As to the district where he found the one hundred and seventy miles of agricultural land he had described, he reached there only about the middle of June. There was no frost in the balance of June or in July, and no frost in August, excepting once, on, he thought, the 29th, when the thermometer dropped just to freezing point. There was not enough frost to touch vegetation at all in the valley of the river where he was. He noticed when he got out to the Saskatchewan there was rather a high ridge on which there were a lot of half-breed settlers. He got there on September 6, and noticed on top of the hills where they had potatoes that they had been touched just on the tops, but down in the villages the potatoes in the garden of the Hudson’s Bay post had not been touched at all. He presumed that was the frost on August 29.
Owen O’Sullivan, C.E., of the Geological Survey of Canada, was one of the witnesses before the Senate committee of 1907. He explained that in 1904 he was engaged as assistant to Mr. Wilson in examining the west coast of James bay. They went up the river Kapiskau for one hundred and fifty miles and surveyed it, and found mostly swampy ground, right to about the headwaters of the Kapiskau, longitude 86°. His impression was that the whole coast from the southern extremity of James bay, at the mouth of the Hurricane, up to Cape Henrietta Maria, for an average of one hundred miles in depth, is mostly swampy ground. It is partly peat and wet spagnol (wet moss). There is a bluff of small spruce isolated here and there.
In 1905 he was sent to survey the coast between York Factory and Cape Henrietta Maria. The shore between these points was swampy as far inland as he could walk in two or three days.
Mr. O’Sullivan testified that during the summer of 1906 he started from Split lake, on the Nelson, and made for the headwaters of Little Churchill river, going down the Little Churchill to the Big Churchill. The country between Split lake and Big lake is mostly swampy. The country about Big lake is a good loamy soil, with easy slopes surrounding the lakes. From Big lake to the Big Churchill the country is rocky and swampy, with a good deal of good loamy soil in places—a rich clay loam. The rock is mostly granite and gneiss. It is very hard to find out whether the land is suitable for agriculture on such an expedition. It is hard to know the extent of the soil, but Mr. O’Sullivan thought