Qu'Appelle () is a town in Saskatchewan, located on Highway 35 approximately east of the provincial capital of Regina.

Qu'Appelle was for a time the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the major distribution centre for what was then the District of Assiniboia in the North-West Territories and is now southern Saskatchewan. The town is situated in a lush rolling parkland, with intermittent coulees containing steady-flowing creeks running into the Qu'Appelle Valley, poplar bluffs, and sloughs.

Qu'Appelle had at one stage been credibly anticipated to be the major metropole of the North-West Territories by both the federal Government of Canada and the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada (since 1955 the Anglican Church of Canada). It was under serious consideration by the Government of Canada as district headquarters of the District of Assiniboia and territorial headquarters of the North-West Territories. The Church of England had in anticipation of Qu'Appelle's future urban importance designated it the cathedral city for the Diocese of Qu'Appelle, which geographically corresponded precisely to the District of Assiniboia in the North-West Territories.The Diocese of Qu'Appelle geographically remains largely coterminus with the old District of Assiniboia in the North-West Territories, though a strip of the diocese which fell over the 1905 boundary between the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta was ceded to the Diocese of Calgary in the 1970s.

Political events, however, passed Qu'Appelle entirely by when Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney selected the locale of his own landholdings at Pile-O-Bones (then renamed "Regina" by Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, when her husband John Campbell, Marquess of Lorne was Governor General) as his territorial capital: Qu'Appelle's significance other than in historical terms then largely lapsed.

Etymology

The CPR arrived in 1882–83,David McLennon, "Qu'Appelle," Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan Retrieved 29 November 2008. and the post office was founded at what was originally called Troy on August 1, 1882. For a time Qu'Appelle appeared likely to be the administrative headquarters for the District of Assiniboia, which corresponded to the southern portion of the present day province of Saskatchewan.

Two versions of the origin of the name "Troy" are proposed: That

it was named after Troy, Ontario by Wellington Mulholland, a land surveyor and land agent and the name was chosen by the brothers Stephen and James Caswell who were merchants in the area and managed the post office.

Original settlers hung onto the old name of "Troy" well into the 20th century.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway arrived in 1884 the new town was renamed Qu'Appelle Station in reference to the nearby Qu'Appelle Valley, which was the location of a long-established Hudson's Bay Company factory.David McLennon, "Qu'Appelle," Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan , retrieved 30 September 2008. The name "Qu'Appelle," a corruption of qui appelle, French for "Who calls?" refers to the once-popular legend of the Qu'Appelle Valley versified by E. Pauline Johnson:

In 1902 the name was changed to South Qu'Appelle and in 1911 the longstanding confusion as to the name "Qu'Appelle," which also referred to the former Hudson's Bay Company fort town in the Qu'Appelle Valley, to the northeast of Qu'Appelle, was resolved when the two communities agreed to deem the then-CPR station site as Qu'Appelle and the town in the valley as Fort Qu'Appelle.

History

Establishment

Like many small Canadian prairie towns, Qu'Appelle has had a considerably livelier past than its present. A Hudson's Bay Company trading post temporarily stood southwest of the future site of the town from 1854 through 1864David McLennon, "Qu'Appele," Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan , retrieved 7 February 2009. when it was re-located back to its previous site, the modern Fort Qu'Appelle in the Qu'Appelle Valley.

Qu'Appelle was a district used to elect two members of the NWT Council in 1885. Later the district was divided into South Qu'Appelle and North Qu'Appelle.

Qu'Appelle was at one point among the likely choices as capital of the North-West Territories, as indicated by its original status as the historical see city of the Church of England in Canada (Anglican since 1955) Diocese of Qu'Appelle. The choice of Pile-of-Bones, as Regina was originally called, as the Territorial headquarters was a national scandal in the 1880s: there was an "obvious conflict of interest" in Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney's promoting of Pile-of-Bones as the territorial headquartersPierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881-1885 (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1973), 120. though not to the extent of preventing a major street in Regina being named "Dewdney Avenue" or in resuming his political career in British Columbia after leaving office in the North-West Territories in 1888.

A 1980 local town history reports that

Until 1897, however, when responsible government was accomplished in the Territories,David J. Hall, "North-West Territories," The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19 November 2007. the lieutenant-governor and council governed by fiat and there was little legitimate means of challenging such decisions outside the federal capital of Ottawa, where the Territories were remote and of little concern.

North-West Rebellion

Despite its loss of initial prominence as a likely territorial headquarters Qu'Appelle attained national prominence in 1885 during the North-West Rebellion. Until the construction of the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake, and Saskatchewan Railway in 1890 linked the newly established Regina with Saskatoon and Prince Albert, Qu'Appelle was the major debarkation and distribution centre for the North-West Territories.David MacLennon, Qu'Appelle , Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, retrieved 20 April 2009.

General Frederick Dobson Middleton, who billeted in Qu'Appelle's Queen's Hotel (which survived into the 21st century), made Qu'Appelle the marshalling point to the locus of the North-West Rebellion in the north-west for troops arriving by train from eastern Canada.

For some years Qu'Appelle was the centre of national attention as journalists based there reported back home to eastern Canada on developments in the North-West Rebellion. Qu'Appelle's significance in the 1880s before the anticipated prominence of it and Fort Qu'Appelle was substantially reduced by Lieutenant-Governor Dewdney's preference for Pile-of-Bones — in the case of Qu'Appelle ultimately virtually eliminated — is even today in the Canadian Encyclopedia indicated by a simple reference to it: "General Middleton's original plan was simple. He wanted to march all his troops north from the railhead at Qu'Appelle to Batoche."Bob Beal and Rod MacLeod, "North-West Rebellion." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 16, 2013. The resolution of the North-West Rebellion perhaps needless to say did not comprehensively resolve conflicts among settlers and aboriginal people. Many Qu'Appelle children of the late 19th and early 20th centuries recounted frightening encounters with angry Cree and Métis, who not unreasonably bore a considerable grudge against white settlers in the Qu'Appelle region.Cf references, passim, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books: contemporary attitudes of South Dakota from 1880, when settlement opened there, are obviously precisely coterminous with such attitudes in the District of Assiniboia some 2-3 years later, notwithstanding the wide divergence between immediately adjacent Canadian provinces and American states as to issues such as gun control and abortion.

Early town life and economy

From 1882, early residents of Qu'Appelle included numerous English remittance men whose cultured backgrounds contributed significantly to the life of the town. Amateur theatricals and musical evenings were a regular feature of winter social life and it was important to early Qu'Appelle residents that there be an "opera house": an auditorium in the town hall.

At a time when farmers were vastly greater in number than later: a standard farm was a quarter section, a section being . As in Fort Qu'Appelle, town life in many ways resembled that of an Indian hill station during the British Raj. Perhaps improbably in so small a community but indicative of the not always tolerant and inclusive social mores of early settlement in the Canadian west, discrete neighbourhoods of Qu'Appelle were called "Germantown" and "Breedville," the latter in racist early reference to the prairie Anglo-Métis, whom white settlers at the time called "half-breeds," a term now considered disparaging, and generally avoided.

Relations between the English immigrants of the Anglican pro-cathedral parish and the native-born Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and Roman Catholic settlers from Ontario and Quebec were at times frosty and the Anglican Church was long referred to in some disparagement as "the English Church" by eastern Canadian settlers who perhaps regarded themselves as more authentically Canadian. At one point Bishop Harding, the Church of England (Anglican) bishop, was quoted at a meeting — when he was imprudently unaware that local Canadians were hearing his remarks — as observing that English Anglican migrants might be more attractive settlers than Presbyterian and Methodist Canadians, occasioning considerable adverse notice and animosity against the English in the general community.Qu'Appelle: footprints to progress: a history of Qu'Appelle and district Retrieved 15 March 2009.

The fine yellow brick town hall and "opera house" remains marginally in use, though its auditorium has long since been closed to public use because it falls short of modern standards of safety and the town cannot bring it up. Its companion building, Qu'Appelle High School, built in similar style in identical yellow brick, closed in 1973 and was demolished in 1975. The Queen's Hotel, built in 1884 (early on with the competitor of Smiths Hotel, far more briefly surviving) continued to operate, latterly largely as a town pub albeit that alcohol was briefly banned for drink in Saskatchewan after World War I, as vastly more lengthily in the USA. After steady commercial decline for many years it was destroyed by fire in 2003.

The first Qu'Appelle businesses of 1882 were a restaurant operated by J. Stoddard; pool hall by Love & Raymond; livery and feed store by Johnston & Paterson; livery and feed store by Joe Doolittle; and harness shop by John Milliken. An observatory was opened in 1882 by Leslie Gordon and provided morning and evening weather readings for the CPR until 1907, when the observatory was supplemented with anemometer and weather recording devices. The Qu'Appelle Felt and Boot factory opened at the end of 1897 but liquidated in 1900. A fire in 1883 destroyed much of the new business district but soon there were six stores, three hotels, five implement agencies, two butcher shops, a flour and feed store and a bakery.Qu'Appelle Historical Society, Qu'Appelle: Footprints to Progress (Qu'Appelle, 1980), 22.