White Bear takes its name from a sighting during the Palliser Expedition of the 1850s, when an Assiniboine warrior saw what was probably a white prairie grizzly bear on the shores of a neighbouring lake. The animal is now gone from the region. Early Metis settlers and the North-West Mounted Police recorded that the last roaming herd of buffalo was slaughtered around 1879 in the hills of the Missouri Coteau, about 25 miles northeast.
By the 1930s White Bear was a bustling community of about 250 people, with two grocery stores, a school, four grain elevators and three garages serving some 200 families in the area. The region rarely saw poor crops, apart from the droughts of the Great Depression and of 1988. Farmers from the area played a prominent part in the socialist movement that later shaped Saskatchewan and then Canada, through the introduction of Medicare and state-run insurance.
The community has since dwindled, a decline partly blamed on federal policy affecting the Canadian National Railway line in that part of the province. Today White Bear is a small hamlet on the north side of the South Saskatchewan River, reached by Highway 342, and the White Bear Hotel is the only business still operating.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “White Bear, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.