Prairies

The Prairies — Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Opened after 1870, when Canada bought the Hudson's Bay lands and put down the Métis resistance of Louis Riel, they were filled by the railway and the homestead — British, but also a vast Ukrainian, German and Scandinavian wave whose onion-domed churches still dot the wheat. Big-sky farming and Alberta's oil (the 'Texas of the North'), the Calgary Stampede and a populist free-market politics — with a recurring 'western alienation' from distant Ottawa — set the region apart.

• Existed: 1812 CE – present
• Type: Entity