Description
As with the items topic this one is a key to understanding what actually went on year to year in the area. There are any number of individual customers in the ledgers that can be studied with some interest. You may find your own interests from a specific individual, a specific company, or where possible from an identifiable group like the Chinese miners (an aspect of this is developed in another project).
You could also consider one of the following issues in terms of customers:
A. How much business did John Boyd do with himself? We find in the Coldspring ledgers both money coming from Cottonwood house and charges to Cottonwood house. Similarly the Cottonwood journals show business with Coldspring House and ranch. Was this real business? Was a profit made? Did money actually change hands? Or was it all bookkeeping? What was the pattern?
B. What was more important, company accounts or individual accounts? There are a large number of companies in operation in the ledgers. Which were the most important, how much business did they provide, and what were the main purchases?
C. We know that as long as he was alive John Boyd hired Chinese cooks for the roadhouses. What were those cooks paid and how much of that income was spent at the roadhouses and for what purposes? Can we see any other patterns in the people that John Boyd hired for various purposes?
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Learning Outcomes
- locate and record information from a variety of sources (grd 4)
- analyze how people interact with their environment ... (grd 4)
- describe daily life, work ... (grd. 6)
- assess the interaction between Aboriginal people and Europeans (grd 10)
- analyze how geography influenced the economic ...development (grd 10)
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Grade Level
In most cases this kind of investigation will be more suitable for the secondary grades. We have a great deal of data available and the point is to be able to make some sense of it all and come up with information that is useful. You will want to do some searching yourself to get a feeling for the range of customers and you may want to go as far as assigning specific customers to groups or individual students in developing the overall project.
One good way to get a feel for any given ledger is to simply click on the button that will return all the records "Find all records". We have tested this out on a standard dial-up connection and found that the wait was not too long but we did find that setting the number of returns to be a maximum of 50 was the best compromise.
Though a given journal may not contain all the business conducted by John Boyd with a given customer it may be possible to see how closely his customers kept their bills paid.
Another investigation worth pursuing is a look at what was most profitable for John Boyd, the Roadhouse business serving travellers or the farming.
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