1922-1923 - Growing Enthusiasm

   Notwithstanding the sorry state of the Association’s finances and the continuing depressed economic conditions of that time, the 1922 Annual Meeting seems to have approached the level of enthusiasm that had marked some of the early meetings of the pre-war years. Only twenty-three members were on hand, but the discussions were vigorous, three papers were read, and a handsome report of the proceedings, embodying the long-promised Memorial Report, was later printed.

The expected transfer of the natural resources loomed large again at this meeting. Mr. William Pearce spoke at some length about the province’s water and coal resources, predicted the eventual commercial development of Alberta’s deposits of iron ore, advocated the establishment of a provincial scientific research organization, and said he hoped the province would never get control over water as he feared that this would lead to the same king of disputes in Canada as those which had arisen in the United States between state and federal governments. Mr. Knight described the extent and potential value of the Athabasca tar sands, and gave an estimate that the amount of oil they contained would fill a lake as long as the from Edmonton to Saskatoon, five miles wide and fifteen feet deep. Col. Saunders reported that he had ten tons of tar sands at home and was having them run through a commercial machine and hoped soon to be able to tell what they would produce. The Annual Report manages to convey the impression that this operation was being carried out in his living room. Mr. Charlesworth gave the members a run-down on the irrigation developments that were proceeding in southern Alberta, and Mr. Pearce outlined the scheme he had conceived some twenty years earlier for the impounding of water from the Red Deer and North Saskatchewan rivers in Buffalo and Sullivan lakes for the purpose of bringing under irrigation some three million acres of land in eastern Alberta and western Saskatchewan. This was the famous William Pearce Irrigation Project which, although generally admitted to be technically feasible, has never materialized because of the great capital costs it would involve. Two years previously, in 1919, official surveys had been commenced and had now shown that the scheme was practicable and Mr. Pearce was obviously hopeful that he would live to see it get under way.

Mr. Johnson read a paper on “The Rights of Possession” and Mr. Pearce was again to the fore with a dissertation on his experiences as a surveyor from 1869 to 1881 and later as a member of the Land Board that dealt with half-breed settlement claims in Manitoba and the North-west Territories. There is a wealth of interesting material in both these addresses which, along with other papers produced in earlier days of the Association, would be well worth reprinting for the benefit of today’s generation of land surveyors.

The committee set up in 1921 had arranged with the Board of Examiners the addition of an oral examination to the syllabus, and the examination subjects as a whole were reviewed at the annual meeting. No other changes were proposed but the discussion led to an expression of the need for both an Association reference library and provision of a surveyor’s handbook, and a Library and Publications Committee was set up to see what might be accomplished in those directions. This committee later made a deal with the Provincial Librarian whereby $75.00 worth of books, to be selected by the Director of Surveys, would be purchased by the Provincial Library Committee and made available for loan by mail to members of the Association through the office of the Director. It seems doubtful whether this arrangement was actually carried through, however, for the only book on surveying that the Provincial Library had in 1931 was an ancient general textbook that had been acquired some twenty years earlier. Neither do the minutes of subsequent proceedings show that this offer was ever accepted by the Association. The committee reported it to the Annual Meeting of 1923, and the minutes state that considerable discussion followed, but the members seem to have got side-tracked by a proposal that the Association should take out membership in the Champlain Society. The whole matter was finally referred to the incoming Council, after which nothing more was heard of it.

As for the proposed surveyors handbook, the committee reported in 1923 that a compilation of the portions of various acts affecting the work of surveyors, with certain technical material such as slope conversion tables, all comprising about one hundred pages in a loose-leaf binder, would cost an estimated $6.45 per copy. The opinion of the membership was that this cost was too high, and the annual meeting voted against proceeding further with the handbook.

Meanwhile, there had been some unrest in connection with the tariff of fees, the new Cemeteries Ordinance and the Drainage Districts Act. The Edmonton members in private practice who had felt that some of the tariff rates were too low, had settled that problem by agreeing on a special local tariff which provided for a minimum charge of $50.00 for any city subdivision comprising less than one acre and the division of the City into an inner and outer zone in which the minimum charges for residential lot surveys involving the staking of four lot corners would be $20.00 and $15.00 respectively. This was given the blessing of the 1923 Annual Meeting.

The Cemeteries Ordinance was a measure promulgated by the provincial departments of Health and Public Works, requiring the ownership of cemeteries, whether municipally and privately owned, to be properly recorded in the Land Titles Office, and containing regulations governing the location of cemeteries in relation to public roadways and watercourses. The members of the Association thought that cemetery sites and the plots they contained should be properly surveyed, that a plan of each such survey should be prepared for approval by the Director of Surveys, and that this should all be done in accordance with the provisions of the Alberta Surveys Act by registered Alberta Land Surveyors. The Committee on Legislation therefore prepared a re-draft of the Cemeteries Ordinance to provide for this, and the Annual Meeting of 1923 approved it and instructed the Council to take the matter up with the Department of Public Works. As to what the outcome was, the record is silent, but it does not appear that the Ordinance was later changed.

The Drainage Districts Act, caused dissatisfaction because it contained no provisions, similar to those in the earlier Drainage Act, authorizing the employment of land surveyors as engineers on the land reclamation projects which the new Act was intended to facilitate. The Association expressed some concern about this, and the omission was soon remedied by an appropriate amendment.

At that time, drainage schemes under The Drainage Districts Act and The Private Ditches Act were stirring up a good deal of interest, and in 1922 and 1923, papers on the operation of these Acts were read at the Annual Meetings by Mr. Charlesworth and Mr. A.E. Farncomb. Under the former Act, some large-scale drainage operations were carried out in the country east of Camrose, and the other Act represented an attempt to encourage small groups of neighbouring farm owners to carry out simple drainage works that would bring more land into productive use. Although the country was becoming dryer and water-tables were generally falling, there seems to have been a general conviction that there would be a recurrence of the wet years experienced in 1900 to 1904 when much farm land in the central part of the province had been repeatedly flooded. These conditions never did recur – in fact, the long-term trend was in opposite direction, and the early thirties were years of drought and dust – and it was not long before both these acts relapsed into disuse.

At the 1923 meeting, two other interesting papers were read. The gospel of town planning was propagated once again by Mr. A.W. Haddow, Edmonton’s City Engineer, in an address on the relation between the work of the land surveyor who, said Mr. Haddow, plans and lays out a town or city, and the municipal engineer who constructs, maintains and operates it and in so doing has to live with the mistakes made by the surveyor. An interesting point made in Mr. Haddow’s paper was that at that time the population density of Edmonton was 2.15 persons per acre, as compared with an average of 7.5 persons per acre for all Canadian cities. He deducted from this that the area of the City was about three and a half times too big for its population, and pointed out that one consequence was that it cost about twice as much per capita to provide Edmontonians with sewer and water lines and roads and sidewalks as it cost in other cities.

The other paper dealt with the early fur-trading posts in Alberta and was presented by Mr. J.N. Wallace, of Calgary, an ex-Inspector of Dominion land surveys and an amateur historian of the early West who knew his subject thoroughly. His paper, which contained some references to Peter Pond, drew an interesting comment from Mr. Hugh Pearson, who said that Pond, a fur trader of the 1770s, was the first white man to see Lake Athabasca and the first man to attempt a map of northwestern Canada in which he placed that lake not far from the Pacific Ocean. After returning east, where he was tried in Quebec and acquitted for undoubtedly having murdered a couple of rival traders in western Canada, he retired to his home town of Boston where, from his knowledge of the north country, he persuaded the Boundary Commissioners for the United States to insist on an international boundary following the middle of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes and thence along the 49th parallel. But for this, said Mr. Pearson, they would have been content to settle for a line drawn due west from Lake Champlain along the 45th parallel. This would have cut off the peninsula of southern Ontario but would have given Canada the whole of the States of Montana and Washington and large slices of the other northern States. Mr. Pearson concluded that Peter Pond was clearly an undesirable character, but the residents of Toronto might beg to differ.

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