Long before settlers came, the land around Luseland was part of the hilly moraine country near the Neutral Hills, where the Cree and the Blackfeet did not venture and the last bison herds took refuge. Métis hunters later pursued those herds. John Palliser, guided by Métis people in 1858, judged the country barren, but botanist John Macoun saw it very differently in 1881 and called it an agricultural Eden.
The first settlers arrived about a quarter century later, drawn by the rich prairie wool pastures along the Grass Lake valley. George Hoddinott and the Abbs brothers applied for a homestead they called Abbnott in April 1906. British-Canadian settlers, many from Ontario, followed in 1907 and 1908.
The town takes its name from the Luse Land and Development Company, founded by J.F. Luse of St. Paul, Minnesota, which hoped to set up a German Lutheran colony for Volga German families who had first settled in the American Midwest. Government regulations stopped the company from reserving homestead lands that way, and the district already lay within the German Catholic block of St. Joseph's Colony. Even so, by 1909 the company was bringing in trainloads of settlers, who travelled by horse and cart from the station at Scott. Luseland became a village on December 10, 1910.
The area grew into one of the west's most productive wheat districts, with as many as six grain elevators, and the town once had six churches. Today Luseland has a museum, a school, and Prairie Park, which preserves native prairie on the old schoolyard. It is also the hometown of business leader Jim Pattison.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Luseland” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.