The first photographers to capture the Canadian prairies on film defined the region for the rest of the world. Their images of rolling plains, early settlements and architecture, railways, and surveyors, colored by their own expectations and the instructions of their employers, had an enormous impact on the settlement and the development of the West.

In Looking West author and archivist Brock Silversides provides a lasting and valuable record of the changes that transfigured the Canadian prairies during a century of development. Archival photographs and an accompanying essay offer a fascinating and powerful look at a land that has been depicted as everything from a desert to a fertile region of incomparable diversity and beauty. The men and women who chronicled the region's development through their lenses faced countless obstacles from prairie climate and conditions but found in the land and its people a constantly renewing source of inspiration.