THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION 5 I 



settlement, where the Ontario Government has already established a 

 dairy farm, which promises remarkably well. No doubt many other 

 regions of fertile land exist throughout our northern domain ; but of 

 those that are well known it may be safe to say that the largest and 

 best is the country on the Rainy river lying between Rainy lake and 

 the Lake of the Woods. Writing of this district and the river itself 

 in his Narrative of a Journey round the World, Governor Simpson of 

 the Hudson's Bay Company said : " From Fort Francis downwards 

 a stretch of nearly a hundred miles, it is not interrupted by a single 

 impediment, while yet the current is not strong enough naturally to 

 retard an ascending traveller. Nor are the banks less favorable to 

 agriculture than the waters themselves to navigation, resembling in 

 some measure those of the Thames near Richmond. From the very 

 brink of the river there rises a gentle slope of green sward, crowned 

 in many places with a plentiful growth of birch, poplar, beech, elm 

 and oak. Is it too much for the eye of phiianthrophy to discover, 

 through the vista of futurity, this noble stream, connecting as it does 

 the fertile shores of two spacious lakes, with crowded steamboats on 

 its bosom, and populuous towns on its borders.* This is a glowing 

 description for a Hudson's Bay ofificer to give ; but Governor Sim.p- 

 son recanted it with ingenuity when the claims of his company 

 seemed to be in jeopardy before a committee of the Imperial House 

 of Commons a few years afterwards. When the passage from his 

 book was read to him, first by Mr. Gordon and subsequently by Mr. 

 Roebuck, Governor Simpson said he only meant the description to 

 apply to the bank, "the lip of the river" as he phrased it. "The 

 back country is a deep morass, and never can be drained in my 

 opinion." And again : "I confine myself to the banks; the back 

 country is one deep morass extending for miles." The Governor's 

 explanation was ingenious in a little sense, but it had the demerit of 

 being untrue. The fertile land along the Rainy river on the Ontario 

 side extends nearly frorn one lake to the other, a distance of about 

 eighty miles, and its breadth is said to range from five to twenty-five 

 miles. The land also rises steadily towards the north, so that drain- 

 age is easy ; indeed the swampy ground a mile back from the river is 

 found by levels to be seventy feet above it, The soil is deep and 



♦Narrative of a Journey Bound the World during the years 1841 and 

 184-2, vol. I., pp. 45-6. 



