ne-half million acres were under
cultivation. There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one
hundred and fifty-eight million acres. The land area of the three
prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres. If only
half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in
wheat--namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten
bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the
three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the
entire spring wheat production of the United States. Grant, then, two
bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels,
and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie
provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million
bushels. All this presupposes population. Granting each man one
hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are
in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand
settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in
half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred
thousand more farmers--enough to feed Great Britain and still have a
surplus of wheat for Europe.

In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never
be ignored--the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in
reducing freight to the West. Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the
cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on
the all-land haul must never be ignored. Freight can be carried on the
Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate
for one hundred miles.[11]

And wheat is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On
the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits
of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through
Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost
pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an
Indian, from an unknown mine, which no white man has yet found. On the
borderland between Alberta and British Columbia is a ridge of coal
deposits which such conservative experts as the late George Dawson
estimated would mine four million tons a year for five thousand years.
These coal deposits seem almost nature's special provision for the
treeless plains.

It is well known that the decrease in white fish in the Great Lakes fo