The Prairies Are Sitting On The Most Valuable Land On Earth

In March 1869, in London, the Hudson's Bay Company sold a third of modern Canada, most of the Prairies included, for 300,000 pounds. Inside that sale sat the largest potash reserve on the planet, the oil field that made Alberta rich, most of the world's known cesium, and almost seven million acres the company kept for itself. By 1929, three provinces stood on all of it, and none of them owned the rock beneath it. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com This documentary goes down through the Prairies one layer at a time, and for each names what it holds, what it is worth, and who decided. The 1869 sale, Riel at Red River, the numbered treaties, and the fur company's leftover minerals that later sank Dome Petroleum. Palliser's triangle, Macoun's wet summers and the railway route that still carries the Trans-Canada. The 1887 order in council that kept the minerals for the Crown. Marquis wheat, the dust of the 1930s, canola born as warship grease, and farmland now valued near 760 billion dollars. Medicine Hat and Kipling's Judasville, Turner Valley's wasted gas, Leduc, the oil sands and the dinosaur in the Suncor mine, 157 billion barrels and 280 billion dollars in royalties. The potash sea, the flooded shafts, Blakeney's takeover, the BHP veto and Jansen. Helium from the granite, the hydrogen wells at Central Butte, Uranium City, Cluff Lake, Cigar Lake and the richest ore on Earth. Bernic Lake, two-thirds of the world's known cesium, and its sale to China for 135 million dollars. Then the signatures of 1929 and 1930 that gave three provinces their ground, the National Energy Program, the 1982 resource amendment, and the treaty bill still being paid. Sources include the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Manitoba Historical Society, Library and Archives Canada, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Statistics Canada, the Canola Council of Canada, the Alberta Energy Regulator, Natural Resources Canada, the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, the Government of Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Geological Survey, BHP, the United States Geological Survey, the World Nuclear Association, Cameco, Orano, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the House of Commons Debates of 22 March 1905, the Constitution Act 1930, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Globe and Mail and CBC. Where figures are disputed, on potash shares, oil reserve rankings, the hydrogen wells and the cesium resource, the narration says so. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.