About Grande Prairie

European fur traders entered the Peace River Country as early as 1770 and in 1881, Grande Prairie began as a Hudson's Bay Company trading post. The city was so named because in the late 19th Century, Father Grouard, a French-Canadian Roman Catholic missionary, was said to have described the rolling plains and the large open prairies of the aspen parkland as "la grande prairie". The Edson Trail from Edson to Grande Prairie was opened in 1911 as a means for settlers to reach the Grande Prairie area. It was basically nothing more than a tract of clear cut bush and forest, and thus was a very difficult route for many settlers, especially during wet weather. Because of this, large scale settlement came late compared to other major farming regions further south in Canada. Grande Prairie was incorporated as a town by the Province of Alberta in 1914. It was not until the arrival of the railway in 1916 that farmland quickly expanded as waves of settlers came into the Peace region. A local recession in the 1920s caused a temporary depopulation of Grande Prairie. But the population rebounded afterwards by the 1930s, by which time the population had reached 1,464. Settlement continued unabated even into the 1930s during the Dust Bowl era because the Peace Region was able to escape the severe drought conditions that plagued the Canadian Prairies further south at the time