jenniferhawke.com

[edit: Bruce Fairman (author of "Moose Jaw, Then and Now" and "Moose Jaw, The Early Years") was kind enough to contact me with a few updates for this page.]

no real time to write and nothing real to write about. all of my days are the same. they come and go in a familiar marching pattern only punctuated by differences in what i have for lunch or how cold my toes are in the morning.

i’m tired. and i’m deathly bored of studying.

but you don’t want to hear me whine.

instead, here is a little bit of writing from other folks. some of you are traveling an awfully long distance to attend a wedding in this neck ‘o the woods. the rest of you might be interested in the fierce pride this little community has for its’ colourful history.

from The Canadian Encyclopedia:

Moose Jaw, Sask, City, pop 32 132 (2006c), 32 131 (2001c), inc 1903. Moose Jaw is located 160 km north of the US border. The city lies in a sheltered valley at the confluence of the Moose Jaw River and Thunder Creek. Moose Jaw is governed by a mayor and 6 councillors elected at-large.

South of Moose Jaw is 15 Wing Moose Jaw (formerly CFB Moose Jaw). It is the home of 2 Canadian Forces Flying Training School and the principle site of the NATO Pilot Training Centre. The Wing, first established as a training facility in 1941, is now the city’s largest employer. 15 Wing is also home to the internationally renowned SNOWBIRDS aerobatics team.

in the beginning, from MooseJaw.ca:

Moose Jaw was originally settled as a traditional Indian fur traders camp at “the turn” (known as Kingsway Park today). A narrow crossing of the river, plenty of water and game for food, made this an ideal place for settlement. It was a winter encampment for both Cree and Assiniboine nations, and there are burial grounds in the vicinity. The natural protection of the Coteau Range provided the valley with many warm breezes. The name Moose Jaw comes from a Cree name for the place, moscâstani-sîpiy, meaning “a warm place by the river”. The first two syllables, moscâ-, sound remarkably like “moose jaw”.

from Bruce Fairman:

In the middle of December 1881 Jim Ross and his party; his brother Fred Ross, Hector Sutherland, Dan McDonald, and Tommy Healy set out on their journey from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw Creek. Hector Sutherland was the son of Senator John Sutherland, the first Senator appointed from Manitoba. Tommy Healy, originally from Parry Sound, Ontario, was the designated cook. Using a bake kettle in the ashes of an open fire, he was able to prepare splendid Cree bannock bread – similar to the Scottish scone. Made with flour, water, sugar, baking powder and salt, bannock was remarkably tasty.

Using the new section of the CPR route completed during the summer of 1881 the five men travelled by train west through Portage La Prairie and Brandon to Flat Creek (Oak Lake) – the end of the line at that time. Leaving Flat Creek, they followed the Assiniboine river the short distance north to where it joined with the Qu’Appelle river. Travelling with horses and homemade “jumpers” – improvised sleighs made of poplar poles with wide, smooth runners which slipped easily over the ice, they made the frozen rivers serve as their highways.

Following the Qu’Appelle River west to its confluence with Moose Jaw Creek, they quickly covered the last twelve miles, arriving on January 2, 1882, at the site of what would become the city of Moose Jaw. Initially the men stayed in one large tent set up in a coulee which meandered along the north edge of the present Crescent Park. The men soon discovered there was no big game close by, although some jack rabbits and cottontail rabbits could be found in the bush, as well as quantities of prairie chicken. The menu therefore often consisted of salt pork or pemmican with beans or hot cakes with syrup and beans. Lots of beans. A meal often was only beans; boiled, baked or warmed up in a pan. There would be no potatoes or vegetables until they could be grown.

Using the 4th base line as their point of reference, Ross’s group got their bearings and chose their quarter sections to homestead. (Base lines were survey lines running east to west, parallel to the 49th parallel, located 24 miles apart. Caribou Road, now Caribou Street, was known as the 4th Base Line.)

from Virtual Saskatchewan:

The Tunnels of Moose Jaw is a high quality, interactive attraction that uses actor/guides and state-of-the-art animatronics to recreate the tunnel-and-basement underworld Chicago mobster Al Capone is believed to have frequented in the 1920s. That’s when Moose Jaw was a hub for booze delivered by rail to the United States during Prohibition. A second Tunnels tour focuses on the plight of Moose Jaw’s Chinese community around the turn of the century and a third, in the planning stages, will mine a rich vein of bootlegger stories.
More than two dozen murals adorn downtown Moose Jaw.

One of the earliest bootleggers was Annie Hoberg, owner of the Railway Restaurant in the 1890s. At that time, hard liquor was banned in Moose Jaw, which was then part of the North West Territories. Banned, but not unavailable, according to a story told during the colorful Moose Jaw Trolley Company tour of the city.

Annie served meals 24 hours a day to accommodate passengers of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Many of those passengers, male and female, enjoyed a drink at meal time and Annie didn’t let them down.

During her regular train trips to Winnipeg, she used her fashionably long skirts and petticoats to conceal specially fitted rubber bags filled with hooch she smuggled back to Moose Jaw. So emboldened was she by her success in this enterprise that she even dressed up kegs of whiskey to look like sleeping babies and disguised crates of booze to resemble commodities like flour or beans. Until one of those crates slipped off the station platform.
Halina Johnson works on a new mural near The Station Centre Liquor Store, formerly the train station.

After paying her fine in a Regina courtroom, Annie retired to Manitoba with a wealthy rancher.

Though it now bears little resemblance to the way it looked in its glory years, River Street is the setting for many of Moose Jaw’s most entertaining stories about gamblers, bootleggers, “tom-catters”, painted ladies, crooked cops and gangsters — the old Empress Hotel, which burned down in 1987, is said to be the place Capone stayed when he visited Moose Jaw.

Nobody can prove Capone was ever actually in Moose Jaw. His name has not turned up in old hotel registries and no one has come forward with photos of the crime boss posing with Chief Johnson, for instance, in front of the old fire station. But Grajczyk says there exist six first-hand accounts of people who claim to have met the Chicago hoodlum when he was in Moose Jaw, including one from a barber who claimed he used to cut Capone’s hair.
Beautiful Crescent Park is the heart of downtown Moose Jaw.

Chicago had a rail connection to Moose Jaw in the Soo Line, which ran from Saskatchewan to Chicago via Minneapolis. There’s no question the Soo was a prime conduit for Canadian booze entering the States during Prohibition, and there’s every reason to believe organized crime was involved in its procurement and transport.

Fitting, then, is the fact Moose Jaw’s old train station, built in 1922 and refurbished more than 70 years later, is now the most beautiful place in Canada to buy liquor. And it’s all legal.

there are other not-so-proud* moment’s in Moose Jaw’s history, but this little city has heart. a lot of people from Saskatchewan talk about how they can’t wait to get out. get to the west coast or the big city out east. i escaped to Alberta and Vancouver for almost a dozen years and was proud to leave the windy plains behind. like i had achieved something the suckers stuck here could only dream of.

and now i’m back. this time around i am old enough or wise enough to realize how great Saskatchewan really is and what a wonderful home province i have to be proud of.

————
photo: our farm pond a couple of weeks ago before all the green showed up.

*like, being Saskatchewan’s KKK centre.

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