In the early 1930s, the R.B. Bennett Conservative government introduced the Relief Settlement Plan, a federal scheme to get the urban unemployed back on the land. Based on the romantic notion that working hands and backs would never be idle in a rural setting, the plan was little more than a thinly disguised attempt to reduce the number of people on direct relief. But families welcomed the support and tried to start over again in the provincial middle north. Many of the inexperienced settlers - if they stayed - continued to need relief assistance to avoid starvation.

Neither leader of Canada’s two traditional parties knew how to respond to the combined economic/ecological disaster of the 1930s. Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett provided emergency aid but did not embark on more radical solutions until he faced certain election defeat in 1935. And his arch-rival Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King did not propose any new programs or talk about any new ideas, but chose to hammer away at Bennett’s mismanagement of the unemployment crisis. In other words, the best policy was to have no policy, or as the Liberal campaign slogan aptly put it in 1935: "It’s King or Chaos." The strategy worked, and the Liberals stormed back into office with the largest and most lopsided general election victory to date, while Bennett’s name became synonymous with the Depression.

The heaviest mammal species native to North America, the bison (Bison bison) - usually called “buffalo” by pioneers - occupied the prairie region in vast numbers before they were largely killed off in the commercial hunt by the late 1870s. The herds broke up and merged seasonally and their numbers expanded and contracted in periods of climate variability. Drought, severe winters, heavy snow falls and other conditions could sharply reduce herds on a year-by-year basis.

Certain farming techniques common in the settlement period served to render the landscape more vulnerable to the effects of drought. Particularly harmful was the practice of black summerfallow, in which a field left unseeded would be tilled throughout the growing season primarily for purposes of weed control. Farmers believed this allowed them to collect precipitation over a number of years, increasing the odds of success for the next crop in an often-dry region. Unfortunately, this technique broke down the soil structures, which led to a fine soil vulnerable to drift in dry, windy conditions.

In the Canadian West, the forest fringe is a zone of transition or “ecotone” between the grassland and the northern boreal forest ecological regions. Its community of plants and mixed deciduous trees is in constant flux through both climatic changes and human disturbances. In the dustbowl era, it constituted a major refuge for many of the 40,000 prairie farmers who abandoned their properties between 1930 and 1936. The forest fringe encouraged more mixed farming in the well-watered, lighter soiled, and patchy forest area to the north.

Pioneers usually referred to the Richardson’s Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus richardsonii) as a gopher, a term given to many ground squirrels in North America. The rodent species lived throughout open grasslands and became widespread in disturbed farm environments whether in ditches, cattle rangelands, haying areas or edge areas of farmlands. A burrowing animal that builds colonies underground, the gopher usually avoided areas prone to ploughing and flooding. It was considered a pest because of the toll it took on crops and the threat its burrows seemed to pose for cattle. It should not be confused with the black-tailed “prairie dog” (Cynomys ludovicianus), which is considerably larger in size and paler in colour.

Over 140 species of grasshoppers of the genus Melanoplus exist in Canada, 80 of which exist in Canada’s prairie provinces. Ten of these are considered pests and damage agriculture. The most common grasshoppers fall into three main subfamilies: the banded-winged, slant-faced and spine-breasted grasshoppers. Hot and dry conditions encourage their hatching and raise both survival rates in spring and reproduction rates in late summer. Successions of warm and dry summers can compound population growth to monumental proportions.

Grasslands in temperate environments emerge in areas too dry for forests and too wet for deserts. The Canadian grasslands include distinctive zones: "prairie," a region of mesic grass varieties characteristic of Manitoban tall grass areas and parkland ecotone; fescue grass "belts" that straddle the middle sections of Alberta and Saskatchewan; and the "plains" where xeric conditions and shorter mixed grass varieties dominate. Across much of the Canadian grasslands, early spring rains give way to persistent dry spells.

The Great War, 1914-1918, saw the allies of the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia, and later the United States, at war with the Central Power nations of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Canada, with colonial status and little diplomatic autonomy, was drawn into the conflict automatically when Britain declared war against Germany in August 1914. Canadians eventually mustered some 690,000 troops to its expeditionary force. A major Canadian war contribution was in wheat and other cereals, beef and other meat products. High war-time wheat prices and almost unlimited demand for food from the allies, especially after Russia left the war in 1917, provided keen incentives to farmers to expand production.

Many of the newcomers to the middle north lived on a steady diet of fish and big game, while trying their hand at trapping to supplement their meager bush farm income. These activities interfered with the traditional livelihood of local Indigenous peoples (including Métis) populations who had to turn to the generosity of local posts and missions. The situation was little better further north, where itinerant white trappers overran the trap lines of Indigenous peoples and white prospectors deliberately started fires to clear the country to facilitate their work. In 1937, it was estimated that more than half the northern forest was on fire because of the abnormally dry weather and the carelessness of settlers in clearing their land. This burning precipitated a shift in the migration pattern of the barren ground caribou, one of the mainstays of the Dene people.

The insect scourge of the 1930s were grasshoppers. The hot, dry weather provided ideal breeding conditions and by the mid-1930s, it was estimated that tens of thousands of square miles were infested. The prairie provinces mounted an aggressive campaign against the grasshoppers by adopting a simple mixture (sawdust, bran, paris green, and water) perfected by entomologist Norman Criddle of Manitoba. Thousands of farmers, under government supervision, mixed and spread the poison bait, sometimes by spoon and ladle, over millions of acres to bring the plague under control.

James Garfield Gardiner (1883-1962), Liberal politician and strong advocate for the prairie west, was federal minister of agriculture from 1935 to 1957. Under his tenure, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration grew into a major force in the prairie region’s recovery from the Great Depression and in subsequent agricultural change on the Canadian Prairies.

William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950) was a dominant force in Canadian federal politics for decades. As leader of the Liberal Party, he was Prime Minister from December 1921 to June 1926, from September 1926 to August 1930, and from October 1935 to November 1948. Fortunately for King, the worst of the Great Depression had passed by the time he returned to power in 1935, and the prairie drought of the 1930s would soon start to wane as well.

The North Saskatchewan River basin drains about 70 million cubic meters of water into the larger Saskatchewan River, one of the largest rivers in the Canadian West. The North Saskatchewan begins in the Columbian Ice Fields in Alberta, and enters the Saskatchewan at “the forks” east of Prince Albert. The watershed covers some 41,000 km² with major contributory rivers being the Battle River, Eagle Creek and the Goose Lake drainage.

Some of the refugees from the dried-out area of the southern prairies headed to Paddockwood, a community along the southern edge of the boreal forest. Here, they found a wealth of local resources to draw upon, as well as a booming cordwood industry that provided some much-needed off-farm income. Their experience, and the success they enjoyed, suggests that these dust-bowl settlers were not simply fleeing from the drought, but actively fleeing to a region which offered a better future. They traded one environment for another in the knowledge that they would no longer be dependent on grain production, but a diversity of economic opportunities in a forest setting.

The Pale western cutworm is a soft-bodied caterpillar that feeds on stems of wheat and other plants below the soil surface. Infestations are common throughout the Canadian Prairies and American Great Plains, particularly in dry periods, and can devastate large agricultural areas.

One of the best sources about life in 1930s are the gut-wrenching letters found in the personal papers of Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. The correspondence today serves as poignant testimony to what people in the prairie west faced during these desperate times. One of the most touching letters was prepared by young Dody Brandt of Harney who wanted the prime minister to write a special letter for her and her little brother: "I just thought that I would write to you because I thought you would write Santa for me and tell him I was a good girl all the time, and Mama tells me her and Daddy have no money to give Santa for my little brother and me and we can’t hang up our stockings now...do you think Mr. Bennett he would forget Brucy and me...I hope he don’t."

The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was an agency created as part of the federal government response to the drought of the 1930s on the Canadian prairies. While initially oriented to pressing problems such as soil drift, the agency expanded its mandate over time, assuming a role in a diverse array of undertakings across the prairies including rural resettlement and large dam construction, as well as in relation to activities more in keeping with its initial purpose, such as creating community pastures on degraded agricultural land. The PFRA remained in existence over a period of decades before being absorbed into other branches of the federal government in the 2010s.

In the field of paleoclimatology, the term ‘proxy data’ refers to information about climate that can be extracted from natural systems affected by climate patterns. For example, as the annual growth patterns of trees are affected by periods of flood and drought, analysis of tree rings can provide a window on past environmental conditions. Tree rings, along with other sources of proxy data such as ice cores or fossil pollen, provide an important means of extending human understanding of past climate patterns beyond the roughly 140-year instrumental record.

R.B. Bennett (1870-1947) was Prime Minister of Canada from August 1930 to October 1935. Bennett led the Conservative Party to victory in a difficult period defined by the international crisis of the great depression and the catastrophic drought on the Canadian Prairies. His efforts to respond to these crises, which included the creation of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration to address the situation on the drought-stricken prairies, were judged to be too little, too late. Widespread dissatisfaction with his handling of the drought and depression led to his defeat in the 1935 federal election.

Relief to farmers was provided in the form of food, fuel, clothing and medical aid, or in agricultural relief of seed, feed, fodder or grasshopper bait. Given the traditions of the English poor law, relief was viewed as best handled and organized at a local level and continued to be provided by municipal and rural councils in the 1930s. Under provisions of the Municipal Relief Act, 1920, Saskatchewan municipalities were empowered to borrow money to provide relief to local farmers (or in urban areas, citizens), who in turn would accept it in the form of a promissory note to be paid back, or with liens on their property or future crops.

Dominating a region making up 20% of the arable land in Canada, semi-arid lands stretch across the brown soil profiles of Southern Saskatchewan and Eastern Alberta. Provided appropriate crops and methods were employed, semi-arid conditions were suitable for agriculture. However, drought, soil erosion, unpredictable frost, short growing seasons and pest and crop diseases have long challenged farmers in the region.

A community of native grass species adapted to the xeric (dry) areas of the prairie and the brown soil types of present-day southern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. Canada has very few true “short grass” regions. Properly speaking, Canada’s driest prairie areas sprawled as mixed grasslands. Composed of some cooler-season varieties like needle-and-thread (Stipa comata) that cure in early June, the short grass areas are dominated by blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) and buffalograss (Buchloë dactyloides) which are specially adapted to flourish even during the hottest months of the year.

Returning soldiers were provided land grants to begin civilian life as early as the Boer War. Large scale soldier settlement occurred during World War I when the Soldier Settlement Board in 1917 was created to offer returning soldiers a land grant of a quarter-section of Dominion Lands and $2500 in interest free loans. Almost 19,000 soldiers settled the prairie by 1920. By 1927, about 24,000 had taken up the provisions of the act. Initially, poor post-war commodity prices dashed many of the hopes of soldier settlers. Their transition to farming, volatile interwar crop prices, and, especially, their ongoing indebtedness, made homesteading both unrewarding and unpleasant for many. A high percentage of soldier settlers abandoned their land altogether.

The Western Producer is a publication based in Saskatoon that has been publishing news of interest to western Canadian farmers since the 1920s. A major aim of the magazine in its earliest years was to encourage prairie farmers to sell their grain through wheat pools, farmer-owned co-operatives intended to replace the large for-profit corporations that had previously dominated the prairie grain trade. For decades, the publication provided a voice to prairie discontent and protest. Despite changes in ownership, the publication remains in distribution through to the present.

One of the great challenges of the 1930s was to bring the drifting soil under control. And the longer it took to find solutions, the more pronounced the problem became. University faculty worked with government scientists and agricultural producers to develop practical techniques to control blowing soil. For example, Lawrence Kirk at the University of Saskatchewan recommended the use of crested wheat grass, which sent down incredibly deep roots and stabilized the soil. Kirk’s contribution emphasized the potential value of involving university researchers in attempts to tackle the drought of the 1930s.

Weyburn is located on the Souris River about 100 km southeast of Regina in southern portion of Saskatchewan. The village, incorporated in 1900 and chartered as a city in 1913, grew as a farm and mercantile service centre that benefited from its placement on the CPR subsidiary Soo Line, that linked the prairies to North Dakota and its relative close proximity to the CPR’s railhead at Estevan, that had been built from Brandon.

A cereal plant of the genus Triticum, wheat was grown in temperate countries around the world. In Western Canada, plant breeding early in the century mixed crosses of Ukrainian, Russian and Indian hard spring wheats to create varieties better suited to the shorter growing seasons in the northern latitudes of the North American Great Plains. In the rain shadow of the Canadian prairies, dry conditions produced wheat with particular baking characteristics. Before World War II, much of the spring wheat of Western Canada was termed and marketed as “macaroni” or “pasta” wheat.

The wheat stem sawfly lays eggs in the stems of prairie grasses, including cultivated grains such as wheat. Larvae feed on the stem interior, often weakening it sufficiently to cause the plant to collapse in the wind. Sawfly damage is especially evident around the edges of agricultural fields. Vulnerable areas include the American Great Plains and the Canadian prairies, and extend northward to Alberta’s Peace River agricultural region.

Environmental historians disagree on the cause of the dust bowl in the 1930s. Donald Worster claims that poor farming techniques, in particular the indiscriminate ploughing up of the land in the early twentieth century, led to the great dust storms of the 1930s. Geoff Cunfer, on the other hand, suggests that drought was the deciding factor and that dust storms are part of Great Plains ecological cycle as evidenced by newspaper accounts from the region in the nineteenth century. Although ploughing made the problem worse, it was not the sole cause of the dust bowl.