[SketchySeaBeast]

> They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it.

I'd had that phenomena explained to me in University as a result of the feudal states (serfdom was only officially abolished in 1861) that the Russian people left to come to North America - back home those trees would have been the lord's property, but here it could be theirs - so even though there was better arable land even in southern Alberta (assuming you could deal with the fact that the land in basically a desert), they traveled where there were "valuable" resources they wouldn't have had access to in the old country.

[Alan_Dillman]

Agreed, though they were not serfs in the case of my family/ethnic group. Rather, they were Germans(and some others) who colonized southern Russia, and were called the Volga Germans. In other ways you are correct: their lives and property were tightly constrained.