e equally fertile and equally diversified in
fertility. Along the lakes and clustered round Niagara is the great
fruit region--vineyards and apple orchards that are gardens of
perfection. North of the lakes is a mixed farm region. Parallel with
the latitude skirting Georgian Bay begins the Great Clay belt, an area
of heavily forested lands about seven hundred miles north to south and
almost a thousand diagonally east to west. On its southern edge this
hinterland, which forms the watershed between Hudson Bay and the St.
Lawrence, seems to be rock-bound and iron-capped. For years travelers
across the continent must have looked through the car windows across
this landscape of windfall and fire as a picture of desolation.
Surely, "here was nothing," as some of the first explorers said when
they viewed Canada from Labrador; but pause; not so fast! Here lay, if
nothing else, an area of timber limits seven hundred by one thousand
miles; and as the timber burned off curious mineral outcroppings were
observed. When the railroad was graded through what is now known as
Sudbury, there was a report of a great find of copper. Expert after
expert examined it, and company after company forfeited options and
refused to bond it. Finally a shipment was sent out to a smelter
across the border. The so-called "copper" was pronounced "nickel"--the
greatest deposit of the metal needed for armor plating known in the
world. In fact, only one other mine could compete against the Sudbury
nickel beds--the French mines of New Caledonia. Here was something,
surely, in this rock-bound iron region of desolation, which passing
travelers had pronounced worthless.

The discovery of silver at Cobalt came by an almost similar chance.
Grading an extension of a North Ontario railroad projected purely for
the sake of prospective settlers, workmen came on surface deposits of
"rose" silver--almost pure metal, some of it; and there resulted such a
mining boom and series of quick fortunes as had made Klondike famous.
And Cobalt and Sudbury are at only the southern edge of the unexplored
hinterland of Ontario. Old records of the French regime, daily
journals of the Hudson's Bay Company fur-traders, repeatedly refer to
well-known mines between Lake Superior and James Bay; but fur-traders
discouraged mining; and this region is less known to-day than when
coureur de bois and voyageur threaded river and lake and leafy
wilderness. Ontario, like Quebec, is