Indeed, when "Captain John Palliser first reached the prairies he was said he thought he had "discovered Hell" because the region was so arid and desert-like. Still, Palliser noted "a fertile belt surrounding the region" (Bonikowsky 2007)
In contrast to the initially hopeful conditions experienced by the 19th century American pioneers, the early settlers in Alberta Province's Palliser's Triangle struggled from the beginning. Although the 1930s as a whole for all farmers were marked by dramatic periods of "boom and bust," for the residents of the Triangle, the periods of "boom" were far shorter and crueler (McNeill 40)
There was a wheat boom during World War I but this was followed by a sharp drop in prices in the 1920s. Farmers developed a near "compulsion" to "plough and plant every available parcel of the ground," first to make a profit, and then to sustain the profits they had made during the boom (Worster 1975)
This is the determinism about which Carr speaks of in his chapter on causation. Carr says determinism is "the belief that everything that happens has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different (Carr, 121-122)