Post offices, railroads and land offices in the Canadian prairies, 1850-1900

This study is an interdisciplinary investigation that contributes to the analysis of Western Canada settlement by incorporating postal data, homesteads records and the historical railroad network into a Geographic Information System (GIS). For this project, I built a database based on textual records, gazetteers, pamphlets, and government documents. In this form, almost 1000 post offices and several land offices were georeferenced in GIS. In addition, I reconstructed the historical railroad expansion year by year to 1900 based on the actual railroad network. The location of post shows a pattern of occupied space year by year. In addition, it shows with certain precision the formation of communities, villages, and towns that emerged during the period. Moreover, spatial analyses that consider the distance of post offices, first to rivers and then to the railroad network, allow one to evaluate the importance of means of communications in the evolution of the frontier of settlement. Similarly, by analyzing updated homestead entries and cancellations data during the period, my investigation found that farmers' failures were more frequent than the classical literature assumed, particularly after the 1890s, a period that scholars regarded as one of more stable settlement.