Description
The essence of these assignments is to have students track the amount and the price of a specific item over time at the road houses. When searching in the "Item" field enter either "equals" or "contains" for the best results. Students can be given general directions and allowed to do an initial survey after which they select the item that they want to research.
Alternatively you could follow this schedule:
- All students search a specific set of ledgers for one of the key items like rice or flour and prepare some charts of pricing and how it changes over time. Since all students are doing the work together it is easier to instruct them in how to work with the data base, how to build charts with a program like Excel, and how to develop a report on the topic.
- Now either in groups or as individuals send the students through all the ledgers with a specific commodity that they are responsible for. They get a large version of all the price changes and amount of traffic and for their specific commodity they make some inferences on the patterns that they are noticing.
- As an entire class you then combine the information you have now developed and see how it fits together.
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Learning Outcomes
- analyze how people interact with their environment ... (grd 4)
- demonstrate understanding of why immigrants come to Canada, the challenges they face and their contributions (grd 5)
- analyze how geography influenced the economic, historical and cultural development...(grd. 10)
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Grade Level
This type of investigation is the heart of the ledgers. Tracking the volume and price of a single commodity over time like: oats, an overnight bed, bed and breakfast, nails, or almost anything; is the essence of economic and historical analysis. It is a clear indicator of how transportation is affecting the area since the harder it is to travel the more it will cost and conversely as transportation improves the price will go down (this is of course an investigation on its own as well).
No matter what grade level, once the students have collected information it will be most important to lead discussions that look at why the prices change over time, what kind of commodities are available on the frontier and how the variety increases with "civilization". The geographic influences on the Cariboo are quite clear and the relative isolation provides interesting comparisons.
To provide a yardstick for student comparisons keep in mind that an average wage throughout this entire period of time in North America would be something like 30 dollars per month or 1 dollar per day. In modern terms working with a minimum wage of 7 dollars or 8 dollars per hour gives a monthly income of roughly 1100 dollars, the comparisons are then possible. For convenience let's have our fellow drink four drinks at a cost of 1 dollar, that is just about 4 percent of his monthly income. Four percent of our modern example is 44 dollars, a sum that will buy a lot more than 4 drinks.
You will want to do some preliminary work with the ledger searches before you assign students specific commodities. If you are going to look at the more common commodities like oats, bed and breakfast, or hay be aware that the number of returns is going to be quite large and you likely don't want to get involved in a lot of calculations because of the volume of information. It is possible to move this material into a spreadsheet program but the work of setting up each column is quite time consuming.
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