chiming in with **Gorsnak ** here - rjk’s post had several errors in just a few lines.
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only one of the borders of Saskatchewan has correction lines, not both - the eastern one with Manitoba has correction lines, but the western one with Alberta doesn’t.
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as Gorsnak noted, by the time settlement in Saskatchewan was booming, Canada had been in existence for forty years, and it was the Canadian government that was trying to create a Canadian national identity through settlement of the west. Ties to Britain were part of that identity, but to say that it just amounted to loyalty to England is a gross (and I would argue, inaccurate) simplification.
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and the Gov’t did so sell land, and so did the CPR in the railway belt, and so did the Hudson Bay company. Settlers who homesteaded could get one “free” quarter frm the governement - by investing three years of improvements in that quarter. If they did that, then they had an option to purchase another quarter from the government. Outside of that, they had to buy land from the CPR or the HBC, from the shares of land alloted to those companies as a condition of the transfer of the North-Western Territory from the HBC, and under the terms of the CPR Charter.
So maybe Gorsnak was a bit snarky, but the post he was responding to certainly was inaccurate.
- Piper, whose great-grandparents homesteaded in the 1880s.