History Matters: Agricultural potential of southern prairies was much debated

Desert or garden? These conflicting images were at the centre of the mid-19th-century debate over the agricultural potential of the semi-arid prairie district of present-day Saskatchewan.
Could farmers make a living from the prairie soil? Was the region better suited for stock raising? Or was it marginal land that could provide only a bare living?
In the late 1850s, the Palliser (1857-59) and Hind (1857-58) expeditions were sent to the western interior to assess the region’s future as a co