Gimmie Shelter: Tree Planting in Rural Saskatchewan, 1870-1914

Tree-planting in rural Saskatchewan emerged long before the Depression and dust storm-induced shelterbelt explosion of the 1930s. Government scientists, amateur scientists, as well as forestry and agricultural experts first envisioned growing trees in the prairies soon after Canada acquired the western interior in 1870. They imagined the creation of entire forests — large woodlands covering about one-third of the land — that would transform the seemingly deficient grasslands into a fertile garden ideal for agricultural production by provoking rainfall, reducing evaporation, moderating temperatures, and creating fuel and construction material. Prairie forestry was deemed necessary to not only support agricultural development in the West, but also help ensure that Canada's timber supply would never disappear. In 1886, the Canadian government, deeply committed to western settlement and fearful that the prairie environment was preventing it, created the Dominion Experimental Farms — a system of research stations that were expected to stimulate extensive tree-planting and hopefully bring about positive environmental change in the prairies. With the backing of government forestry programs, farmers began to grow trees in Saskatchewan in the 1880s. Although there were easily twelve million planted trees on Saskatchewan farms by 1914, settlers were not generating forests. Instead, they were concerned simply about sheltering their farms. After 1886, attention shifted from forest creation to the planting of rows of trees, called shelterbelts, to protect crops, gardens, livestock, and buildings from wind, sun, and storm. Between 1870 and 1914, prairie forestry appeared originally as a massive project of environmental engineering, but evolved into an activity that would be more familiar to current inhabitants of Saskatchewan, namely the planting of shelterbelts that dot the landscape and accentuate the geographic grid of fields which has been imposed upon the land.

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