Travel Agency

The Dominion Land Survey System laid out nearly uniform land parcels that can be precisely described and located in the settled areas of the four western provinces.

This system was designed to describe essentially agricultural land areas in an understandable and detailed manner down to ten acres (4 ha) in size. Cities, First Nations reserves, federal parks, the older river lots, and lands that were Hudson's Bay Company posts were excluded from the survey. The system was based on a model used in the mid-western United States. Both plans used a one square mile land unit. The Canadian system was modified from the US system to exclude road allowances from the land to be used for agriculture. In Canada there were five variations in the system, largely related to roadway accommodation and how the convergence of the lines of longitude was handled.

Difficulties in mountainous terrain and the overlapping of a flat grid system meant that only small portions of British Columbia were surveyed under the system. Almost all the settled areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta were, however, surveyed and remain under the original land description system, except for the local areas already mentioned as being outside this system. When urban areas were being created, a new plan was laid over the original survey; and where this occurs, the city or town type of survey using blocks and lots prevails.

The basic system was a grid. The major grid boundaries comprised of township lines paralleling the lines of latitude, and of a system of range lines largely paralleling the lines of longitude. Within these east-west and north-south grid lines, which occur about every six miles (six miles plus road allowances) are divisions creating blocks of land called sections, as near as possible to one mile by one mile square, ie, 640 acres or close to 259 ha. Figure LLS-1 and its legend show how the sections are numbered as well as the original land appropriations.