Regina was established as the territorial seat of government in 1882 when Edgar Dewdney, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, insisted on the site over the better developed Battleford, Troy and Fort Qu’Appelle (the latter some 48 km (30 mi) to the east, one on rolling plains and the other in the Qu’Appelle Valley between two lakes). These communities were considered better locations for what was anticipated to be a metropole for the Canadian plains. These locations had ample access to water and resided on treed rolling parklands. “Pile-of-Bones”, as the site for Regina was then called (or, in Cree, Oskana kâ-asastêki),[18][19][20] was by contrast located in arid and featureless grassland.
Lieutenant-Governor Dewdney had acquired land adjacent to the route of the future CPR line at Pile-of-Bones, which was distinguished only by collections of bison bones near a small spring run-off creek, some few kilometres downstream from its origin in the midst of what are now wheat fields. There was an “obvious conflict of interest” in Dewdney’s choosing the site of Pile-of-Bones as the territorial seat of government[21] and it was a national scandal at the time.[22] But until 1897, when responsible government was accomplished in the Territories,[23] the lieutenant-governor and council governed by fiat and there was little legitimate means of challenging such decisions outside the federal capital of Ottawa. There, the Territories were remote and of little concern. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, wife of the then Governor General of Canada, named the new community Regina, in honour of her mother, Queen Victoria.[24]
Commercial considerations prevailed and the town’s authentic development soon began as a collection of wooden shanties and tent shacks clustered around the site designated by the CPR for its future station, some 3.2 km (2 mi) to the east of where Dewdney had reserved substantial landholdings for himself and where he sited the Territorial (now the Saskatchewan) Government House.[25]
The Regina Court House during Louis Riel‘s trial in 1885. He was brought to Regina following the North-West Rebellion.
Regina attained national prominence in 1885 during the North-West Rebellion when troops were mostly able to be transported by train on the CPR from eastern Canada as far as Qu’Appelle Station,[26] before marching to the battlefield in the further Northwest – Qu’Appelle having been the major debarkation and distribution centre until 1890 when the completion of the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake, and Saskatchewan Railway linked Regina with Saskatoon and Prince Albert.[27] Subsequently, the rebellion’s leader, Louis Riel, was tried and hanged in Regina – giving the infant community increased and, at the time, not unwelcome national attention in connection with a figure who was generally at the time considered an unalloyed villain in anglophone Canada.[28] The episode, including Riel’s imprisonment, trial and execution, brought the new Regina Leader (later the Leader-Post) to national prominence.
Regina was incorporated as a city on 19 June 1903, with the MLA who introduced the charter bill, James Hawkes, declaring, “Regina has the brightest future before it of any place in the North West Territories”.[29] Several years later the city was proclaimed the capital of the 1905 province of Saskatchewan on 23 May 1906, by the first provincial government, led by Premier Walter Scott; the monumental Saskatchewan Legislative Building was built between 1908 and 1912.
In June 1912, a tornado locally referred to as the Regina Cyclone devastated the city. The tornado remains the deadliest recorded tornado in Canadian history.
The “Regina Cyclone” was a tornado that devastated the city on 30 June 1912 and remains the deadliest tornado in Canadian history, with a total of 28 fatalities, the population of the city having been 30,213 in 1911. Green funnel clouds formed and touched down south of the city, tearing a swath through the residential area between Wascana Lake and Victoria Avenue, continuing through the downtown business district, rail yards, warehouse district, and northern residential area.