The history of Regina, Saskatchewan, the capital of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Prior to the province's establishment, Regina served as the territorial headquarters of the then-North-West Territories and district headquarters of the territorial district of Assiniboia.
19th century Early settlement
Regina was founded in 1882, when the Canadian Pacific Railway, then being built across western Canada, reached the site: by the time of the North-West Rebellion in 1885 the CPR had reached only Qu'Appelle (then called Troy), some to the east of what became Regina.
The Dominion Lands Act encouraged homesteaders to come to the area where they could purchase of land for $10. The city was originally known as "Pile of Bones"—the English translation of the Cree place name "oskana kâ-asastêki" (lit. "Bones, which are piled")—because of the large amounts of buffalo bones on the banks of the Wascana Creek, a spring runoff channel rising some couple of kilometres to the east of Regina and gradually becoming a substantial coulee as it approaches the Qu'Appelle Valley some ten kilometres to the north.
In 1882, Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, wife of the Duke of Argyll, who was then the Governor General of Canada, named the new community Regina (Latin for queen), after her mother, the Queen. giving rise to frequent use of the sobriquet Queen City. Alternate names considered for the town were Leopold (for a son of Queen Victoria), Wascana (a mildly anglicized version of the Cree for "Pile of Bones") and Assiniboia (the Aboriginal people who gave their name to the district of the North-West Territories, corresponding to modern southern Saskatchewan, a famous mountain in the Canadian Rockies, a town southwest of Moose Jaw, and a river (Assiniboine) in Manitoba.)
Because of its location on the planned route of the new transcontinental railroad — the Territorial Lieutenant-Governor, Edgar Dewdney, had reserved substantial land on the site for himselfBerton, Pierre, The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881-1885 (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1971), pp.118-25. — Regina was chosen in 1883 as the new capital of the North-West Territories, replacing Battleford, and over the in-many-ways-superior claims of Battleford, Qu'Appelle and Fort Qu'Appelle. The headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police was then transferred to Regina from Fort Qu'Appelle. In 1883, Regina was officially declared a town. The town's first mayor, David Scott, was elected on January 10, 1884. Regina remained the territorial capital until 1905 when Saskatchewan became a province.
Louis Riel was brought to Regina after his troops were defeated by government forces in the North-West Rebellion in the spring of 1885. Riel was found guilty of treason during trial and was hanged on November 16, 1885. One of three territorial government buildings remains on Dewdney Avenue where the trial was conducted. The trial was re-enacted each summer by local actors in the Trial of Louis Riel for many years. This play, based on the writings of author John Coulter, was not presented in 2004, but was revived for 2005.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police training depot was established in 1874, and still survives. The RCMP chapel frame building was built in 1885 is still standing which was used to jail Indian prisoners. From 1892 to 1920, Regina was the headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police, and it is now headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Northwest Region and home of the RCMP Academy, Depot Division.
20th century Regina grew slowly for the first 20 years of its existence. With a population of more than 3,000, Regina was incorporated as a city on June 19, 1903, with Jacob W. Smith serving as the first mayor.
Establishment as the capital
After Saskatchewan became a province on September 1, 1905, Regina was officially decreed the capital on May 23, 1906. In 1908, the first city hall was completed in downtown Regina, while work began on the Saskatchewan Legislative Building across Wascana Lake. The years between 1903 and 1913 saw the city grow tenfold. Not only was the Government of Canada's immigration policy finally hitting its stride and attracting large numbers of settlers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the British Isles, from eastern Canada and the U.S., but adjustments to railway tariffs made the city more attractive as a distribution centre for farm machinery and other supplies needed by the settlers.
The population growth set off a frenzied building boom that gave the city many handsome public and private buildings that are still standing. These include its two main hospitals, the Canada Life Building, Regina College (which became the University of Regina), Holy Rosary Cathedral (Regina, Saskatchewan), Knox-Metropolitan United Church,(although its predecessors, the then-Metropolitan Methodist Church and Knox Presbyterian Church, were destroyed during a tornado and rebuilt) and the provincial Legislative Building.
An important element in the economic development of the young city was the creation of the Warehouse District on the north side of the city's downtown Canadian Pacific Railway yards. Laced by railway spur lines and encouraged by a change in CPR freight rates that made it more attractive to ship manufactured goods westward from eastern Canada, the district led the city's rapid expansion in this period. Regina was chosen to host the Dominion Exposition of 1911.The Progress and Opportunities of Regina (1910) Commercial souvenir published by the Greater Regina Club, Leader Publishing Co, Regina Saskatchewan https://archive.org/details/reginasaskatchew00grea/page/79/mode/1up?view=theater Retrieved 21 August 2023
On June 30, 1912, a tornado, locally referred to as the "Regina Cyclone," devastated the city, killing 28, injuring hundreds and destroying more than 400 buildings. The estimated $5 million in damage took more than two years to repair. Future horror film star Boris Karloff, who was in Regina at the time with a theatre company, served as a rescue worker after the disaster. The Regina Cyclone remains the deadliest tornado event in Canadian history. (Some sources state the tornado's toll was either 29 or 30.)
Growth tapered off with recession in 1913, and then the outbreak of the First World War, which saw immigration, capital and pools of workmen and building supplies dry up.
Roaring Twenties
Well underway but drastically interrupted by the First World War from 1914 to 1918, the city had considerable prosperity though nothing like the enormous growth in population which was initially predicted. As with other cities, Regina had numerous entertainment centres, including cinemas housing both stage productions and moving pictures — six downtown cinemas at the peak of such period, the Regina Theatre at 12th Avenue and Hamilton Street opening in 1910 and the Regina Grand Theatre in 1912 on 11th Avenue between Lorne and Cornwall Streets — which survived until television developed in the 1950s and such businesses gradually closed until only one remained in the central business district in 2012.
The city was home of the first licensed airport in Canada (May, 1920) and was also the home of first licensed commercial pilot in Canada (First World War veteran Roland Groome), the first air maintenance engineer in Canada (Robert McCombie) and the first licensed aircraft in Canada (Canadian-built Curtis JN-4 (Can) G-CYAA).
Regina used STV-PR in its city elections from 1921 to 1926. When Regina used PR-STV in its second city election in 1922, Gordon Merllin, a local member of the Typographical Union, was elected.Redcliff Review, Dec. 21, 1922Bowler and Grofman, Elections in Australia, Ireland and Malta, p. 206
Economic growth resumed postwar and switched into high gear in the late 1920s, in large part due to construction of the Regina General Motors auto assembly plant in the city's northeast industrial area in 1928–29. For a while, soaring wheat prices made Saskatchewan one of the richest places on Earth, in terms of per capita income. That led to a construction boom in Regina that left the city with an architecturally distinguished generation of apartment and commercial buildings.
The most ambitious such project, however, the Grand Trunk Railway's Chateau Qu'Appelle hotel at the corner of Albert Street and College Avenue (the site of the 1955 Museum of Natural History, now renamed the Royal Saskatchewan Museum), was abandoned, its building materials lying unused for years until they were eventually bought by the CPR and used in the construction of the Hotel Saskatchewan. The fiasco anticipated the later stalling of the intended Centennial auditorium, which sat only begun, derided as "the world's largest monkeybars" for years until it was finally opened in 1972 as the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts.
(The oldest building in Regina still in use is the chapel at the RCMP's "Depot" Division, built in the early 1880s and later converted for religious use. Nearby Government House (Saskatchewan) was built in 1891–92 as an office and residence for the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories.)
Great Depression The Great Depression of the 1930s caused massive unemployment in western Canada. In July 1933, a group of farmers, labour and social organizations met in Regina to form the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation or CCF, whose foundation document, the Regina Manifesto, was adopted at that first national CCF convention.
As frustrations grew among the unemployed in 1935, 1,300 men boarded trains in Vancouver bound for Ottawa to demand work from the federal government in what came to be known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek. The issue came to a head in Regina, where the numbers had swelled to 1,800 by the time the Prime Minister intervened and ordered the protest to be disbanded. On the evening of July 1, 1935, a public meeting was called for in Market Square to bring the public up to date on what had happened so far. It was attended by 1500 to 2000 people, of whom only 300 were trekkers. The main body of the trekkers had decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.
Three large vans were parked on the sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police concealed themselves in a nearby garage. At 8 p.m. a whistle was blown and the police charged from their concealment, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city's centre. The attack caught the people at the meeting by surprise, but then anger took over. They began to fight back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. RCMP mounted on horseback then charged into the crowd and attacked with clubs. Driven from the Square, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for four hours. Trekkers on the speakers' platform were arrested by a body of police in plain clothes.
The police began firing their revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed. There was no looting, with one exception. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of trekkers were quartered.
When it was over, 120 trekkers and citizens had been arrested. One plain clothes policeman had been killed. Hundreds of local citizens and Trekkers who had been wounded by police gunfire or otherwise injured were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the one in plain clothes who had been killed.