Portrait - Fabulous Western Canada: Capture the Excitement of the Great West! - page 4

Alberta farms, and empty into Hudson
Bay, along with the South Saskatchewan,
Oldman and Bow Rivers.

THE FIRST
INHABITANTS

The region's fi rst human inhabitants are
believed to have arrived at least 11,000
years ago when the Wisconsin glacier
receded, though they may have ar-
rived on the American continent earlier.
These people found large numbers of
buffalo and other game animals here,
as well as berries and roots. They did
not waste any of these resources, using
hides for clothing, storage and shelter,
bones as tools, horns for spoons, ant-
lers for handles, plants for medicines,
sinew for thread and clay for pottery.

5 A dinosaur skeleton. © Travel Alberta

Dinosaurs thrived along the shores of
this subtropical sea and along the riv-
ers that emptied into it. They lived there
for millions of years until about 70 mil-
lion years ago, when the Pacifi c Plate
collided with the North American Plate
and was forced upwards, forming the
mountain ranges of present-day British
Columbia and western Alberta. This
gradually altered the climate, cooling
things down and eventually killing off
the dinosaurs around 63 million years
ago. Then, about a million years ago,
four polar ice caps advanced across the
region, eroding the mountain ranges
and carving out the rivers and lakes
that make up the present landscape of
Alberta, Sakatchewan and Manitoba as
they receded.

There is some doubt, however, as
to whether native civilization on the
West Coast came with these same vast
waves of immigration. According to
one theory, the ancestors of the West
Coast tribes came here more recently
(around 3000 BC) from islands in the
Pacifi c. Proponents of this hypothesis
base their argument on Aboriginal art,
traditions and languages, which are not
unlike those of the indigenous peoples
of the Pacifi c islands.

In the 18th century, fi ve First Nations
occupied the area between Hudson
Bay and the Rocky Mountains. The part
of the Canadian Shield covered by vast
forests is Ojibway land. The Assiniboine
occupied the plains and prairies, while
the Western Cree lived in the forests and
plains south of present-day Manitoba
and Saskatchewan. Southwest of these
two groups lived the Blackfoot, and in
the far north, the Athapaskans. The ar-
rival of the European colonization dras-

These rivers divide the province of
Alberta into distinct regions. The
Mackenzie, Peace and Athabasca Rivers
make the land arable as far as the
Boreal forests of the north and eventu-
ally empty into the Arctic Ocean. The
North Saskatchewan and Red Deer
Rivers provide most of the irrigation for