The story of the Ukrainian-Canadians starts at Confederation. In order to entice British Columbia into joining the new country of Canada the federal government committed to completing a trans-continental railroad within 10 years. The Canadian Pacific Railroad, upon its completion in 1885, not only connected the new province to the rest of Canada but opened up the vast Canadian West. The eastern industries saw the vast prairie lands as a new market for their goods as well as a source of cheap agricultural production. In order to facilitate these goals vast numbers of farmers needed to be found and settled on all of this land.
The first step in this process was the Dominion Land Survey whereby the land from Manitoba to western British Columbia was divided into 160 acre parcels (quarter-sections). The hardy surveyors crossed the land painstakingly locating and marking the boundaries of each of these potential farms. In many cases they were likely the first people to walk on this land (though much of the land was used by the natives long before this). Once this was completed the government offered these quarter-sections up to any potential settler through the Dominion Lands Act. This Act gave a claimant one quarter-section for free, the only cost to the farmer being a $10 administration fee. Any male farmer, aged 18 or higher, who agreed to make certain material improvements to the land and build a permanent dwelling on it within three years qualified. This condition of "proving up the homestead " was instituted to prevent speculators from gaining control of the land.
As the vast majority of citizens of Canada at this time were from the British Isles the ideal immigrant was thought to be a person of similar descent and immigration of other ethnic groups was initially not encouraged, if not actively discouraged. The problem with this policy was that experienced farmers from this region had little incentive to pack up and move their family across the ocean to this completely unsettled land. Many of these who did immigrate and file on the land had no experience in agriculture and were completely unprepared for the harsh conditions they would find on the Canadian prairies.
From 1795, when the first Fort Edmonton was built, the Saskatchewan River had become the main highway into the Far West. Alongside the river the fur traders slowly developed an overland trail connecting one fur outpost to another which by 1800 reached the Edmonton region. In fact, from Fort Pitt to Fort Edmonton, a distance of about 175 miles, two trails came into use, one on each side of the river. The southerly one swung north of Whitford Lake and in due course Edna was built where it crosses Beaverhill Creek.
In 1862 the Revered George McDougall built a mission which he called Victoria about seventy-five miles downstream from Edmonton. Because either of these trails could be used to reach it, one of them became known as the North Victoria Trail and the other, which crossed Beaverhill Creek, the South Victoria Trail. When gold was discovered in British Columbia large numbers of Overlanders would use this South Victoria Trail along their way and indeed they were the ones who built the first temporary bridge across Beaverhill Creek at the future site of the Edna settlement. During 1875, the North West Mounted Police built their headquarters, which they called Fort Saskatchewan, near the South Victoria Trail some twenty miles downstream from Fort Edmonton.
When the Dominion land surveyors arrived in the area in 1882, the first townships to be laid out, of course, were those immediately around Edmonton and those along the South Victoria Trail. Not only was it logical to work along the trail, which provided access for the surveyors, but the land itself was some of the best in the Edmonton area. At the time the remains of the thick forest of spruce, poplar and birch covered this rich flat but here, and there, fires had cut wide swaths, leaving islands of green timber five or six miles across, interspersed with patches of fallen or fire-killed timber. In some places these burnt areas had been partially clothed by a new growth of thick poplar saplings and willows. Where the fires had swept through more recently, for hundreds of acres the resulting scars were swathed in vast fields of purple fireweed.
In 1891, on the eve of the arrival of the first Ukrainian settlers the prairie lands remained extremely sparsely populated. 25 million acres of land was available in Manitoba, of which perhaps 2.5 million were already settled. A further 65 million acres existed in the future provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Of this, around 1 million acres had been claimed in Saskatchewan. Alberta had a total white population of 25,000 with maybe 5,000 of them urban, leaving 20,000 settlers occupying half a million acres in a narrow streak near the railway lines. It was in this year that a branch rail line was completed running north from Calgary to Edmonton.