Description of Historic Place

The Bone Trail is a Municipal Heritage Property located in the Rural Municipality of Corman Park No. 344. The designation applies to a tract of pasture land featuring the wheel ruts of the former trail.

Heritage Value

The heritage significance of the Bone Trail lies in its association with the development of trade and commerce around Saskatoon. The trail was a relatively short but common route that connected smaller, outlying areas to Saskatoon. Users of the trail included First Nations, settlers and merchants who collected and sold bison bones, hence the naming of the trail. The bones were brought to Saskatoon where they were loaded onto rail cars and transported to the United States where they were used in fertilizer or as colouring agents in paint and ink. The trail was used until bison were hunted to the brink of extinction in the late 1880s.

Homesteaders replaced bone merchants on the trail after 1900, using the trail for travel to points in west-central Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta. It is estimated that 10,000 settlers travelled the Bone Trail between 1904 and 1905.

Source:

Rural Municipality of Corman Park Bylaw 12/81.

Character-Defining Elements

The heritage value of the Bone Trail resides in the following character-defining elements:
-those elements that display the site’s use as a historic trail, such as the wheel ruts that exist in the surrounding landscape.