ABSTRACT
This study of a typical region in Western Canada was designed as an exercise in the analysis of a modern agricultural community from an ecological point of view. “Jasper’ is the fictitious name of a secondary service center town, and is used to designate the region as a whole. The region is found in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada, not far from the United States boundary. We selected this particular region for the following reasons: (1) its topography, natural resources, and economy provided a complete profile of the basic western North American economic-ecological pattern; (2) the human groups that settled the region, or had lived in it from early times, likewise duplicated the ecological pattern typical of most western communities, especially the northern Great Plains; (3) the region had experienced a late Euro-American settlement, and therefore had unusually complete historical documentation (at the same time, the stages of this settlement, and the patterns of economic development, though compressed, were similar to those everywhere in the semiarid West); (4) the region had experienced the drouth-and-depression cycles that affected the entire North American West, and therefore provided an example of change and adaptation.
