Thunder Bay, at the head of Lake Superior, presents very bold and beautiful scenery. Fort William and Port Arthur, in the vicinity, are the headquarters of an important lake traffic energetically prosecuted during the summer. Immense elevators receive millions of bushels of grain to be transferred to steamers and borne down the lakes, the canals, the St. Lawrence, and at last perhaps across the Atlantic to supply the markets of the British Isles.

A little over four hundred miles westward from Port Arthur stands the young and handsome prairie city Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, and the chief centre of trade for the great Canadian West. In 1871 Fort Garry, a trading-post of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the humble dwellings of a score of half-breeds, occupied the site of this busy and well-governed city of 180,000 inhabitants. Here the Assiniboine and the Red River of the north unite their turbid waters and hasten through the fertile plain to Lake Winnipeg.