Hope's Last Home: Travels in Milk River Country

Nora D.S. Robins is the co-ordinator of internal collections at the
University of Calgary Libraries.

Located in the extreme southeast corner of Alberta is the only river in
Canada that flows into the Gulf of Mexico drainage basin. The Milk River
is a place where the last continental glaciers stalled and began to die.
Now it is home to the last vestige of shortgrass plains. Milk River
country is the ancient domain of the Blackfoot and Assiniboine peoples,
and was also often home to buffalo, prairie wolf, pronghorn, and plains
grizzly.

In 1805, Lewis and Clark traveled the river, giving it the name “Milk
River” because it appeared to be “about the color of a cup of tea
with the admixture of a tablespoon of milk.” With the Europeans’
coming , the Natives were pushed out, but they left behind the greatest
concentration of pre- and postcontact petroglyphs to be found anywhere
in the northern plains. Preserved in Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone
Provincial Park, these attract visitors from all over the world.

The essays in this book are the result of the author’s
two-and-a-half-year exploration of the Milk River’s special places.
Rees, who is chief archivist at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, has written
a memorable salute to a unique place. His book is enhanced by maps and a
four-page bibliography.