, the line would traverse an area of remarkable 

 fertility with but a few short intervals of country unfit for settle- 

 ment. This route also passes between the vast mineral districts of 

 Omenica and Cariboo. The extraordinary results of recent mining 

 operations in the latter give promise, when their resources are 

 more fully developed — as they can only be with the assistance of 

 direct railway communication — of rivalling, if not surpassing, the 

 far-famed gold and silver regions of the neighbouring States, which 

 lie in the same mountain zone. 



" Port Simpson may possibly be considered, at present, too far 

 north for the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway; but it is 

 important that the fact should be borne in mind that, by virtue of 

 low altitudes and consequent easy gradients, together with the 

 comparatively moderate character of the work required to reach it, 

 this terminal point offers advantages which would enable a Cana- 

 dian line to defy competition for the trade with China and Japan, 

 Port Simpson being fully five hundred miles nearer to Yokohama 

 than Holme's Harbour, at the mouth of Puget Sound, the proposed 

 ultimate terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway, while the advan- 

 tage it possesses over San Francisco is correspondingly greater. 



" But the Pine River Pass is not merely the key to Port Simpson : 

 it affords comparatively easy communication with Bute Inlet, and 

 all the intermediate inlets between that point and Port Simpson, 

 the valleys of the rivers leading to these inlets radiating from the 

 Stuart Valley, south-west of the Pass, with exceptional directness. 

 Thus many of the difficulties in the way of reaching Bute Inlet and 

 the inlets to the north of it, via the Yellowhead Pass, can be 

 avoided, and this probably without increasing the length of the line." 



There is still further evidence in the report of Mr. Joseph 

 Hunter, C.E., to Mr. Marcus Smith, in 1878. He says:— "The 



