The first settlers around Oxbow, mainly of English, Irish and Scottish descent, began homesteading the area under the Dominion Lands Act in 1882. The town takes its name from the oxbow bend in the Souris River, near which it sits. The Oxbow Herald, still the town's weekly paper, was founded in 1903, and Oxbow was incorporated as a town in 1904.
Growth came quickly after incorporation, and by 1916 the town had 678 people. Numbers then held steady at roughly 600 to 700 for several decades. In the mid-1950s oil companies began developing the oilfields around Oxbow, and a boom followed as workers arrived to staff the drilling rigs and supply services to the industry. By 2010 there were roughly 38,000 oil and gas wells in the surrounding area. Agriculture and oil remain the town's two major industries, a pairing the Herald has celebrated with the unofficial motto "Where Oil and Agriculture Meet."
Oxbow is also remembered as the home of Ralph Allen, the journalist and editor of Maclean's, who often mentioned his hometown in the magazine. The town museum is named in his honour. Along the Souris River south of town, Bow Valley Park hosts the annual Bow Valley Jamboree. After the 2011 flood destroyed much of the park, it took almost six years and $300,000 to restore, and it formally reopened in June 2017.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Oxbow, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.