626 TUB GLACIAL LAKE AGASSIZ. 



BUILDING STONE. 



Quarries of magnesian limestone have beeu extensively worked at 

 East Selkirk, Stonewall, Stony Mountain, and Little Stony JMountain, partly 

 for lime-burning-, but also in large amount for foundations, bridges, and 

 buildings. The East Selkirk stone is beautifully mottled and banded, 

 and is easy to cut when first quarried, but hardens much when its mois- 

 ture dries out. It contains so much water that newly qiiarried blocks in 

 winter are damaged by freezing; but after drying no such frost fracture 

 is observed where this rock has beeu used in masonry. By exposure 

 many years the streaked contrast in color is mostly weathered out, the 

 brown portions losing their darker color. The Volunteers' Monument in 

 Winnipeg is a fine example of the adaptation of this stone for ornamental 

 purposes. The quarry at Stonewall, situated close east of the village, has 

 been opened to an average depth of 6 or 8 feet on an area about 15 rods 

 square. Inexhaustible supplies of stone of the most durable quality, in 

 many portions capable of being quarried in blocks of large dimensions, out- 

 crop there and at Stony Mountain, and have beeu ml^ch used for building 

 in Winnipeg. Similar stone has been slightly quarried on the northeast 

 quarter of section 4, township 15, range 2 east, on land of Allen Bristow, 9 

 miles north-northeast of Stonewall. The outcrop of Cretaceous limestone 

 on the Assiniboine, in section 36, toAvnship 8, range 11, has also been 

 quarried in small amount. 



The abundant Ai-chean bowlders of granite, gneiss, and schists in the 

 till or glacial drift are readily collected wherever the till forms the surface, 

 and on these tracts they commonly serve the immigrant for the construc- 

 tion of foundations of farm building's and for the walls of cellars and wells. 



The quarry of Little Stony Mountain was actively operated several 

 years ag'o for burning lime, a spur track about a mile long being- laid to it 

 from the Canadian Pacific Railway; but work had been suspended at the 

 time of my survey of the beaches of Lake Agassiz in Manitoba, in 1887. 



Besides the outcrops of the bed-rock which thus supply lime, it is 

 conveniently obtained by collecting and bm-ning limestone bowlders that 



