The Plains Farmer and the Prairie Province Frontier, 1897–1914

It is curious that students of the American frontier and population movements have paid so little attention to the role of American farmers in the settlement and development of the last plains frontier—the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Perhaps the twentieth century has provided scholars with too many alternative “frontiers†to scrutinize, or perhaps the famous pronouncement of the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 has been accepted too casually. The movement has not been subjected to careful analysis, and the published material on the topic is peripheral or fraught with error, especially in its quantitative aspects.