11. Almost A Province Called Buffalo
As a whole, Canada is made up of ten Provinces and three Territories, but that was not always the case, as it actually took many years for the country’s current overlay to come into being, and as far as Alberta and Saskatchewan are concerned, they were almost a single, large Province with a very different name.
When you hear the name Buffalo, you can associate it with the animal, or the city located in the State of New York, but it was almost also the name of said unrealized Province.
In the early 1900s, the first Premier (Canada’s version of a Governor) of the Northwest Territories, Sir Frederick Haultain, attempted to rename a section of the territory under his jurisdiction the Province of Buffalo, after the animal which called the territory home. The Prime Minister at the time ultimately disliked the idea, and in 1905, he decided to essentially split the Northwest Territories into two, with the southern portion being split into what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan.
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