f his energy. Mr Fleming possessed an unusual gift of
literary style, and his reports upon the work of his staff gave the
people of Canada a very clear idea of the difficulties to be
encountered. His friend, the Rev. George M. Grant, who accompanied him
in a rapid reconnaissance in 1872, gave, in his book {118} _Ocean to
Ocean_, a vivid and heartening record of the realities and the promise
that he saw.

It had been decided, in order to hold the balance even between Montreal
and Toronto, to make the proposed Pacific road begin at some angle of
Lake Nipissing. From that point nearly to the Red River there
stretched a thousand miles of woodland, rugged and rock-strewn, covered
by a network of countless lakes and rivers, interspersed with seemingly
bottomless swamps or muskegs--a wilderness which no white man had ever
passed through from end to end. Then came the level prairie and a
great rolling plain rising to the south-west in three successive
steppes, and cut by deep watercourses. But it was the third or
mountain section which presented the most serious engineering
difficulties. Four hundred miles from the Pacific coast, and roughly
parallel, ran the towering Rocky Mountains, some of whose peaks rose
fifteen thousand feet. Beyond stretched a vast plateau, three or four
thousand feet above sea-level, intersected by rivers which had cut deep
chasms or, to the northward, wide sheltered valleys. Between this
plateau and the coast the Cascades interposed, rivalling the Rockies in
height and {119} rising sheer from the ocean, which thrust in deep
fiord channels. At the head of some one of these fiords must be found
the western terminus.

[Illustration: Fleming Route and the Transcontinentals]

Early in the survey a practicable route was found throughout. Striking
across the wilderness from Lake Nipissing to Lake Superior at the river
Pic, the line might skirt the shore of the lake to Fort William, or it
might run northerly through what is now known as the clay belt, with
Fort William and the lake made accessible by a branch. Continuing
westward to the Red River at Selkirk, with Winnipeg on a branch line to
the south, the projected line crossed Lake Manitoba at the Narrows, and
then struck out northwesterly, through what was then termed the
'Fertile Belt,' till the Yellowhead Pass was reached. Here the Rockies
could be easily pierced; but once through the engineer was faced by the
huge flanking range of the Car