History of Regina, Saskatchewan

The city was originally known as "Pile of Bones"—the English translation of the Cree place name "oskana kâ-asastêki" (lit.

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.)

In 1908, the first city hall was completed in downtown Regina, while work began on the Saskatchewan Legislative Building across Wascana Lake.

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.

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.

[6] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[7][8] 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.

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.

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.

People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars.

Premier Gardiner sent a wire to Prime Minister Bennett accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers.

Bennett further added to the misrepresentation by stating in the House of Commons the same day that the Trek was "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."

Its defence of Bretteville Farm on the night of June 7/8, 1944 has been credited by some historians with preventing a German armoured breakthrough that could have reached the vulnerable invasion beaches and caused havoc, delaying or even stopping the Allied advance into Normandy.

The Royal Canadian Navy corvette HMCS Regina, named for the city, sank an Italian submarine in the Mediterranean in 1943, but was itself torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Cornwall in August 1944.

The disused General Motors assembly plant (east on Dewdney Avenue), which had ceased operations as the Depression gripped the prairies, was requisitioned for armaments manufacture before returning to idleness at war's end.

The early years of the province's social democratic government (first elected in 1944) brought into Regina a rich mix of civil servants ranging from a scion of Britain's Cadbury family to expatriate American intellectuals hounded out of their own country by anti-communist investigations.

Regina's downtown core has experienced similar problems to those of other cities on the continent as the retail focus has moved to suburban shopping areas, especially "big box stores."

The civic government has possibly not discouraged the depletion of Regina's downtown core, keeping parking expenses extremely high and repeatedly approving the development of further shopping complexes on the city perimeter.

Some of the larger retail centres which have failed in recent years are being converted into government office space, which may return people to work downtown.