Fort Qu'Appelle () is a town in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan located in the Qu'Appelle River valley about north-east of Regina, between Echo and Mission Lakes of the Fishing Lakes. It is not to be confused with the once-significant nearby town of Qu'Appelle. It was originally established in 1864 as a Hudson's Bay Company trading post. Fort Qu'Appelle, with its 1,919 residents in 2006, is at the junction of Highway 35, Highway 10, Highway 22, Highway 56, and Highway 215. The 1897 Hudson's Bay Company store, 1911 Grand Trunk Pacific Railway station, Fort Qu'Appelle Sanatorium (Fort San), and the Treaty 4 Governance Centre in the shape of a teepee are all landmarks of this community. Additionally, the Noel Pinay sculpture of a man praying commemorates a burial ground, is a life-sized statue in a park beside Segwun Avenue.
Origins and early history The current site is the third Fort Qu'Appelle. The first was a North West Company trading post (1801–05), also in the valley but near what is now the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. The Hudson's Bay Company itself first used the name for a post north of present-day Whitewood (some east of Regina on Highway 1) from 1813 to 1819.
Prior to the mid-19th century establishment of the more lengthily surviving fur-trading post at the ultimate site of the town, it "was the hub of several historic trails that traversed the northwest".Garth Pugh. "". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed 1 March 2012. It was the site of a Hudson's Bay Company post from 1852 to 1854. An Anglican mission was established, which still survives as the town's St. John the Evangelist Anglican parish church.
The post was revived again from 1864 to 1911. With the signing of Treaty 4 by Cree and Saulteaux peoples at Fort Qu'Appelle the North-West Mounted Police, now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), arrivedMcLennon. and have maintained a continuous presence in the town ever since.
Substantial transformation of Fort Qu'Appelle occurred when farm development began in the 1880s and farmers required a nearby urban centre for selling their grain and other products, purchasing agricultural and domestic supplies and for social gathering beyond rural schools and churches. It was not anticipated that initial partition of agricultural land into farms of one-quarter section () would not last long and farm population would substantially reduce very quickly; the process accelerated in the 1970s when farmers began selling their land and retiring in substantial numbers to Fort Qu'Appelle as the custom of elderly farmers remaining at home with offspring passed into history, and more retired to town.
The name "Qu'Appelle" comes from is French for 'who calls' and is derived from its Cree name, kah-tep-was (in Modern Plains Cree: kâ-têpwêt ᑳ ᑌᐻᐟ 'river that calls'). There are several versions of the origin of this name, but the most popular suggests it refers to a Cree legend of two ill-fated lovers." The name refers to the once-popular legend of the Qu'Appelle Valley versified by E. Pauline Johnson and known nation-wide. "Fort Qu'Appelle was the crossroads of a number of historic trails that traversed the North-West Territories."McLennan, David. "Fort Qu'Appelle". The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. CANADIAN PLAINS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF REGINA. Retrieved 3 March 2012
The town is immediately adjacent to the site of the original Fort Qu'Appelle Hudson's Bay Company trading post, whose "factory" is maintained as a historical site and museum. The Hudson's Bay trading post was built in 1864David McLennon, "Fort Qu'Appelle," Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 19 November 2007 when the company's activity was still largely confined to the fur trade with First Nations residents.McLennan, David. "Fort Qu'Appelle". The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. CANADIAN PLAINS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF REGINA. Retrieved 14 March 2012 "[P]emmican was shipped down valley on a Hudson's Bay Company cart trail to supply the paddlers of the fur trade in more forested regions."Norm Henderson, "Qu'Appelle Valley". The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/quappelle_valley.html. Retrieved 1 December 2012.
Despite the gathering of General Middleton and soldiers at Qu'Appelle, at the westernmost extreme of the still-incomplete Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and some kilometres south of the Qu'Appelle Valley, "Middleton empowered Captain French, an Irish officer who had been in the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), to raise a mounted force in the vicinity of Fort Qu'Appelle. ... This mounted troop ... joined the 10th Royal Grenadiers from Toronto and the Winnipeg Field Battery under the command of artillery officer Lieutenant-Colonel C.E. Montizambert, to form the west-bank column that would march from Qu'Appelle to Batoche",Peter Borch, Daria Coneghan, "French's Scouts," The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/frenchs_scouts.html. Retrieved 18 January 2013. where the battle would occur.
After ethnic European settlement by farmers had become established in the 1880s—a post office being established in 1880—the original Hudson's Bay Company activity was replaced by its department store on Broadway Street in 1897. By this time the fur trade had lapsed but the town community and farmers travelling into town for shopping had substantially increased in number. The store building remains though long disused by the Bay.
There was once certain ambiguity as to entitlement to the town-name between the present town and the once-significant regional centre bearing the name "Qu'Appelle"; the matter ceased to be an issue in 1911 when the two communities agreed to deem the then-CPR station site as Qu'Appelle and the town in the valley as Fort Qu'Appelle. As did the town of Qu'Appelle, Fort Qu'Appelle early-on had "a bid to succeed Battleford as the territorial capital" but "lost out to Regina ... in 1882".Garth Pugh. "". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica-Dominion. Retrieved 16 March 2012.
The name Fort Qu'Appelle was given to a number of trading posts in the Qu'Appelle valley. Near Fort Espérance both the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company had temporary posts that were apparently called Fort Qu'Appelle. (The Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company merged in 1821.) From 1855 until 1864 the Hudson's Bay Company had a Fort Qu'Appelle a little south of where McLean was later established. It was an outpost of Fort Ellice and was mainly a source of pemmican. In 1864 it was moved to the present site of Fort Qu'Appelle.Elizabeth Brown Losey. "Let Them be Remembered: The Story of the Fur Trade Forts", 1999, page 659-667
Three industrial boarding schools for First Nations adolescents were established in 1883, including one on the south side of Mission Lake across from Lebret on the north side of the lake, as well as Battleford and High River.Blair Stonechild. "Aboriginal Peoples of Saskatchewan". The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 1 December 2012.
It was often claimed that colonial administration of Canada, once British North America, was very different from that in other British colonies. But it has been alleged to have been corruption on the part of Edgar Dewdney when he was Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Territories to place the capital in Buffalo Bones rather than Fort Qu'Appelle or Qu'Appelle. On the other hand, Fort Qu'Appelle is strikingly similar to Murree, northeast of Rawalpindi and once the summer capital of British India, and Maymyo, Burma highlands. It was in 1915 that "Sir Robert Borden has been invited by the Saskatchewan Art Society to unveil a memorial at Ft. Qu'Appelle to the signing of the first treaty in 1874 between the Dominion and the plains Indians." The site of the fort was designated a national historic site of Canada in 1953.
Demographics In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Fort Qu'Appelle had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.
Development
The town's substantial growth beyond its status as a Hudson's Bay Company "factory" first occurred in the 1880s and 1890s when European settlement began in the region as the Canadian Pacific Railway moved westwards: a post office opened in 1880.David McLennan. "Fort Qu'Appelle." The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. CANADIAN PLAINS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF REGINA. Retrieved 10 July 2012 This coincided with the first development of British India after the seizing of control of India from the East India Company by The Crown after the 1857 Indian Mutiny, and the town of Fort Qu'Appelle's striking similarity to the Indian hill stations of the early Raj has been widely commented upon by anyone who has seen both. Although the North-West Mounted Police headquarters was established in Regina once it was named capital of the North-West Territories in 1882, the substantial police station at the western end of the town of Fort Qu'Appelle remained significant as centre of service within the valley and in rural communities and to farms in the plains region: this became more important though less as nearby towns declined from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and continuing after World War II.
Older residences and commercial premises together with the town's Anglican and United (formerly Presbyterian) churches are quintessentially of the 19th century hinterland British Empire, a matter which local civic boosters and cultivators of tourism appear not yet to have capitalised upon. "In 1913, construction began on a fish culture station near Fort Qu'Appelle and, to date, the facility has supplied more than 2 billion fish to stock water bodies throughout the province....[T]he Fort Qu'Appelle Sanatorium (Fort San) for tuberculosis patients...[opened in] 1917."
The commercial shops, being grocery and supply centres for the ample number of area farms, were substantially busier than they would have been if merely for town residents; the Fort Hotel of the early 20th century through the 1960s had a well-attended pub with its parking lot full late Friday afternoons through evenings. A large drive-in movie theatre stood on Bay Avenue south of the railway track just before the entry into the coulee on Highway 36 to leave the valley; it had lively attendance by townspeople, cottagers and farmers until the 1960s when home television significantly improved and the drive-in closed.
Despite the accelerating decline of rural Saskatchewanian population in the post-World War II years as farms needed to be larger and therefore fewer in number for economic viability, the town grew through most of the 1950s and 1960s as a cottage community serving the Qu'Appelle Lakes summer-cottage country in the valley up- and down-river from the town. Cottagers from Regina and other southern Saskatchewan communities used Fort Qu'Appelle as a base from which to explore the scenic and historic river valley, purchase hardware and groceries and contract services; the town also benefited urban drift as farms and other towns steadily depopulated.
This process was precipitately accelerated in the early 1960s. Highway 35 had reached Fort Qu'Appelle by branching off the Trans-Canada Highway at the once-significant town Qu'Appelle and somewhat laboriously proceeding into the Qu'Appelle Valley by winding through an un-occupied coulee. The old highway was supplemented and effectively replaced by Highway 10, leaving the Trans-Canada at Balgonie and taking a straight route from the plain into the valley. This vastly eased access from the southwest and increased Fort Qu'Appelle's attraction over other market-places for farmers.