I listened to Jake and the Kid every Sunday afternoon on CBC Radio when I was a young lad (I was 14 when the series ended). These were people that I knew. Jake, the Kid, and all the other characters could have been people in my home town. The grass, the fields, the sky, the wind that were part of each episode were exactly as I felt them every day of my life. Every detail was real, the things that happened, the way people talked and acted, were as true to life as anything I observed around me.
I have read other books that were set in small prairie towns, but the writers lived in England or the USA, and so many details were laughably inappropriate. I know writers who live here in Saskatchewan, yet set their stories in the USA. I suppose they are considering the size of the US market, compared with the size of the Canadian market. I am confident that they do not make major blunders, but is it possible to capture the essence of a place if you don’t live there?
Lucy Maud Montgomery lived in Prince Edward Island and used her surroundings as the background of the Anne of Green Gables books. She portrayed that setting, and the lives of her characters in that setting, so vividly that her stories have a universal appeal. I don’t think you can do that if you are not intimately acquainted with the time, the place and the people you are writing about.
Writing a fantasy novel is one alternative, but it is definitely not the easy way out. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien put an immense amount of effort into creating fantasy worlds that remained consistent from beginning to end, then dropped your next door neighbours into that world to see how they would behave.
Living in a small prairie town, with your eyes and ears open, provides an immense store of characters and incidents that cam become material for a book. There is social commentary in Jake and the Kid, Who Has Seen the Wind, and other books by W. O. Mitchell, but it is done with gentle humour that make the books both appealing and thought provoking. What more can one hope to accomplish with a book?
Flatlander Faith 
Interesting thoughts. The Stump Farm written by Hilda Rose in 1928 was a great book. Village of Small Houses by Ian Fergusen was true to life and if I am correct it won a humor contest as well. Jam in the Bed Roll by Frank Jackson is one of 3 books he read and his late wife Mary Jackson wrote several medical documentaries as well. If you go to yard sales and to Trade Fairs you may find many good interesting and humorous books.
Hank