Excerpt from The Great Mackenzie Basin: Reports of the Select Committees of the Senate, Sessions 1887 and 1888; A Summary of the Reports of the 'Schultz Committees' of the Senate of Canada (1887-88)

The demand for the publication last mentioned was so widespread that a second edition had to be issued, and the correspondence with the Department of the Interior on the' subject of the Dominion's great northern land reserve has so remarkably developed that a separate branch, placed under the direction of Mr. R. E. Young, Superintendent of Railway Lands, has been established to attend to it.

The requests for further authentic information as to the resources of northern Canada, particularly that portion of it which lies between Hudson bay and the Rocky mountains, are urgent and insistent.

With the enquiries on the subject received at the Department often come expres sions of surprise that the facts regarding the vast latent wealth of this region brought to public attention by the publication of the evidence produced during the investigation before the committee of the Senate presided over by Senator Davis during the parlia mentary session of 1906-7, should have been so tardily revealed.

As a matter of fact, much of this information had been already obtained by parliamentary committees, but as it had not been made readily accessible to the public, it had not attracted general attention.

Those Specially concerned in the subject have for many years been aware of the fertility and latent natural wealth of the Dominion's northern hinterland, but, up to the present time, public attention has been mainly directed to the exploitation and development of the resources of the more accessible portion of the region originally known as the 'northwest Territories, ' namely, the districts which lie south of the North Saskatchewan river, and are now comprised in the province of Manitoba and the southern and settled portions of the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The vast region north of the present settled area - the future home of many thousands of prosperous Canadians - has therefore failed to receive the attention it invited.

It will be remembered by even the casual reader of Canadian history that it was no longer ago than the year 1869 that the region up to that time known by the three designations, 'rupert's Land, ' the Hudson Bay Territory, ' and the Northwest Territory, ' was added to the Dominion by purchase from the Hudson Bay Company. The original province of Manitoba was set apart out of a portion of it, and admitted into the Confederation July 15, 1870.

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