From top: Wheat grower Herman Trelle was “outstanding” in his field during the late ’20s; freshly cut timber is loaded onto the D.A. Thomas somewhere along the Peace River in August 1921.

When my grandfather, Tom Kerr, rode on horseback from the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort Dunvegan on the Peace River in 1881 with an axe and orders to build a simple log trading post on “la Grande Prairie,” the young company labourer could not have imagined what the future held for the region. He had no way of knowing there were “diamonds on the soles of his shoes.”

For beneath this bountiful expanse of forests and grasslands where fur-bearing animals thrived and great multitudes of wild birds thronged, there lay huge deposits of oil and gas and soil that would one day produce world-class grain.

Granddad Kerr, like other young Scots, had emigrated to Canada because he was inspired by the journals of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1789, had used the Peace River portal to reach the Mackenzie River and paddle on to the Arctic seas. Four years later, Canada’s greatest explorer embarked from the banks of the Peace at Fort York near the present day town of Peace River on his epic voyage of discovery to the Pacific Ocean. On the way, he wrote glowingly about the bounties of the land.

The waterway defined Mackenzie’s travels as it had for two aboriginal societies, the Cree and Beaver who had often gone to war with each other for control of the land. In 1790 at a point on the river near present-day Wood Buffalo National Park, leaders of the two native nations met and agreed on treaty to share the resources, thus giving the river its name, Peace.

Fur traders who came in Mackenzie’s footsteps built posts along the length of the river from Hudson Hope in the mountains of east-central British Columbia to Fort Vermilion in the far north of Alberta, the most northerly truly arable farmland in Canada.

Winding more than 1,900 kilometres from its headwaters in the rocky mountains of British Columbia the Peace meets the Slave River and Lake Athabasca in a teeming marshland delta, draining on the way thousands of square kilometres of land.

The region remained relatively obscure until 1898 when the Klondike Gold Rush suddenly steamed like a rampaging bull across North America, sweeping in its path men from a depression ridden outside world. Quick to exploit the economic fallout of the world’s greatest gold rush, the Chamber of Commerce in Edmonton launched an audacious public relations campaign to convince gold seekers that the “all-Canadian route” to the Yukon via the Peace River district–starting from Edmonton, of course–was the easiest route to riches.

More than 2,000 tried it and in their wake made Edmonton a prosperous boomtown. Hardly a handful reached the gold fields; stopped by a swath of muskeg, mud, mosquitoes, and misery almost 200 kilometres wide across central Alberta. “Hell can’t be worse than this trail,” one Klondiker carved in the bark of a spruce tree. This natural barrier between the productive south and even more productive north remained an impediment to northern development.

However, the gold rush roused an indifferent federal government to the fact that the land might rightly belong to wandering native tribes who followed the boom and bust cycles dictated by fish, fowl and fur. Enlightened ministers and Mounties reported that living conditions for natives were often less than acceptable and that some Klondikers had displayed a reckless attitude toward the original peoples. They also speculated that the future would likely bring more non-native intrusion.

Ottawa took notice and established a federal commission to negotiate with the native peoples. In 1899, northern chiefs agreed with the terms of Treaty 8 thus ceding the land that encompassed most of northern Alberta to the Crown and paving the way for unfettered development and eventual provincehood in 1905. Among the things the natives got in return, were reserves and hunting, trapping and fishing rights.

Fast on the heals of the treaty negotiators came speculators who bought up large tracts of land and began advertising surveyed lots in well laid out municipalities. Some would-be pioneers, gullible in the extreme, discovered that the building lots they bought lay almost perpendicular on some remote hillside.

Still, word was out. The Peace Country was open for business. By the turn of the 20th century, news of the farming potential attracted young men like Maynard Bezanson who in 1906 made extensive travels through the region and wrote a book called Peace River Trails extolling the country’s foundation of farming, fishing and forests. The book sold 5,000 copies and for years afterward, would-be pioneers considered it “the bible.”

Bezanson took his own advice and developed a private town site on the banks of the Big Smoky River, a major tributary of the Peace. By now the talk of rail service to the region was on everyone’s lips and Bezanson was convinced the railway would roll through his land. When it finally arrived in Grande Prairie in 1916, the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia, E.D. & B.C., did not pass through his land.

Nor did it reach Dunvegan and took another 14 years to arrive in British Columbia. Yet the railway’s route determined the communities that would live and those that would die. Grande Prairie lived to become the dominant city in northern Alberta.

Meanwhile, in 1910, the Alberta government heeded the call of newly elected northern politicians like businessman Jim Cornwall, MLA for Peace River. Because of his lobbying, the newly created province opened up tracts of land for homesteaders who could travel a government-sponsored road called the Edson Trail through the barrier of muskeg and dense bush to the promised land.

Those thousands who packed their entire families and belongings on board clapboard cabooses slung over the top of cumbersome ox carts soon realized that the Edson Trail was not much better than the non-existent trails to the Klondike Gold fields. Many kept diaries. Most echoed the same theme: “May 1: The wagon trains file on again. Lurching down steep gullies that tore the tongues out of wagons and broke them like matchsticks; floundering across swollen streams, oxen mired in the muskeg, loads pitched off the bottom of steep hills, heartbreaking, backbreaking returns to carry the heavy goods a little at a time up the steep grades.”

Still men, women and children challenged the muskeg, forests and rivers that raged in the spring during their long journey to the Peace Country.

To get there, they had to pass by Sturgeon Lake where Granddad Kerr, after more than 30 years as a Hudson’s Bayman, had set up his own private trading post and welcomed weary travellers with a cup of tea and some well earned advice about fur, frost and farming.

In spite of the hardship, the pioneers discovered that hard work on the homestead would pay off since the country possessed all the natural resources of timber for logs, pasture for animals and soil that could secure a future for the working family. They also gained a worthy place in the tablet of trailblazers as: “Those who came before the railroad.”

With the arrival of rail in 1916, sod busters had an economical means of shipping their harvest to the outside world. Grain elevators sprouted like spring crocuses on a sunny side hill as the train clattered along a route that old-timers called “extremely dangerous and badly constructed.”

Not far behind appeared a new-fangled gadget: The airplane might have arrived even earlier except that one of its main proponents was otherwise occupied. In 1917-18, Wop May was fighting for freedom over the skies of Europe inside the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel, becoming a Canadian war hero in the process.

When May returned to Canada in 1919 with a Distinguished Flying Cross for his role in ridding Europe’s skies of the Red Baron, he established May Airplanes Ltd. and flew a fragile Curtis Canuck Jenny north from Edmonton to Grande Prairie, barnstorming along the way for gas money while extolling the virtues of aircraft in remote regions.

May’s talk was much more than barnstorming bluster. In 1929, during the dead chill of a northern winter, he and co-pilot Vic Horner delivered antitoxin medicine in a tiny open cockpit biplane from Edmonton to the beleaguered village of Fort Vermilion where an outbreak of diphtheria threatened to engulf the entire North Peace region. May, the World War I hero, proved that aircraft could bridge the frozen muskeg from above and save lives in the process.

Meanwhile, Grande Prairie, smack in the southern heartland of Alberta’s Peace River Block, was advertising the abundance of fertile land, good roads, schools and hospitals and urged newcomers to take up a homestead and join the prosperity that was as sure as spring to come. “Statistics prove that as much grain can be raised in the territory lying to the north and west of Edmonton as is at present grown between Winnipeg and the Rockies. Come and be one of the first hundred thousand!” wrote the Board of Trade.

To show this was not merely public relations hyperbole, Herman Trelle, a farmer at Lake Saskatoon just a few miles from Grande Prairie, won the world wheat crown at the 1926 Chicago World’s Fair with his northern hard spring, milling wheat. The resulting publicity inspired many a doubtful settler who by 1930, could drive the first real highway linking the Peace River district with Edmonton via Lesser Slave Lake. In fact, it was a twisting, squirming road that turned into an impassable morass of gumbo following the famously frequent cloudbursts, thus awarding it with notoriety as the worst road in North America and proving that even with progress, the country would not yield easily to development. Still, in 1931, the population of the region exceeded 50,000.

Through the 1930s and ’40s, farming and fur remained the lifeblood of the pristine empire, but there would soon be a new kid on the block. The presence of oil and gas under the land defined by the river had been known for years, but the extent of the fields could not be determined.

On his journeys of the 1790s, Alexander Mackenzie had noted oil seeps from the banks of the Peace and native people told him they used the stuff to caulk their canoes. In 1912, oil was found oozing out of gravel beds along the Pouce Coupe River and gas was seen bubbling up between the boulders. Similar reports came from Hudson Hope and other locations along the Peace River. As unlikely as it may seem, the news attracted the attention of an influential Welsh coal and munitions magnate from far off Wales. Between 1913 and 1916, Baron Rhonda spent a quarter of a million dollars on surveys and exploration of coal and petroleum resources.

Rhonda built a palatial paddlewheeler called the D.A. Thomas with an enormous price tag of $120,000 and equipped her with tanks to carry the crude oil he hoped to find. The money man found no commercial supplies of gas or oil, but Peace Country Canadians were certain he was just slightly ahead of his time.

In 1917, a trapper named Blaine Pierce became a real life Jed Clampett when he discovered oil and natural gas bubbling out of the ground while checking out his traplines. History recorded Blaine as the first man to find an oil and natural gas field in the Peace block’s British Columbia sector. His discovery caught the attention of Imperial Oil in Edmonton. In 1920, the company sent a drilling crew to the trapline and struck a large flow of natural gas.

Engineering however was slightly behind its time. Thirteen men using natural gas for cooking and heating in the bunkhouse had just settled down to Christmas dinner when the gas line broke under pressure. The men were burned in the explosion that followed. All survived, but the well site was abandoned. Still, the presence of gas in the region was a harbinger of exploration activity to come.

Thirty years later the Fort St. John No. 1 well hit gas marking the beginning of the region’s future fame as a major producer of oil and gas. A few months later, in January 1952, the first deep well struck natural gas in British Columbia and by 1957, Westcoast Transmission completed a natural gas pipeline from the Peace to the Pacific and a refinery at Taylor on the Alaska Highway was completed.

The race was on to find new deposits and build pipelines through farmland. Today, as but one example, Fort St. John, the former Hudson’s Bay Co. fur trading post, calls itself the Energetic City with good reason. It is the oil and gas hub of British Columbia’s Peace River district producing nearly 11/2 billion dollars a year and employing nearly 5,500 people. The scene is similar on the Alberta side of the border. Through the energy rich Peace River district, oil and gas wells relentlessly pump liquid gold from beneath the blanket of grain-covered ground earning a farmer about $2,500 per pumper on his land in addition to a $10,000 signing bonus for each well.

The region embraces the most northerly agricultural lands in Canada producing canola, oats, peas, barley, tame hay, forage crops and has limited livestock production, including cattle, bison, elk and some sheep. Beekeeping is another remarkable activity of the region.

Giant multinational pulp and paper companies ship a variety of wood products, including lumber, oriented strand board, fibreboard, roofing shakes, pulp and fence posts by truck via the main north-south Highway 43, one of the busiest roads in the country.

The route is a four-lane thoroughfare for about half its length and the Alberta government is racing to complete the so called “twinning of the highway” to accommodate the endless stream of trucks hauling everything from hogs to logs, and hay to hardware, travelling at high speeds beside brand-new pickups with workers dashing to yet another oil patch, and buses carrying people and products in both directions.

The environmental effects of this development have been studied in a number of forums. Aboriginal people, comprising about 10 per cent of the region’s population of 250,000, generally feel that seismic lines, logging roads, modern farming methods and modified water levels on the Peace River have altered streams, lakes and marshes and changed the traditional patterns of wildlife habitat. The modified water levels on the Peace occurred when the Bennett Dam was completed near Hudson Hope in the late 1960s.

In the government sponsored Northern River Basins Study, scientists expressed concern about “current conditions within the river system” but concluded that “there is enough time through good management and planning to preserve and protect the northern rivers while supporting prudent sustainable development.”