Wild Rose Country

A History of Alberta

By: Daniel Hardy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A Sweeping History Of The Province of Alberta

Alberta is the most misunderstood province in Canada — misunderstood by the rest of the country, and sometimes by itself. It is written off as a land of pickup trucks and pipeline politics, of boom-time arrogance and bust-time grievance, of a conservatism so reflexive it has become a kind of identity. Wild Rose Country argues that this picture is not just incomplete. It is wrong.

From the dinosaur-rich badlands to the Athabasca oil sands, from the great buffalo hunts of the Blackfoot Confederacy to the immigrant tide that broke the prairie, from the Social Credit revolution of the 1930s to the multicultural cities of the twenty-first century, this is the full, surprising, and often thrilling story of one of the world's most consequential pieces of ground. It is a story of deep geological time and very human ambition, of extraordinary landscapes and the societies they shaped, of a people defined less by any single politics than by a shared experience of distance, weather, and the relentless cycle of boom and bust.

Authoritative but never academic, sweeping but always grounded in the particular, Wild Rose Country takes Alberta seriously — its grievances and its glories, its unfinished reckonings with Indigenous peoples and the land, and its urgent, unresolved question: what does a petrostate do when the world starts leaving petroleum behind?

The answer, this book suggests, may surprise you. Alberta always has.