Ken Allred's love of surveying knows no boundaries and his enthusiasm for a study that to laymen appears to be a mathematical equation, is contagious.
The retired St. Albert MLA is quick to point out the power that surveyors wield once they hammer their simple posts into the ground. Even hundreds of years later those posts are deemed to be the definitive markers for all time. Survey markers decide international and national boundaries, but on a personal level, they mark the property lines of every landowner. Their importance goes back to the very first time people stood on a piece of property and squabbled about who owned which pebble.
"The importance of surveyors' work can be found in the Bible in the Deuteronomic Code that determined ownership of land. Canadian explorers such as Samuel de Champlain or Jacques Cartier were really surveyors charting the coastlines. In modern municipalities, real property boundaries that determine who owns the land and any fixtures on it, are determined by surveying," Allred said.
His fascination with surveying began more than 50 years ago with a summer job when he was studying engineering at the University of Alberta.
"It was a course requirement for engineers. I was on a surveying crew on the north boundary of Waterton National Park. I saw a surveyor from Ottawa come and find a trace of a wooden post boundary marker and I was hooked because I saw that, to be a surveyor, you have to be part detective," said Allred.
Although most St. Albert residents remember Allred for his political posts as a city councillor and member of the Alberta legislature, after that summer in Waterton, Allred became a government surveyor and it was his first career.
His interest in the subject became so absorbing he made a hobby of studying the history of surveying. Allred spent many holiday hours searching for famous monuments such as the 300-year-old cairns marking the Mason-Dixon Line in the United States and the boundary Stelae that still remains near the Aswan Dam on the Nile, even though it was cut into the rock by the ancient Egyptians.
"Many of those ancient markers are works of art," Allred said as he showed his photos of ancient monuments, including a copy of a Babylonian monument.
The Babylonian stone, from the Kassite period about 1700 BC is marked with ancient lettering that explained who owned the land and it was a marker to resolve a border dispute, Allred said.
"It shows the role surveyors have and their importance in establishing boundaries to support claims of neighbours against neighbours," he said.
The monument governs
The overarching rule of all surveying is that the monument governs. That rule remains consistent in all boundary disputes.
Spoken decrees or even written documents do not have the same power as a surveyor's post. Even a king's decree does not mark the actual line on the ground where one property begins and another one ends.
In the instance of the Mason-Dixon Line, for example, the argument of the 1700s was that the King of England had granted William Penn land based upon the 40th parallel. However, the original survey was not on the 40th.
Nonetheless, when the boundary decision went all the way to the English court, the original surveyors' markers stood. It meant in the end that based on the Mason-Dixon survey line, Philadelphia was located in Pennsylvania, not in Maryland.
"The same principle remains true for international boundaries such as the 49th parallel," Allred said. "The Canadian/American boundary is not (exactly) on the 49th parallel."
River lots
Closer to home, in 1861, Father Albert Lacombe granted St. Albert's first settlers land on a river lot system based on the Quebec system. Each settler got a narrow strip of land backing onto the Sturgeon River.
In 1869, a surveyor named Major Webb was sent by the government of Canada to survey the river lots on the Red River Settlement in Manitoba using a square township method of land measurement. Louis Riel stepped on Major Webb's surveying chain and stopped him.
Allred commissioned St. Albert artist Lewis Lavoie to paint a picture depicting that moment in history.
"When Riel stepped on that surveyor's chain it changed the geography of Western Canada," Allred said.
The surveying system that was to be used in Manitoba was a marketing gimmick. Webb had been asked to survey the land into 800 acres in an attempt to attract settlers north of the American border. The Americans surveyed their townships into 640-acre squares.
"They were trying to attract settlers by offering more land than the Americans did," Allred said.
The river lot system became an issue in St. Albert, too. In 1877 five surveyors were sent to St. Albert from Edmonton under chief surveyor M. Deane.
"The Métis resisted the surveyors because the federal government wanted to divide the land into sections," said Jean Leebody, retired exhibits co-ordinator at the Musée Heritage Museum, who has researched the surveying question in St. Albert.
"Part of the problem was the Métis weren't given reserves. The Métis only got scrip. In St. Albert the Métis threatened to stop work if their river lot system was changed, and that caused the Oblates and Father Leduc to step in."
The Métis settlers watched Deane and his crew size up St. Albert for a potential township system of land distribution and began to panic because they feared they would lose land rights. If the land was resurveyed into townships, the settlers argued, as many as seven families would have ownership to one section of land. Some settlers would lose their access to the river that was so necessary to farming and fishing. All the roads, which ran parallel to the river, would have to be changed.
"The government didn't learn. They didn't learn from what happened in Manitoba and it caused problems here and in Batoche in Saskatchewan," Allred said.
At the same time, the St. Albert Métis welcomed an official survey system because the loosey-goosey system of lot distribution by the Oblate Fathers led to many disagreements.
According to the local history book Black Robe's Vision, claim jumping was common. New settlers simply put a stake at each end of their property.
The appearance of the government surveyors brought the issue to the fore and a public meeting was called in St. Albert that was attended by people from other river communities including Fort Saskatchewan and Edmonton. Funds were raised and Father Leduc and St. Albert resident Daniel Maloney were sent to Ottawa to plead the case to keep a surveyed river-lot system in St. Albert. They were successful and as a result the river lot system remained.
"As the town grew, the Grey Nuns sold their land and it was subdivided. As the town expanded those who owned the river lots sold their holdings and they were sold as the square lots that we now have in St. Albert," Leebody said.
Detective work
The old surveyors' posts remain as the definitive property-line markers but they are not easy to find.
When waters rise or fall, as in the case of Big Lake, boundaries still need to be established. When bush grows over the posts they can be equally hard to find.
"The surveyor's most valuable tool is a shovel. Sometimes they are digging and looking for a rusted circle where the post has disintegrated but that rust is enough of a mark," Allred said.
To illustrate the difficulty of finding the posts, Allred showed a road-survey marker labelled R-4 located in the midst of the White Spruce Forest near Big Lake.
"This originally was likely a marker from the river lot road allowance survey," he said.
Now the marker is a stick with a red surveyor's plastic ribbon tied to the top. When Allred shoved away the leaves and debris, he found the original iron marker. Nearby, he also found a shallow depression in the ground.
"I can only find one depression now, but for a road survey there would have been four depressions, 12 inches deep and 18 inches square. The depressions were an extra marker so the farmers wouldn't plough over them and lose the markers," he said.
Allred marvels at the work of early explorers such as David Thompson, who surveyed unknown, often treacherous country in the most extreme weather conditions.
"Surveyors are the pathfinders. In the case of Thompson it was all astronomical work from the stars. There was no other reference point for him," Allred said.
He pooh-poohed the idea of surveying being boring.
"So much depends upon the land and every piece of land has boundaries," he said.
"Surveyors have to be good at trigonometry; they have to be good at understanding legal systems and at art and map making and geography. They have to know what was there before. Surveying is history."
