Long before settlers arrived, the land around Herschel was prime bison country. For thousands of years it served as hunting ground for the Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Plains Cree and Métis. The nearby Coalmine Ravine holds a buffalo jump, a butchering and pemmican site, and a ceremonial site about 1,500 years old, found by a local farmer in 1960 and named a Municipal Heritage Site in 1988. In 1859 the Scottish big-game hunter James Carnegie, Earl of Southesk, hunted bison and a plains grizzly here. Millions of years earlier the area lay beneath an inland sea, and fossil bonebeds found in the ravine in the 1990s include a short-necked plesiosaur species known nowhere else.
The village of Herschel was established in October 1910 and named for the English physicist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. In 1911 W. G. King built the first store, a post office opened, the first mixed train arrived, and the rail line from Macklin to Rosetown officially opened. The first grain elevator and the United Church followed, and a school organized in 1912. In the winter of 1924-25 a large group of Mennonites from Russia settled nearby and founded what is now the Herschel Ebenfeld Mennonite Church. Soft coal was mined in the ravine in the 1930s. A fire in 1935 destroyed 18 homes and businesses.
Herschel reached its peak population of 203 in 1956, after a busy decade that saw new businesses and the building of the Memorial Hall. The last two elevators came down in 2010. After the school closed in 1994, the community bought the building for $1, and the Ancient Echoes Interpretive Centre opened there that October. It shows off the area's fossils, prairie ecology, First Nations history and pioneer past. Herschel is also the seat of the Rural Municipality of Mountain View, and it holds a yearly ethnic supper featuring Mennonite wereneki and smoked sausage.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Herschel, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.