That this entire region is of a highly volcanic nature and that it must have been shaken about considerably is shown by the fact that from the bottom of the Death Valley, which is 276 feet below the surface of the ocean, one can see the top of that Mount Whitney which is the highest peak of the United States, excluding Alaska (14,496 feet).
To the east of the Rockies lies that tremendous plain which on the north is bounded by the Arctic Ocean, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by the Laurentian highlands of Labrador and the Appalachians of the United States. That part of the world alone could, if brought under proper cultivation, feed the entire population of our globe. The so-called Great Plains (where the Rockies gradually slope off into the flat country) and the Central Plains, through which the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Ohio and the Arkansas and the Red Rivers flow to the Gulf of Mexico, are one vast granary. The northern part is less well favoured because here the rivers, the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan and the Albany River, all lose themselves either in the Arctic Ocean or in Hudson Bay and are therefore only of local importance, being frozen up for the greater part of each year. But the Missouri, which rises near the Yellowstone Park in Montana and the Mississippi (together with the Missouri the longest river in the world), which takes its origin on the divide between Lake Winnipeg in Canada and Lake Superior, are navigable almost all the way from their sources to their deltas and pass through a region that in centuries to come will resemble eastern China in its density of population.
The other lakes of this slightly elevated region which is the divide between Hudson Bay (or the Arctic Ocean), the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, are Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The latter two are connected by a short river which is unnavigable on account of a waterfall, called Niagara (Niagara is a little wider than the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi river but only half as high, while Yosemite Creek beats them both with a height of over a thousand feet and they are therefore connected by a canal, the Welland canal. The Huron Lake and Lake Superior are also connected by a canal, the Sault Ste Marie canal, which has more tonnage pass through its locks than the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal and the Kiel Canal put together.
The waters of these lakes then pass into the Atlantic Ocean through the St Lawrence river, emptying into St Lawrence Bay which is a sort of inland sea situated between the Canadian mountains in the west, the island of Newfoundland in the east (it was ‘‘New” when John Cabot found it in 1497 and in 1500 when it got its first Portuguese governor-general) and Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the south. The Cabot strait, separating Newfoundland from Cape Breton Island, bears witness to the fact that this region was first visited by an Italian.
As the northern part of Canada, the so-called North-Western Territory, is too cold to be entirely suited to the white man’s occupation, we rarely hear of it except in connexion with its picturesque local police force. It is a land of lakes and most of it used to belong to the Hudson Bay Company. This company was founded in 1670, exactly fifty-nine years after Henry Hudson, the discoverer of the bay that bears his name, had been murdered there by his mutinous sailors. The “adventurers of England” who organized the company lived up to their name but without much discrimination. Had they been given another half-century they would have killed off all the live stock of the lakes and forests (even during the breeding season the slaughter of fur-bearing animals did not cease) and the Indians, most liberally supplied with the fire-water, would have exterminated themselves completely by way of the gin bottle. Wherefor Queen’s Most Gracious Majesty finally intervened, annexed most of the Company’s sovereign territory to her Majesty’s dominions in Canada and left the Hudson’s Bay Company behind as an historical curiosity which still (though greatly diminished in size) continues to do business in the same region (262 consecutive years under the same management no mean record, if you please, for any business house!) but no longer on the old, irresponsible scale of former times.
The Labrador peninsula between Hudson Bay and the St Lawrence is too near the cold currents that come from Greenland’s icy shores to be of any value to anybody. But the Dominion of Canada is only at the threshold of its enormous future and to-day suffers chiefly from a very serious lack of population.
Politically Canada is one of the most interesting remains of a former dream of empire. We are apt sometimes to forget that when George Washington was born, the North American continent belonged for the greater part to France and to Spain and that the English colonies along the coast of the Atlantic were only a small Anglo-Saxon enclave surrounded entirely by hostile nations. As early as 1608 the French had established themselves at the mouth of the St Lawrence River. Then they had turned their attention to the interior, first of all travelling due west until Champlain reached Lake Huron. They explored the entire region of the Great Lakes, Marquette and Joliet found the upper part of the Mississippi and La Salle in 1682 descended the river to the sea and took possession of its entire valley, which he called Louisiana after Louis XIV. By the end of the seventeenth century, the French were laying claim to all the land as far as the Rocky Mountains, beyond which the territories of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain were supposed to begin. The Alleghenies, which were a real barrier in those days, separated this enormous French colonial empire from the English and the Dutch possessions along the Atlantic seaboard and from Florida, which was another colony of Spain.
If Louis XIV and Louis XV had known a little more geography; indeed, if a map had ever meant something more important to these artistic monarchs than a colour scheme that could be worked out very nicely in a new Gobelin, the people of New England and Virginia would now probably speak French and the whole of North America would be administered from Paris. But those who decided the destinies of Europe did not realize what the New World meant. As a result of their indifference, Canada became English, Quebec and Montreal ceased to be French cities and a few generations later, New Orleans and the whole of the Far West were sold to the Republic that had been recently founded by a few rebellious little English provinces along the Atlantic seaboard. And even the Great Napoleon thought that he had done a clever stroke of business when he looked at the stack of American golden dollars which he had got in exchange for what is now the richest part of the United States.