Rails Across the Prairies. Ron Brown
Roundhouses and bunkhouses were demolished, workforces reduced.
Where tracks still exist, a number of former divisional points have retained a small workforce of railway workers. Places like Humboldt, Wilkie, Bredenbury, Medicine Hat, Wynyard, Biggar, and Melville, as well as dozens more, remain busy railway communities and have even constructed new facilities for their workforces. In other communities, such as Kerrobert, only a few sidings remain and the station sits vacant. Lanigan, Big Valley, Hanna, and Wainwright are examples of one-time divisional points where sidings have been lifted and stations closed.
In the face of truck competition, and centralization of grain elevators, many branch lines proved uneconomical and were abandoned. Stations and elevators vanished by the hundreds.
This was more than many of the little trackside towns could bear, and many shrivelled into ghost towns. Businesses were shuttered, children bussed to distant schools, and jobs fled to the cities — a situation the federal government is exacerbating by ending the Canada Wheat Board.
The Names
It seems that many of the railway companies rather enjoyed the prospect of naming the stations and the towns that they created. The Grand Trunk Pacific is well-known for alphabetizing its station names, and it managed to get through the alphabet three times in the Prairies and at least once in Ontario. The names between Winnipeg and Prince Rupert included Atwater to Zelma, Allan to Zumbro, and Bloom to Zenata.
While the Canadian Northern preferred to name its towns after its own employees and executives, it did venture into the literary world by naming the townsites between Bienfait and Maryfield, in southeastern Saskatchewan, after poets such as Lampman Browning, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Cowper, Service, Parkman, Mair, and Ryerson. After naming the town of Mozart after the great composer, the CPR set about naming streets after Liszt, Schubert, Haydn, and Wagner, among others. Loyalty to the crown also figured prominently in the CPR’s “Empress” line, with Monarch, Empress, Duchess, and Princess. Consort, Throne, Coronation, Sovereign, Veteran, and Loyal were all so-named on a line built by the CPR in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of King George V. A military-fealty theme came with Major, Ensign, Forward, Federal, and Hussar — again, all CPR towns.
Sometimes, the railways would blend provincial and even state names, coming up with such combinations as Alsask, Altario, Mankota, and Mantario.
The most common names, however, were reserved for railway employees or executives. In 1908 a special GTP train made its way across the new line, with three executives on board: Charles Melville Hayes, William Wainwright, and William Hodgins Biggar. They were seeking locations for the line’s divisional points, and it came as little surprise that those locations should bear the names Melville, Biggar, and Wainwright. The divisional point of Rivers in Manitoba was named to honour Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, chairman of the GTP’s board of directors. In at least one case, the CPR chose to spell an employee’s name backwards, Retlaw (Walter). Near Drumheller, the CPR reversed the letters of its Rosedale Junction station, calling it Eladesor Jc.
The Canadian Northern Railway, though, was the only railway to actually name a town after itself. Canora uses the first two letters from each of the railway’s three names: Ca-No-Ra.
Body parts also served as inspiration, with Elbow and Eyebrow in Saskatchewan (although Elbow referred to a bend in the river) and even the delightfully named Owlseye in Alberta and Birdtail in Manitoba. International diplomacy received its due consideration in Togo, Saskatchewan, named after the Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo, who defeated the Russian fleet at the battle of Tsushima during the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–05 (the name was chosen because of Britain’s support of Japan). The town of Mikado was also named in support of Japan. Russia, meanwhile, earned its share of recognition with the name Makaroff, after the vice-admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy during the same conflict.
Perhaps the two most intriguing communities, with regard to their names, are Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. The latter likely derives from longer “Medicine Man’s Hat.” Oral tradition suggests that, during a battle between Cree and Blackfoot tribes, a Cree medicine man dropped his hat in the South Saskatchewan River. Taking this as a bad omen, the Cree fled the battlefield. When the Blackfoot found the hat, in celebration they named the location Medicine Hat Crossing. When the CPR arrived in 1883, it simply adopted the English translation of the local name for its station.
As early as 1857, surveyor John Palliser marked the name “Moose Jaw Bone Creek” on his map of the dry southern prairies. This likely referred either to the shape of the river at this point or that a moose’s jaw was found here. Records don’t indicate which. Again, the CPR used this existing local name when it established a divisional point here.
Cities
The concentration of railway activities turned some towns into the Prairies’ major metropolises. These included Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Calgary, often at the expense of towns with earlier promise, like Fort Macleod, Battleford, and Emerson. Major regional centres developed at Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Brandon, Lethbridge, Prince Albert, Red Deer, Estevan, Yorkton, and Dauphin.
Winnipeg
The forks of the Red River and the Assiniboine River had been a focal point for settlement long before the trains arrived, and indeed even before European settlers crept in. The first, of course, were the settlers of Lord Selkirk’s Red River colony, who arrived in 1813 at Douglas Point (the 5th Earl of Selkirk, Lord Selkirk’s actual name was Thomas Douglas.) At around the same time, across the river in 1818, in what is today Saint Boniface, Father Joseph Norbert Provencher was creating a Roman Catholic mission.
Steamers plied the waters of the two rivers connecting the Red River colony and the mission. Travel to eastern Canada required a journey by steamer or stage to a railhead, then taking a train through the U.S.
Railways first reached the region in 1879, when the Pembina Branch laid its tracks from Winnipeg into Grand Rapids Minnesota, upstream on the Red River. Clearly, the newly created government of the Dominion of Canada believed that an all-Canadian route was in the country’s best interests.
Following its groundbreaking in West Fort William in 1875, the CPR remained effectively stalled until the government of John A. MacDonald, the line’s main supporter, was re-elected. Eventually, in 1883, the first CPR trains began operating in Winnipeg. At first, the CPR had proposed to bridge the Red River farther downstream, at North Kildonan, but when the Winnipeg city council offered the railway company free land and tax relief, the CPR altered the route to pass through Winnipeg. Nearly 20 years would pass before the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific railways joined forces to build one of the Prairies’ grandest urban stations and lay out their yards and shops at the Forks. As it was also the home of the wheat exchange, and the capital of the new province of Manitoba, Winnipeg quickly evolved into western Canada’s “Chicago.”
Although the railways play a lesser role today in the city’s fortunes, both the CNR and the CPR maintain major marshalling yards in the city. Both companies’ grand urban stations have survived, as has the CNR hotel, the Fort Garry, although the CPR’s Royal Alexandra Hotel has not. While the CNR has moved its yards from the location, many of the early railway buildings have been converted into markets and museums, with walkways following the rail beds and bridges. Now known as the Forks, this area constitutes a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike.
Saint Boniface developed around the church and mission, as railways played a small role in the community. The Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway did, however, place its terminal here — a fine stone building that yet serves as the headquarters for that single-purpose railway.
Transcona
Transcona was one of those rare communities that depended entirely upon the railway for its economy. When Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier at the time, decided that Canada needed yet a third major rail line across the country, a joint construction effort began. The government-owned National Transcontinental would handle the eastern portion, and the Grand Trunk affiliate, the Grand Trunk Pacific, would be responsible for the western portion. The two routes met midway at Transcona, east of Winnipeg.
Construction on Transcona and its