johnsjar

We were sitting around talking about units of measurement and converting kilometres to miles and so on. Then the conversation somehow digressed to how they used to use the length of body parts (usually a king’s) as a standard of length. For example, an inch was the length of a thumb, and so on, which was not altogether very accurate since no one’s thumb was the same length, and the king complained bitterly that he was getting terribly tired going from village to village and market to market holding his thumb out for lowly and often smelly peasants to measure.

I then recounted a story about the pioneers, frontiersman, and explorers who first ventured forth into the wild west and how they had no rulers or measuring tapes back then so they had to use innovative ways to create maps. Since there were an awful lot of grizzly bears on the prairies back then, they were a convenient means of measurement. You merely tossed a bear as far as you could, then that would be one unit of distance. I think one bear was equivalent to the distance you could run before being eaten by said bear, after you tried to toss it. For example, the distance from Fort Calgary to Fort Edmonton was one bear. The distance from your sod house to the hole in the ground out back that you called an outhouse was one bear. The distance from any point to any other point turned out to be exactly one bear with very few exceptions.

Incidentally, early farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan developed a derivative measurement from this when they were fleeing for their lives on the homestead. Farmers being generally hardy types, many were able to outrun a bear. The distance they had to run before they were immobilized by a side stitch was called an “ache”, or an “ache-er”. Eventually this became known as an “acre”. For obvious reasons, this unit of measurement proved impractical, and was directly responsible for the fact that the United States was able to explore, map, and develop their country much faster than we hardy yet foolish Canadians. This is one of those obscure and little known factoids from Canadian history. Or it could be a total fabrication.

Only a real Canadian would know. And this post has running content.