The Saskatchewan

Canadian author Marjorie Wilkins Campbell won a 1950 Governor General’s Literary Award (nonfiction) for “The Saskatchewan,” a history of the Saskatchewan river. While Campbell revised the text of this paperback edition, her interest in the history and peoples of western Canada remains intact. The volume traces the Saskatchewan’s routes, roles, and users, ranging from its function as a transportation route for Hudson’s Bay Company explorers to a means of processing potash for energy corporations. With an eye for humor and an array of perpsectives, Campbell’s chronicle of the Saskatchewan river becomes a history of exploration, Indigenous-settler encounters, homesteading, agriculture, economics, and civic life between the Rocky Mountains and Lake Winnipeg.