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Fred
Seibert
F.V. Seibert died
at Victoria, BC, on March 22, 1966. Fred Seibert was one of the better known
Canadian surveyors, having been with the federal government and subsequently
with the Natural Resources Division of the Canadian National Railway.
He was born at Port
Elgin, Ontario, matriculated from the Port Elgin Collegiate Institute and
registered in 1903 in the '06 class of civil engineering at the University
of Toronto.
After completing the
first year of university, he interrupted his academic training and spent
three years on lumbering work. Ernie Martindale, a longtime friend of
Fred's, writes of this period as follows:
Fred recalled to me last fall how I and others had helped him brush up on
his first year's work, which had become hazy after such a long period of
separation. We continued the same course together, graduated at the same
time, took our preliminary DLS examinations together and received our first
employment as articled pupils at the same time. We went out to Edmonton
together in the spring of 1909, and I saw him off to his job with Mr. J.
MacFarlane, DLS, trudging in the mud behind a pack pony on the Stony Plains
trail. Our party (A.W. Ponton's), returning down the fifth meridian trail,
reached Wabasca the same day, in September
1910,
that Fred, with Mr. A.H. Hawkins' party, arrived from the West - both parties
on the way out to Edmonton. Fred, Bruce Waugh and
I came east together. We wrote the same DLS exam, and were closely
associated in the old Topographical Surveys Branch and the former National
Development Bureau until Fred left for Winnipeg to join the Canadian
National Railway as Western Superintendent of Natural Resources; and we
have been the best of friends throughout.
Bruce Waugh, also a friend of Fred Seibert’s,
writes of their experiences in surveys:
It was in
1910
that I first met Fred, at Wabasca in northern Alberta. We were on our way
back to Edmonton after a fourteen-month spell on a survey of the fifth
meridian and the twenty-eighth baseline.
He enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in
1917,
being still in training at the end of hostilities. After World War I, he
was, I believe, in charge of that experiment in clearing land by controlled
fires, which didn't prove to be too successful. After that he had some part
of a roving commission concerning the survey parties making stadia traverses
of the Mackenzie River. The task he had was to have the Hudson's Bay Company
locate food caches, during the winter of
1921-1922,
along the route to the sixth meridian northward from the 60th parallel. He
and the late Max Cameron started out from Providence and travelled south
about 100 miles overland to locate the meridian. When they
calculated that they must be getting close to the 60th parallel they
climbed a tree on a slight ridge to see what might be seen and, lo and behold, three or four
miles to the south of them they could see a cut-line and they were exactly
on it. Anyway, that is the story and I believe it. Max was with me when we
made a survey the following summer and, when we arrived at the starting
point of our survey, Max immediately headed north from our camp and located
the first food cache.
Fred Seibert had
many affiliations. He was a former member of the advisory board of the
Alberta and Northwest Chamber of Mines; a director of the Boy Scouts of
Manitoba; past president of the Winnipeg Rotary Club and the Manitoba
Chamber of Mines; past chairman of the technical bureau, Winnipeg Board of
Trade; Past chairman of the Soil Products Research Committee, Manitoba
Industrial Development Board, and a member of the Alberta Research Council
governing body.
He was survived by
his wife Winnifred; a daughter, Mrs. Sydney (Helen) Larman, Winnipeg; a
brother, Herbert, Edmonton, and two sisters, Mrs. Thomas (Florence)
Atkinson, Edmonton, and Mrs. Lorne (Marguerite) Akins, St. Albert, Alberta.
Canadian Surveyor Supplement, June
1966
Association of Ontario Land Surveyors
Committee on Biography
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