Saskatchewan may be divided into two broad landscape types: the boreal forest of the northern Precambrian Shield – rocky and remote, as familiarly Canadian as a Group of Seven painting – and the southern prairies. The Trans Canada Highway (TCH) Ecotour described in this book focuses on the southern world, part of the much larger Great Plains that sprawl across three Canadian provinces and twelve American states from northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Western Cordillera to the Great Lakes.

The prairies have stymied European travellers for 300 years, defying understanding, even accurate description, and from the beginning of their exploration by non-aboriginals, they were the butt of jokes about the monotony and flatness of it all. A young Hudson Bay Company (HBC) employee, Henry Kelsey, was sent inland in 1690 to entreat the Cree to trade furs on the storied coast. The first “white man” to view the prairies, he was unimpressed and reduced the entire experience of his journey to the prairies to doggerel verse: “The plain affords nothing but Beast and Grass/ And over it in three days time we past.” For the next 170 years, fur traders took the prairies’ barrenness for granted, even while they used its seemingly limitless supply of bison meat to supply pemmican to their northern posts.

Other visitors succumbed to the temptation to view the prairies as an unmarked slate on which to carve their own desires. Around 1860, Capt. John Palliser and Henry Youle Hind, leaders of two separate expeditions sent to gauge the prairies’ suitability for settlement, pronounced much of it an uninhabitable desert. They had visited during a drought. A decade later, and on a similar errand, botanist John Macoun saw the opposite, a verdant paradise, just waiting to be planted with cash crops. Macoun’s ideas, no doubt, were coloured by the politics of the times – John A. MacDonald’s National Policy of settling the West with all due haste less the Americans do it first. Plus Macoun toured during an exceptionally wet summer.

To truly “see” this southern Saskatchewan landscape, it requires not only the physical act of arriving, but the mental exercise of imagination and earth memory, the close scrutiny of a horizon both uncomfortably wide and profoundly subtle. If that sounds like too much work, don’t worry – just a bit of effort soon pays dividends in the number of hawks you spot perched on round hay bales, or white-tailed deer glimpsed stone-still in the hollows; in your awareness that the soil has suddenly become sandy just as the farmyards appear farther apart and the ground cover has turned to silver; in your realization that the dog you see loping across the shimmering field is really a coyote; in the immersion course in fairweather clouds that a single day under the dome of prairie blue affords you.

Paleoindians had plenty of time to attune their awareness. Generally believed to be the first people to migrate into North America from Eurasia over 30 millennia ago, they lived here so long ago we do not know their language or dress. These aboriginal peoples hunted the now-extirpated mega-fauna of the waning ice age, the Bison antiquus and the mammoth, and movednorth into the future Saskatchewan behind the retreatingWisconsin ice sheet. Some 11,500 years ago,their descendants, the Clovis people (named for the kind of spear points they left behind), camped at the latitude of present-day Saskatoon, with the toe of the glacier just a few day’s walk north.

Fast-forward to 1690 and the arrival Henry Kelsey, that emissary of the fur trade, Euro-chauvinism, the Industrial Revolution and bad poetry. The HBC and its rogue competitors have by now met their suppliers and, in business parlance, can put a face to a name. The Chipewyan or Dene caribou hunters occupy the Athabasca country to the far north; the Cree are spread across the boreal north and moving south.

As for the occupants of the Great Plains, nomadic hunters with nothing like the European concept of private landholding or monopoly trading, their boundaries are somewhat conjectural, their movements in defiance of the kind of ethnographic map-making that will soon define the West. They – the Nakota (or Assiniboine), the Lakota and Dakota (related Sioux cultures), the Blackfoot and the Saulteaux – are some of the major Plains Indians of the postcontact period.

Or perhaps it is better to say “bison people,” for this great animal is the very life force of the prairies – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva rolled into one. The beast roved Saskatchewan’s grasslands in numbers we can only guess at – 70 million, perhaps. To the Plains peoples, it provided most of the necessities – food, clothing, shelter and spirit. They enlivened their diets with Saskatoon berries, dug clay for pots, decorated their spear shafts with snakeskin and wore feathers when it was time to dance. It was a good and complete life.

Which brings us back to the imagination, to earth memory, for the prairies seem to have changed. In a wink of time the bison was gone, and so were the old ways of the First Peoples. These plains are some of the most altered lands on the planet. Early botanists divided the grasslands into three broad categories (from wettest and most nutrient-rich to driest, most nutrient-poor): tall-grass prairie, mixed-grass prairie and the semiarid short-grass prairie. Of the tall-grass and the most fertile of the mixed-grass areas, over 99 percent has been brought under cultivation. Even 30 percent of the short-grass prairie, with some of the harshest, most unforgiving stretches of the grasslands – where the precipitation is scant and the temperature can easily swing through 80 degrees Celsius from winter to summer – have been turned up by plows. Endangered grasslands specialists like the burrowing owl, ferruginous hawk and swift fox have nearly become victims of these changes.

As you drive across the Saskatchewan plains, imagining what was is critical to understanding what is. That’s not to say that past is better than present, or that we must mourn some kind of loss. Quite the opposite, really. The Saskatchewan prairie today is a testament to how much we have learned, as a species, in barely more than a century – the age of the province itself.

Altered though it may be, the prairies remain extremely biodiverse. They rate a 2,095 on the World Wildlife Fund Species Richness Index, higher than the California rain forests (1,710) or the Florida Everglades (1,855). As you will learn at Buffalo Pound Provincial Park (Ecopoint 20), the bison have staged a comeback. So have the Cree, Saulteaux, Nakota and the rest of Saskatchewan’s First Nations who are among the most politically active, culturally vibrant communities anywhere in the world, and their numbers are the fastest-growing in the province.

As for agriculture, is it the villain who stole the prairie bounty? Hardly. With the global population hurtling toward seven billion, the fertile parts of the prairie cannot remain a million-square-kilometre nature preserve. By growing prairie grain, farmers have contributed directly to global affluence, which in turn allows our most sophisticated knowledge to grow. The idea that we must, as a species, be mindful of our own success, is really brand new.

Pessimism is easy, but you won’t find much of it in Saskatchewan. This is still the New West, where the limitless horizon implies the scale of possibility. Still, the original, resilient prairie is there too, though you must get out of your car to sample it. You’ll find it on the slopes of the Qu’Appelle Valley (above ) and along the shores of Last Mountain Lake (Ecopoint 18), up in the western hills and even sprouting between the fields like weeds through cracks in a city sidewalk.

HEAVEN ON EARTH

In Sleeping Island (1943), P. G. Downes’ account of travelling in northern Saskatchewan, the author included a conversation between a Dene and a Catholic priest on thesubject of Heaven. The setting is the Barrenlands, another teeming ecoregion regarded as a wasteland by Europeans. The Dene spoke of little sticks and caribou of the North, but he could just as easily have been describing the grass and bison of southern Saskatchewan:

“Tell me, Father, is (your Heaven) like the land of the little trees when the ice has left the lake? Are the great musk oxen there? Are the hills covered with flowers? There will I see the caribou everywhere I look? Are the lakes blue with the sky of summer? Is every net full of great, fat, whitefish? Is there room for me in this land, like our land, the Barrens? Can I camp anywhere and not find that someone else has camped? Can I feel the wind and be like the wind?”