Empire of Dust

Settlers in 1912 knew it as Carlstadt, the "Star of the Prairie"; survivors remember it as Alderson, the ghost town. The history of this doomed village west of Medicine Hat is a life-sized saga of frothy boosterism, lightning expansion and utter miscalculations-a tragedy of drought, destitution and depopulation. It is the tale of the disaster that befell the prairie dry belt after the Great War, the untold sorrow of southwestern Saskatchewan and especially southeastern Alberta, an empire of dust.