The Saskatoon area has been inhabited for at least 8,000 years. Buffalo kill sites, teepee rings and a medicine wheel can still be seen today and form an important link with the past.

The first European to set foot on the northern prairies was Henry Kelsey, a fur trader and explorer who arrived in 1690. Anthony Henday was the first European known to have passed through the Saskatoon area, in 1754.

European settlement of Saskatoon did not begin until 1881. That year, a group of Ontario temperance activists formed the Temperance Colonization Society (TCS), with the idea of creating an agricultural colony on the Prairies, dedicated to the ideals of the Temperance Movement, a philosophy which blamed alcohol for most of the ills that beset society. Take away the alcohol, the reasoning went, and you took away the ills.

At the same time, the Canadian government was hoping to stimulate settlement on the Prairies by offering huge blocks of land to colonization companies. For the TCS, therefore, the new colony would not only be an agricultural and social utopia, but also a chance to make a tidy profit from selling land to prospective settlers.

They soon signed up 3,100 would-be colonists for more than two million acres, and by June of 1882, John Lake — a Methodist minister turned entrepreneur — was scouting out possible colony sites along the South Saskatchewan River.

313,000 ACRE LAND GRANT

As it turned out, the colony’s land grant comprised only 313,000 acres. It extended along both sides of the South Saskatchewan River, from Clark’s Crossing (present-day Clarkboro) in the north to Moose Woods (the present-day Whitecap First Nation) in the south. It was to include a centrally-located townsite to act as a service centre for the surrounding farms. On the advice of Chief Whitecap of Moose Woods, Lake chose the site we now call Nutana as a place to plant the new town.

Lake returned the following year to survey the colony. The first settlers travelled by railway from Ontario to Moose Jaw and then made the gruelling 160-mile trip to Saskatoon in horse-drawn carts.

Saskatoon grew slowly. There was no railway and the river was too shallow and too full of shifting sandbars for easy navigation. Sensationalized newspaper reports of the Northwest Rebellion in 1885 also helped discourage settlement. Fewer than a dozen new settlers a year arrived in the district between 1885-1890.

In 1890, the railway finally arrived. That year the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railway Company bridged the river at Saskatoon. The railway snaked up from the south, following the course of what is now the Idylwyld Freeway and crossing the river where the Senator Sid Buckwold Bridge is now, on its way to Prince Albert. A new settlement soon developed on the west side of the river around the railway station.

By 1899, Saskatoon consisted of a few houses on the east side of the river and on the west side was the station house, the section foreman’s house, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police barracks, a stone building, a hotel and about six other houses and shacks. In 1901, when the west bank settlement incorporated as a village, it kept the name of Saskatoon. The name of the original settlement on the east side was changed to Nutana. A third settlement, Riversdale, developed west of the railway tracks beginning in 1903. In 1906, with the promise of a traffic bridge and other civic improvements, the three settlements amalgamated to form a city. The trickle of immigrants was becoming a flood and Saskatoon became the fastest growing city in Canada.

ECONOMY BOOMED BEFORE WAR

In the years leading up to the First World War, Saskatoon’s economy boomed. The population exploded. New construction was everywhere. Speculators bought up land for miles around, subdividing it into streets and lots and reselling it at sometimes enormous profits. Otherwise sober men dreamed of a city of 100,000 by 1920, in a province of two million inhabitants. It was not to be. The boom went bust in 1913, followed by the declaration of war with Germany in 1914.

With the exception of a few years in the late 1920s, the next 30 years were marked by economic and political upheavals of one sort or another, including the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the great human tragedy known as the Second World War, from 1939-1945. After that war, Saskatoon underwent a huge housing crisis — as bad as or worse than that which followed the First World War in 1918. By the late 1940s, things had settled down somewhat and the city entered a period of prosperity which has lasted — with exceptions — ever since

-Jeff O’Brien (City of Saskatoon Archivist)