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The capital city of Saskatchewan REGINA
is the commercial and administrative centre of one of the more
densely populated parts of central Canada, its services anchoring
a vast network of agricultural villages and towns. Yet despite
its capital status, brash shopping malls and population of 204,000,
Regina acts and feels like a small prairie town. It's a comfortable
if unremarkable place to spend a couple of days, with the offbeat
attraction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Training Academy
and Museum, and the opportunity to explore some of southern Saskatchewan's
less familiar destinations - such as the Big Muddy Badlands and
the Grasslands National Park. If you want to improve your suntan,
incidentally, you've also come to the right place - Regina gets
more hours of sunshine than any other major city
in Canada.
In 1881 the Indian Commissioner Edward Dewdney
became lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories, a vast
tract of land that spread west from Ontario as far as the Arctic
and Pacific oceans. Almost immediately, he decided to move his
capital south from the established community of Battleford to
Pile O'Bones , an inconsequential dot on the
map that took its name from the heaps of bleached buffalo bones
left along its creek by generations of native hunters. The reason
for Dewdney's decision was the routing of the Canadian Pacific
transcontinental railroad across the southern plains: the capital
city was renamed Regina after Queen Victoria, and Dewdney petitioned
for it to be expanded on land to the north of the creek, a plot
coincidentally owned by him. The site was terrible: the sluggish
creek provided a poor water supply, the clay soil was muddy in
wet weather and intolerably dusty in the summer, and there was
no timber for building. Accordingly, the railway board refused
to oblige, and the end result was farcical: Government House and
the Mounted Police barracks were built where Dewdney wanted them,
but the train station was a three-kilometre trek to the south.
In 1905 Regina became the capital of the newly created
province of Saskatchewan , and settlers flocked
here from the United States and central Europe. At the heart of
an expanding wheat-growing district, the city tripled its population
during its first fifteen years. It also overcame its natural disadvantages
with an ambitious programme of tree-planting, which provided shade
and controlled the dust, and by damming the creek to provide a
better source of water. However, the city's success was based
on the fragile prosperity of a one-crop economy, and throughout
the twentieth century boom alternated with bust.
