Synopsis
The Grid That Made the West tells the story of the Dominion Land Survey, the vast nineteenth-century surveying system that helped turn western Indigenous territory into administratively governable Canadian space.
Moving from the transfer of Rupert’s Land through treaties, railway grants, homestead policy, reserve boundaries, land offices, road allowances, and the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the book shows how survey lines became more than measurements.
This is not a technical manual and not a simple tale of progress. It is a narrative history of maps, law, paperwork, field labour, settlement, Indigenous displacement, railway capitalism, and state formation.