GLACIERS AND WOODED ISLANDS 283 



found there in the future. The new government railway 

 and more adequate land laws will doubtless stimulate 

 discovery and trade to an extent previously unknown. 



The town of Prince Rupert is the most northern port 

 of British territory on the Pacific. It lies near the south- 

 ern border of the thin strip of coast belonging to Alaska 

 and is the terminus of the Canadian Grand Trunk Pacific 

 Railway, which was not yet completed. This raw town 

 was most interesting. It was the foreshadowing of a 

 future great city, yet it had a bare 7,000 inhabitants and 

 rough board houses, served by plank roads that ran past 

 many a tree stump and over many a hillock. Here we 

 were permitted consciously to see that rare thing, an 

 important city in the days just following its foundation. 

 The rich country tapped by the new railway, the cheap- 

 ness of its trans-continental haul, the quicker route to 

 Japan, the excellent harbor, all determined beforehand 

 that Prince Rupert must some day be reckoned with the 

 large ports of the Pacific Coast. It is a fiat city, delib- 

 erately placed on its present location after exhaustive 

 search of the coast for the best site, laid out and sur- 

 veyed by the best civic architects, furnished with a 

 model municipal government. When all this work had 

 been done it was handed over to the inhabitants by the 

 process of auctioning the lots, and these were purchased 

 alike by speculators all over the world and by confident 

 residents. One corner, 50 x 50 feet, unimproved, not 

 yet graded, still full of stumps, was held for sale at 

 $42,500. They had discotmted the future for some time 

 to come. 



Leaving the zealous real estate agents of Prince 

 Rupert, we boarded a special train and rode nearly a 

 hundred miles up the large Skeena River, by which the 



