Fort Qu'Appelle sits in the Qu'Appelle River valley, between Echo and Mission Lakes. The name comes from the French for 'who calls', taken from the Cree name for the river that calls. The most popular explanation points to a Cree legend of two ill-fated lovers, later versified by E. Pauline Johnson. Several trading posts in the valley carried the name over the years. The present site was home to a Hudson's Bay Company post from 1852 to 1854, along with an Anglican mission that survives today as St. John the Evangelist parish church. The post was revived in 1864 and ran until 1911. It stood at the hub of several historic trails, and pemmican was shipped from here down the valley to supply the fur trade.
Treaty 4 was signed here by Cree and Saulteaux peoples, and the North-West Mounted Police, now the RCMP, arrived and have kept a presence in town ever since. A post office opened in 1880, and farm settlement in the 1880s turned the town into a place where farmers sold grain and bought supplies. Fort Qu'Appelle even bid to become the territorial capital but lost out to Regina in 1882. The Hudson's Bay Company built its store on Broadway Street in 1897. In 1911 the town and nearby Qu'Appelle settled who would hold the name, and this town became Fort Qu'Appelle.
A fish culture station began construction in 1913, and the Fort San tuberculosis sanatorium opened in 1917. Fort San later hosted the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts from 1967 to 1991. Cottages began appearing on the lakes before the First World War, and the town grew in the 1950s and 60s as a cottage community. Highway 10 and the closing of rural schools in 1963 brought more farm families to town. Today it is a shopping and service centre for farms, resort villages and cottagers. The original fort site is a national historic site, and the Treaty 4 Gathering is held each September.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Fort Qu'Appelle” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.