132 EXPLORATION OF THE PRAIRIES, 1879 



Mr. Laird asked me if I would like to see Mr. Mackenzie 

 (the Prime Minister) as he had been enquiring about me. I said 

 that I certainly would, and I found him to be a very pleasant 

 little Scotchman, but very conservative, for he would not believe 

 one word I told him about the Northwest. When I told him you 

 could travel for two hundred miles and not see an acre of bad 

 land he said, "I canna believe it." The reason for this assertion 

 was that, in Ontario, we had good land always intermixed 

 with poor soils. 



On my return to Belleville, I at once took up my regular 

 studies and, in the meantime, thought over my report and began 

 to compile the notes I had taken. In doing this, I made many 

 discoveries that had not appeared to me of value before. One 

 was, why should the climate of the lower part of the Peace River 

 be as fine as the climate of Winnipeg, one thousand, two hundred 

 miles from it, and ten degrees further south? This led me to 

 take up the studies that I had almost given up, that is, Blodgett's 

 Climatology and Maurie's Geography of the Sea. These two 

 books I found invaluable. For many years, I had been satisfied 

 that to tell the climate of a country by its annual temperature 

 was altogether out of the question, as the three growing months 

 of any year anywhere were factors that produced the crops. So, 

 in making my tables, I took the three growing months of any 

 part of the world and took their average and I found that, in every 

 case, these were the factors that produced the crop. In fact, heat 

 and moisture are the chief factors in the growth of good crops. 

 In working at my report, I began to realize the immensity of the 

 country I had come through, and its wonderful value for the 

 future of Canada, and, the longer I worked, the more this realiza- 

 tion grew. In conversation with the men at Chipewyan, I found 

 they raised wheat as far down the McKenzie as Fort Simpson in 

 latitude 62° and up the Liard to 61° and at Winnipeg, in latitude 

 50°, conditions were apparently not so good as the conditions I 

 found on the lower Peace River, and the distance between the 

 two points was fully one thousand two hundred miles. 



At this time, Mr. Mackenzie was in power and the ideas of 

 the Liberal party, which were then called "Reformers," were 



