Prairies

The grain belt and the oil patch, settled fast and deliberately, and resentful of the centre from the beginning. The Hudson's Bay Company held the whole watershed as Rupert's Land until Canada bought it in 1869 without consulting anyone living there. The Métis of the Red River, a people of mixed European and Indigenous descent with their own language and buffalo-hunting economy, resisted under Louis Riel and forced the creation of Manitoba in 1870, then resisted again in Saskatchewan in 1885 and were defeated. Riel was hanged, which permanently poisoned relations with Quebec. The buffalo were gone by 1879, and the numbered treaties signed with the Plains nations between 1871 and 1877 were followed by starvation policy, the reserve pass system and residential schools. Settlement then came in a rush: free homesteads, aggressive recruiting in eastern Europe, and over a million arrivals between 1896 and 1914, which is why Ukrainian, German and Scandinavian communities are dense here. Wheat farmers dependent on railways they did not control and tariffs written in Ontario built cooperatives, wheat pools and Canada's most inventive protest politics - the Progressives, Social Credit, and the CCF, which introduced public health insurance in Saskatchewan in 1962 and thereby to the country. The Depression and the dust bowl of the 1930s hit here hardest. Alberta's oil, struck at Leduc in 1947, split the region economically. Western alienation remains a permanent feature of federal politics. Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton are the main cities. The Athabasca oil sands hold one of the largest crude reserves on earth. Winters routinely fall below minus thirty. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885.

• Existed: 1812 CE – present
• Type: Entity