The Rural Municipality of Caron lies to the west of the city of Moose Jaw in south-central Saskatchewan. The municipality is cut in two by the Missouri Coteau, a range of hills which rise to a height of 500 feet above the Saskatchewan prairie.

Prior to 1870 this land was home to the Cree, who wandered across it in search of the ever diminishing buffalo. In 1858 Professor H. Y. Hind reported camping near a "great encampment of Cree Indians at the west end of Buffalo Pound Lake." In his report he spoke of the Cree driving thousands of buffalo into a pound on the north side of the valley. A report written by Captain Butler 12 years later spoke of abandoned buffalo trails littered with "hundreds of thousands of (buffalo) skeletons." It was in 1870 that the Cree, close to starvation, left the open prairie to take up residence on a government reserve.

Beyond the Coteau, the brown soils of the rolling short grass prairie became home to ranchers and its lower levels of fertility and undulating terrain kept much of it unbroken. Below the Coteau the dark brown soils had been described by Palister as unsuited for agriculture and, indeed, prior to 1880 it seemed as if the land around Caron would never be broken. But by 1880, John Macoun, a botanist and naturalist, actively promoted the area for settlement and production of wheat. It was his influence that resulted in the diversion of the C.P.R. from its planned route to a path that took it directly through the municipality.

A survey party headed by Charles Aeness Shaw surveyed for the C.P.R. in what was to become the Caron district in about June of 1880. According to Sessional Papers, on September 12, 1882, the C.P.R. reached 16 miles west of Moose Jaw. A siding was constructed and named "Caron," in honor of Sir Adolphe Caron, then Minister of Militia and Defence, who served in the Canadian Cabinet from 1880 to 1896.