Sitting in his weary seat, Captain John Palliser looked east to what would one day be known as the basket of Canada. The Southern Prairies region is the traditional land of the Blackfoot Confederacy, including the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta. What the Irish country gentleman turned expedition leader in the area, known for bison hunting, saw was anything but hopeful. “The heat was very great while traveling through miles of burning sand,” Palliser would say in an 1862 report assessing the future of western Canadian agriculture and settlement. His travels were commissioned by the British government and his report would have implications for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway across the southern prairies. A diary entry in The Palliser Papers dated July 24, 1858, described the area as bordered by “ancient woodlands and true prairie land” with timber and “good ground for agricultural purposes” and “superior pastures”. Palliser’s triangle stretches from Alberta to Manitoba with the vast majority of land in Saskatchewan. (CBC) “In the south there is no timber, the soil is sandy, with little or no admixture or earthy matter, and the pasture is inferior.” Much of the arid country “was occupied by tracts of loose sand, constantly moving before the prevailing winds.” Surrounded by sand hills – “which were almost impassable for carts and terribly hard for horses” – Palliser declared that the land around him would be “forever relatively useless”. He was talking about the stretch of grasslands in southeastern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and extreme southwestern Manitoba, now known as the Palliser Triangle. Not exactly a glowing review. Capt. John Palliser, pictured here in a photo from 1870, led an expedition to explore western Canada. (Glenbow Archives) So why was the Palliser Triangle considered poor for agriculture and what happens to its future with ongoing climate change? To better understand, we need to take a step back and look at the area in the late 19th century.
A different landscape
Stephen Wolfe, a researcher at the Geological Survey of Canada, part of Natural Resources Canada, reconstructed the landscape Palliser would encounter during his 1857-1860 expedition. Palliser’s Prairies expedition was during a drought, Wolfe says, but drought wasn’t the only factor shaping his observations. According to Wolfe, Palliser’s trail did not include the entire southern prairie. Palliser’s research was also influenced by traveling to the Elbow Sand Hills in Saskatchewan and the Middle Sand Hills in Alberta, a “central desert region” that looked very different at the time. “The dunes were much more active than they are today,” Wolfe says. “They were more active than they were even during the Dirty Thirties.” The 1930s got its infamous name in part thanks to dust storms that destroyed the prairie landscape due to the drought conditions and agricultural practices of the time. And while we still have sand dunes in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Wolfe says that by the 1700s, the region would have had more open and more widespread areas of sand and dunes. “We can literally see fossils of old dunes in the grasslands, and we can tell that these were desert dunes that then turned into the dunes we see today,” he says. Wolfe says today the dunes are largely stabilized by vegetation. “There are no desert-type dunes in Canada today. There are all these parabolic dunes with vegetation, but the dunes we dated were desert dunes.”
How ‘miles of burning sand’ transformed Canada’s Prairie breadbasket
The Palliser Triangle, once almost desert but now supporting vast areas of crops and livestock, has seen dramatic changes over the past two centuries – and could see more transition as our climate changes.
So why is it so sandy?
There are several reasons for the desert dunes of the past, Wolfe said. Canada’s prairie dunes are the result of melting glaciers thousands of years ago, and these active dune fields have shrunk with our warming climate, albeit slowly. Wolfe says that by the 1700s, these dunes were, in fact, active because it was cold and dry: a shortened growing season and less moisture. “The landscape doesn’t change instantly, it takes time, just like it takes time for a glacier to melt. It takes time for the dunes to stabilize, and it took time to put vegetation on the grasslands to transform those dunes.” The Great Sand Hills in Sask. feature dunes stabilized by vegetation and open sand. (Ryan Wunsch) The area is the traditional land of the Blackfoot Confederacy, and was sometimes called the Blackfoot Nation. Its arid landscape in the late 19th century was useful for bison hunting, which Wolfe says kept the dunes active. “That [Elbow Sand Hills] it was used extensively by indigenous people to herd bison in the dunes to corral them,” he says. “The bison were trampling over the dunes, that meant there was a high level of disturbance.” Today, Wolfe says most sandhill areas are used as dryland agriculture for cattle grazing with a lower cattle population on the land. According to Wolfe, the level of dune activity has decreased 100 times, if not even 1,000 times, from what it was during its peak period. “We’re literally seeing the disappearance of the sand hills, the active dunes in the grasslands now.” The Papers of the Palliser Expedition 1857-1860 contained observations by Capt. John Palliser, who led an expedition to what is now Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. (Internet Archive)
Sand hills today
The activity of the sandhills may be declining, but they are not gone, and they are not as useless as Palliser might have thought. Erin McKnight and her family raise cattle on the east side of Saskatchewan’s Great Sand Hills, and have for nearly 30 years. “It’s very rough terrain in some areas. The sand hills, some of them are really nice and rolling. And then some of them are what we call beach or rough fields,” says McKnight. McKnight says some hills are up to 10 meters high, covered in sagebrush and grasses and teeming with wildlife. And clear sand dunes are scattered in the area as well. While they cannot grow crops in the sand hills, they have managed to keep about 550 cattle. The McKnight family has been ranching in the Great Sand Hills of Saskatchewan for nearly 30 years. (Erin McKnight) He says there can be challenges with the area. It can be hard on equipment and it takes longer to move cattle and of course moisture levels are low. “It’s dry here. It’s sand underneath us. So our greens are different than in different parts of the country.” He says that with these grasses, they can’t keep as many cattle on the land as they could in other areas, but adds that it’s sustainable, which may have a lot to do with current technology. Because of those challenges, McKnight says she doesn’t fault Palliser for his assessment, saying it would look like a desert, dry spot with no water in sight. But today she and her family are happy to ranch in the hills. “The farm, I think, is a perfect fit for the sandhills, because you get it [to be] caretakers of the land and the animals that continue to eat these grasses and the grass regenerates.’
Will the landscape of the Palliser Triangle return?
Wolfe says advances in farming practices mean a Dirty 30s situation is less likely now. “The landscape we see on the prairies today is not the same as it was in the past because we dealt with it differently. We suppress fire, we don’t have the bison out there.” And while we now know that the southern prairies are a far cry from the “waste” land Palliser describes, Wolfe says Palliser’s assessment was right for him at the time. Stephen Wolfe studies the history of dune activity in Canada. (Stephen Wolfe) “The lesson we learned is that we can change. This was cold and dry, hot and dry will do the same thing.” Wolfe says it takes less time for dunes to activate than to stabilize, and with our changing climate and increased risk of drought moving forward, there’s a chance the dunes will become more active again. “With increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation, we will probably first see the effects of dune stabilization end,” says Wolfe. Wolfe adds that if drought conditions become longer and more severe than seen in historical times, we should expect an expansion of active areas that could return to the extent Palliser saw. “It’s all a balance between being active and being very active, they’re definitely not very active right now.” And Wolfe says balance is important because of the ecosystems dunes provide. “There are, actually, a lot of now-endangered species that rely on dunes. Animals and plants. And so, you know, it’s not a bad thing that we have active dunes.” Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative called “Our Changing Planet” to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up to date with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.
