Big Hill and the Blackfoot.

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The part of eastern Alberta where I was raised is one of our province's more scenic areas. The "Big Hill" rises immediately to the north of my home near Islay, and to the south the lovely range of the Four Blackfoot Hills stretches for many miles from east to west, forming the southern margins of a beautiful panorama. A few moments' drive to the east and the Twin Hills are revealed to the east of Big Hill and just a few feet lower in height.

I walked over the shoulder of the Big Hill every day of my grade school life as I went to Morrison school. Later in life I learned that the Vermilion Standard occasionally referred to the hill as "Morrison School Hill."

According to the Dominion Land Survey, the Big Hill is in sections 14 and 23, township 51, range 5, west of the fourth meridian. A good contour map shows that Big Hill reaches an altitude in excess of 2,150 feet, somewhat higher than the surrounding farm lands. (1)

Climb to its highest point and you will find where the Geodetic Survey of Canada in 1928 placed a square cement marker at the fence line, marking the boundary between two quarter sections. Family tradition has it that Uncle George saw a light on the hill that year and saddled a horse to ride up and see what was going on. The batteries and apparatus were still in place but George saw no one who could tell him what they were used for.

It was many years before I followed the advice engraved on the brass circle imbedded in the cement marker and wrote away to the Geodetic Survey in Ottawa. Eventually I received a manual which told me much about Big Hill. I learned that the people of the survey knew it as "Islay," and that no fewer than six lines of sight connected it to other geodetic markers, all of them many miles away. (2) Most notable is the line of sight to the "Five Kill Hill," some fifteen miles away to the south and east. (3) Big Hill had become part of a belt of geodetic markers which stretched in a great arc from the international boundary. south of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, to the international boundary near Vancouver, B.C.

Big Hill is different in some respects from other well-known hills of our province, like Sick Man Hill near Lavoy and Gopher Head Hill south and west of Broadmoor. Big Hill has its own coulee, which begins at the south-eastern part, extends along the south side, and then curves to the north until it comes into the open again on the west side of the hill. In this coulee are many saskatoon, chokecherry, and pincherry bushes, which must have been very valuable to the people who were here before the settlers, notably the Blackfoot and the Cree. And at the summit of the coulee is a slough which, dry in certain years, in other years provided us with ...