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How It Started
Edmonton did not begin as a city. It began as a fort — Fort Edmonton, established by the Hudson's Bay Company on the North Saskatchewan River in 1795, a fur trade post at the edge of the known world, deep in Cree and Blackfoot territory, sending beaver pelts east and receiving trade goods in return through a supply chain that stretched across half a continent. For the better part of a century it remained what it was: a fort, a river crossing, a place where the Company did its business with the land and the people who knew it. The city that eventually grew around that trading post would become one of the largest in Canada, but the distance from fur trade post to world-class metropolitan centre was not covered quickly. It required a railway, a province, an oil field, and several generations of people who believed the future was out here somewhere, if you were willing to go far enough to find it.
The transformative moment came in stages. The railway arrived in 1891 — the Canadian Pacific had bypassed Edmonton to the south, routing through Calgary instead, but the Canadian Northern reached the city in 1905, the same year Alberta became a province and Edmonton was named its capital. The combination of those two events — provincial status and rail connection — changed everything. Edmonton was suddenly both the administrative centre of a new jurisdiction and the point of departure for the vast territory of homestead land stretching north and northwest. The Dominion Lands office opened. Men lined up to file on quarters. The city's population, which had stood at a few hundred at the start of the decade, would reach more than twenty thousand by 1911. It was growing faster than it could organize itself, faster than its streets could be paved or its schools built, faster than the supply of carpenters and bricklayers could keep up with the demand for buildings to house all those new ambitions.
Why People Came From All Over the World
The answer to why people came to Edmonton from so many different places is partly the answer to why people came to any of the Canadian prairies in those years: the Canadian government was inviting them, aggressively, through an immigration campaign that printed pamphlets in dozens of languages and sent agents to villages in Ukraine, Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and the American Midwest with a simple and compelling message. Land was free. Or nearly free — ten dollars to file, three years to prove up, thirty acres to break, and the quarter was yours. For people who had never owned land, for whom land was the thing the landlord owned and you worked for him, this was not simply an economic proposition. It was something closer to a revolution in personal status.
Between 1896 and 1914, more than 170,000 Ukrainians arrived in Alberta alone, settling the block country north and east of Edmonton in communities that preserved their language and religion and foodways while simultaneously becoming something new — prairie Albertans, with the particular toughness and pragmatism that the land required. They were joined by Icelanders and Danes and Norwegians, by English and Scottish families who had read the same pamphlets in different languages, by Americans from the Midwest who had run out of cheap land to the south and looked north across the border and found the same arithmetic still working. And by Canadians from the east — from Ontario and Quebec and the Maritimes — who had heard the same story and made the same journey in the same hope.
Edmonton received all of them. It was the gateway. You came through Edmonton whether you were going northwest to the Pembina country or northeast to the Elk Point district or east to the dry mixed-grass range where the Provost country began. The city's main street and its hotel rooms and its land office waiting rooms were full of people in transit, people at the inflection point between where they had been and where they were going. Some of them stayed in Edmonton. Many more passed through it on the way to the quarter that had their name on it, to the particular arrangement of surveyed land in the vast Territory that was going to become, over the next three years of their lives, a farm.
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