Happyland : the agricultural crisis in Saskatchewan's drybelt, 1917-1927
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1908, the Dominion Lands Act was amended to open for settlement some twenty-eight-million-acres of land between Calgary and Moose Jaw in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. The amendment also inaugurated the beginning of what was to become thirty-one years of crop failure and farm abandonment in the same region, commonly referred to as Palliser's Triangle. Settlers in west-central and south-west Saskatchewan, the arid heart of the triangle, suffered horribly from crop failure and abandonment. An estimated ten thousand men, women and children fled this region between 1917 and 1927, adding to the thousands more who fled both prior to the crisis of the 1920s and afterward during the Dirty Thirties. The little-known crisis of the 1920s was the second act in a three-act tragedy which claimed the livelihoods of thousands of people. The tragedy was exacerbated by a provincial government which, for a variety of reasons, could not and would not come to terms with the crisis. The second stage of western settlement, the era after 1908, was riddled with problems. This circumstance sets it apart from the earlier and more successful settlement years between 1896-1908. Settlers who participated in the settlement of southwestern Saskatchewan after 1908 experienced crop failure and abandonment like any other region in the province. The crisis of the 1920s raises disturbing questions about the wisdom which underpinned the amendment to the Dominion Lands Act. By considering the crisis, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the second phase of western settlement was, by many yardsticks, a failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".