Harvey Locke identifies a longstanding cultural divide in Alberta between the centre and north on one hand and the south on the other as a recurring theme in the province's history going back to pre-contact Aboriginal cultures. The peoples of the boreal forest, and to a lesser extent, the aspen parkland, led a subarctic lifestyle which involved trapping fur-bearing animals and travelling by canoe, which made the region a natural fit for the fur trade. By contrast the plains cultures on the prairie to the south relied on the buffalo. The predominant political force on the prairie during the fur trade, the Blackfoot Confederacy, would not allow the Hudson's Bay Company to establish itself within Blackfoot territory, preferring to ride to Edmonton House (established 1795) to trade. Around this time some Cree and allied peoples (the Iron Confederacy) pushed south onto the plains, and became rivals of the Blackfoot. By the 1810s, explorer Peter Fidler identified the Battle River as a disputed frontier between the two groups. Locke asserts that the lack of an HBC presence in the south set the stage for very different patterns of settlement in the different regions. Calgary was founded as a North-West Mounted Police fort and was not much of a settlement at all until the mid-1880s when the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) suddenly shifted its planned route across Western Canada from a northern one (via Edmonton) to a more southerly path (via Calgary). Therefore, the economic and cultural origins of Calgary and its region, were created up by the NWMP and the CPR, not the HBC. Because of the CPR line, Calgary's agricultural hinterland was settled much sooner, mostly by people of British, and particularly Scottish, origins but it also has an American influence because of the ranching culture brought into the region by American cowboys. By contrast, Edmonton's hinterland is marked by a French Canadian and Métis presence, and is predominantly occupied by people of non-British European origins. In particular, the region just to the east of Edmonton, Kalyna Country, is Canada's oldest and largest area of Ukrainian settlement.