Map - Peace River, Alberta (Peace River)

Peace River, originally named Peace River Crossing and known as Rivière-la-Paix in French, is a town in northwest Alberta, Canada. It is along the banks of the Peace River at its confluence with the Smoky River, the Heart River and Pat's Creek. It is approximately 486 km northwest of Edmonton and 198 km northeast of Grande Prairie on Highway 2. It was known as the Village of Peace River Crossing between 1914 and 1916.

The Peace River townsite is nearly 1000 ft below the relatively flat terrain surrounding it. Pat's Creek used to be an open channel through the town but is now channelled through a culvert under the town streets, re-emerging at the mouth on the Peace River at the Riverfront Park.

The population in the Town of Peace River was 6,729 in 2011, a 6.6% increase over its 2006 population. There are significant nodal settlements and subdivisions in the vicinity of the town on acreages along Highway 2 to the west, Highways 684 (Shaftesbury Trail) and 743 as well as the southwest portion of Northern Sunrise County. Regionally, there are various First Nation communities to the northeast, French-Canadian farming communities to the south and to the east, and Mennonite and Hutterite German-Canadian farming communities to the north and northwest of the town.

Peace River was the site of the 2004 Alberta Winter Games. In 2010, Peace River, in conjunction with Grimshaw and surrounding municipalities, jointly hosted the 2010 Alberta Summer Games.

After the last glacial ice sheets melted from the northern parts of the Canadian prairies, an ice-free corridor allowed people from Asia to make a way deep into the Americas. When the Ice Age ended, many of these groups moved back north following the large herds of grazing animals which were, in turn, following the grasses northward in the warming climate. In the Peace River area, the two major language groups were the Athapaskan and the Algonquian.

In 1670, following the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company in Eastern Canada, guns began making their way westward as trade goods and the Algonquian speaking Cree began pushing the Athapaskan speakers Dunne-za or Beaver further west. The Beaver in turn pushed the Sekani deep into the Rocky Mountain Trench in the mid-18th century. A truce was eventually agreed to by the Cree and the Beaver and the great river they called Unchagah (the Peace River) became the boundary between their hunting territories.

The North West Company pushed westward in the late 18th century in an attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean, creating rivalry with the other major fur-trading company, the Hudson's Bay Company.