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City of Regina Archives

Long Lake & Qu'Appelle Railway

  • SCN00302
  • Corporate body
  • 1883-1906

The Qu'Appelle, Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railroad and Steamboat Company (QLSRSC) was a railway that operated between Regina, Saskatchewan and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada via Craik, Saskatoon and Rosthern.
Augustus Meredith Nanton was an earlier financier who helped raise the funds to establish the railway. Construction began on the line 1883 but ran into financial problems. By 1886, only 25 miles (40 km) had been built, and the line was not finished until 1889.
Work on the first branch line of the QLSRSC began in 1885, from Regina to Craven, Saskatchewan. This permitted the settlement of the area, resulting in the creation of communities as Sunset Cove. The Regina-Prince Albert line was constructed by 1889 and 1890.
In 1889, the company's railways were leased to the Canadian Pacific Railway and finally taken over by the Canadian Northern Railway in July 1906. The railway also operated steamboats on Last Mountain Lake. Through its land holding company, the railway sold off its 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of farmland to early settlers.

McCallum-Hill Building

  • SCN00181
  • Corporate body
  • 1912-1982

It was Regina’s first skyscraper at ten storeys high, and the tallest building in Saskatchewan at the time. Real estate developers E.A. McCallum, E. M. McCallum and Walter H.A. Hill began construction of the McCallum-Hill office building in 1912. Designed by Regina architects Storey and Van Egmond, the prime office space faced beautiful Victoria Park and dominated the Regina skyline for years. The McCallum-Hill Building was imploded in six seconds with 200 pounds of explosives in 1982.

On to Ottawa Trek

  • SCN00236
  • Corporate body
  • 1935

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a mass protest movement in Canada in 1935 sparked by unrest among unemployed single men in federal relief camps principally in Western Canada. Federal relief camps were brought in under Prime Minister R. B. Bennett’s government as a result of the Great Depression. The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett government ordered the Department of National Defense to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The men in the relief camps were living in poor conditions with very low wages. The men decided to unite and in 1933, and led by Arthur "Slim" Evans the men created Workers' Unity League (WUL). The Workers' Unity League helped the men organize the Relief Camp Workers' Union.

A strike was held in December 1934 with the men leaving the various camps and protesting in Vancouver, British Columbia. After a two-month protest, they returned to the camps after a promise of a government commission to look into their complaints. When a commission was not appointed a second strike was approved by the members and a walkout was called on April 4, 1935.

About 1,000 strikers headed for Ottawa. The strikers' demands were: “(1) that work with wages be instituted at a minimum of 50cents per hour for unskilled workers and trade union rates for skilled labour on the basis of a six-hour day, a five-day week with a minimum of twenty work days per month; (2) that all workers in the camps be covered by the Workman's Compensation Act and that adequate first aid supplies be carried on the jobs at all times; (3) that the National Defense and all military control with the system of blacklisting be abolished; (4) that democratically elected committees be recognized in every camp; (5) that there be instituted a system of noncontributory unemployment insurance; (6) that all workers be given their democratic right to vote; (7) that Section 98 of the Criminal Code, Sections 41 and 42 of the Immigration Act and all vagrancy laws and anti-working class laws be repealed”.

Public support for the men was enormous, but the municipal, provincial and federal governments passed responsibility between themselves. They then decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men began boarding boxcars headed east in what became known as the "On-to-Ottawa Trek".

Regina Leader-Post (Newspaper)

  • SCN00239
  • Corporate body
  • 1883-present

The newspaper was first published as The Leader in 1883 by Nicholas Flood Davin, soon after Edgar Dewdney, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories, decided to name the vacant and featureless site of Pile-O-Bones, renamed Regina by Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, the wife of the Governor General of Canada, as territorial capital, rather than the previously-established Battleford, Troy and Fort Qu'Appelle, presumably because he had acquired ample land on the site for resale.
The first Leader Building, Regina, Assiniboia, 1884

"A group of prominent citizens approached lawyer Nicholas Flood Davin soon after his arrival in Regina and urged him to set up a newspaper. Davin accepted their offer – and their $5000 in seed money. The Regina Leader printed its first edition on March 1, 1883."[2] Published weekly by the mercurial Davin, it almost immediately achieved national prominence during the North-West Rebellion and the subsequent trial of Louis Riel. Davin had immediate access to the developing story, and his scoops were picked up by the national press and briefly brought the Leader to national prominence.

Davin's greatest coup was sending his reporter Mary McFadyen Maclean to conduct a jailhouse interview with Riel. Maclean obtained this by masquerading as a francophone Catholic cleric and interviewing Riel in French under the nose of uncomprehending anglophone watch-house guards.

Regina Riot

  • SCN00237
  • Corporate body
  • 1935

Eight delegates arrived back in Regina on June 26. Attempts of the Trekkers to travel east by car or truck or train were thwarted by RCMP. A public meeting was called for July 1, 1935, in Market Square in Germantown (now the site of the Regina City Police station) to update the public on the progress of the movement. It was attended by 1,500 to 2,000 people, of whom only 300 were Trekkers. Most Trekkers decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.

Three large moving trucks were parked on three sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police were in the garage of the police station which was in Market Square. At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown, and the police charged the crowd with batons from all four sides. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then started to use tear gas and fired guns. Driven from the Square, and with the RCMP blocking the roadway back to the Stadium grounds, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for six hours.

Police fired 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, but with one exception, these stores were not looted, they were burned. 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, 140 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Miller, a plainclothes policeman, died, and Nick Schaack, a Trekker, later died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. There were hundreds of injured residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to a hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protesters had been killed in the melee; the hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.[citation needed]

Trekkers Arthur Evans and George Black who were on the speakers' platform were arrested by plainclothes police at the beginning of the melee.

The city's exhibition grounds were surrounded by constables armed with revolvers as well as automatic fire-arms.[citation needed] The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. News of the police-instigated riot was front-page news across Canada. About midnight one of the Trek leaders telephoned Saskatchewan Premier Gardiner, who agreed to meet their delegation the next morning. The RCMP were livid when they heard of this and apprehended the delegates for interrogation but eventually released them in time to see the premier.

Premier Gardiner sent a wire to the Prime Minister, accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers. He also told the prime minister the "men should be fed where they are and sent back to camp and homes as they request" and stated his government was prepared to "undertake this work of disbanding the men." An agreement to this effect was subsequently negotiated. Bennett was satisfied that he had smashed what he believed was a communist revolt and Gardiner was glad to rid his province of the strikers.

The Federal Minister of Justice Hugh Guthrie made the false statement[citation needed][6] in the House of Commons on July 2 that "shots were fired by the strikers, and the fire was replied to with shots from the city police." During the lengthy trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as "not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government."