Free Republic

A desperate struggle for survival — and not the white man and his horse — likely forced First Nations people on the Canadian Plains to band together in complex communities at least 1,700 years before what is currently accepted. And the way they came together to ward off threats from southern bands from the Dakotas and Minnesota may have resembled a very early form of democracy. University of Calgary archaeologist Dr. Dale Walde has proposed the controversial theory in the prestigious World Archaeology journal, following more than five years of research in the field in Alberta and Saskatchewan. If accepted,...

When giving thanks this year, think of Lena Woebbecke. She and many others paid a terrible price for misreading the prairie sky on the afternoon... 1888. That day was unseasonably balmy, by prairie standards — some temperatures were in the 20s — and many children scampered to school without coats or gloves. Then, at about the time schools were adjourning, death, in the shape of a soot-gray cloud, appeared on the horizon of Dakota Territory and Nebraska. In three minutes the temperature plunged 18 degrees. The next morning hundreds of people, more than 100 of them children, were dead beneath...