Winnipeg

With around 700,000 inhabitants, WINNIPEG accounts for more than half of Manitoba’s population, and lies at Canada’s centre, sandwiched between the US border to the south and the infertile Canadian Shield to the north and east. The city has been the gateway to the prairies since 1873, and a major transcontinental hub when the railroad arrived twelve years later. From the very beginning, Winnipeg was described as the city where “the West began”, and it still has something of that gateway feel. Certainly, Winnipeg makes for an enjoyable stopover, with all the main attractions a reasonable walk from each other. The Forks, a riverside development with shops and cafés, is the obvious visitor hub and buzzes with tourists and locals alike all summer. Next door, the eye-catching Canadian Museum for Human Rights gives the area a heavyweight attraction, while just across the Red River, the francophone neighbourhood of St Boniface has a delightful museum in the house and chapel of the Grey Nuns, who canoed here from Montréal in 1844. Then, five minutes’ walk north of The Forks, the happening Exchange District showcases early twentieth-century Canadian architecture and is noted for its restaurants and performing-arts scene. A block away, the Manitoba Museum uses engaging reconstructions and dioramas to explore provincial history. Winnipeg’s commercial downtown stretches southwest of the Exchange District along its main drag, Portage Avenue, where the Winnipeg Art Gallery boasts the world’s largest Inuit art collection. Winnipeg also makes a useful base for day-trips to pioneer sites, beaches and canoeing of southeastern Manitoba

A brief history

Named after the Cree word for murky water (“win-nipuy”), Winnipeg owes much of its history to the Red and Assiniboine rivers, which meet close to the city centre at The Forks. Fort Rouge was founded nearby in 1738 in an attempt to extend French influence west – and prospered from good connections north to Lake Winnipeg and the Hudson Bay, and west across the plains along the Assiniboine.

After the defeat of New France in 1763, local trading was absorbed by the Montréal-based North West Company (NWC), which came to dominate the fur trade at the expense of the rival Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) – until Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, bought a controlling interest in the HBC in 1809 and improved the business. Douglas resettled many of his own impoverished Scottish crofters around The Forks, buying from his own company a huge tract of farmland, which he named the Red River Colony, or Assiniboia. In 1821 the rival companies amalgamated under the “Hudson’s Bay Company”. For the next thirty years, the colony sustained an economic structure that suited both farmers and the Métis hunters, and trade routes were established along the Red River to Minnesota. But with the decline of buffalo herds in the 1860s, this collapsed , and the Métis faced extreme hardship while the Hudson’s Bay Company lost effective territorial control.

At this time, politicians in eastern Canada agreed the federal union of 1867, opening the way for the transfer of the Red River from British to Canadian control. The Métis majority – roughly six thousand compared to some one thousand – were fearful of the consequences and their resistance took shape around Louis Riel, under whose impetuous leadership they captured the HBC’s Upper Fort Garry and created a provisional government without challenging the crown’s sovereignty. A delegation went to Ottawa to negotiate terms of admission into the Dominion, but their efforts were handicapped when the Métis executed an English settler from Ontario, Thomas Scott. The subsequent furore pushed prime minister John A. Macdonald into dispatching a military force to restore “law and order”; still, the Manitoba Act of 1870, which brought the Red River into the Dominion, acceded to many Métis demands and guaranteed the preservation of the French culture and language – although in practice little was done.

The eclipse of the Métis and the security of Winnipeg were both assured by the arrival of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. With the town handling the expanding grain trade and local industries supplying the vast rural hinterland, its population was swelled by thousands of immigrants, particularly from Ukraine, Germany and Poland, who were attracted by the promise of the fertile soils. Around this time the city began to develop a clear pattern of residential segregation, with leafy prosperous suburbs to the south along the Assiniboine River, and “Shanty Town” to the north. By World War I, Winnipeg had become Canada’s third-largest city and the largest grain-producing centre in North America. Since then, the development of other prairie cities, such as Regina and Saskatoon, has lessened Winnipeg’s pre-eminence, but it’s still central Canada’s transport hub.

Winnipeg festivals

Festival du Voyageur Ten days in Feb w festivalvoyageur.mb.ca. St Boniface’s French-Canadian heritage is honoured annually in the Festival du Voyageur, ten days of February fun, whose events lead up to a torchlit procession and the Governor’s Ball, where everyone dresses in period costume.

Pride Winnipeg Late May wpridewinnipeg.com. Large LBGT festival with a colourful parade and dozens of associated events and performances over nine days.

Winnipeg International Jazz Festival Mid-June w jazzwinnipeg.com. The biggest of Winnipeg’s ambitious summer programme of open-air concerts is this nine-day jazz festival.

Winnipeg Folk Festival Early July w winnipegfolkfestival.ca. A three-day extravaganza featuring over a hundred concerts, held at Birds Hill Provincial Park, 25km northeast of the city.

Winnipeg Fringe Festival Late July w winnipegfringe.com. A ten-day event of theatrical productions, held in the Exchange District.

Folklorama Early-Aug w folklorama.ca. Apart from the music festivals, the biggest festival in Manitoba celebrates Winnipeg’s multiethnic population. The festival has over forty pavilions spread across town, each devoted to a particular country or region.

Manito Ahbee Late Aug wmanitoahbee.com. One of North America’s largest powwows, which celebrates Aboriginal culture in music, dance, arts and crafts.

Winnipeg tours

You can find a good selection of self-guided walking, cycling, driving and paddling tours on Routes on the Red website (w routesonthered.ca), a local nonprofit marketing organization. Their leaflets can also be picked up at The Forks’ Explore Manitoba Centre.

Heartland Tourst 204 989 9630, w heartlandtravel.ca. Interesting and offbeat tours of Winnipeg look at its rock’n’roll era, its dancehall history, hauntings and, most rewarding of all, a look at the hidden meanings of the architecture of the Legislative Building by an author of a best-seller on the subject.

Historic Exchange District Walking Tourst 204 942 6716, w exchangedistrict.org. Interesting guided tours of the Exchange District leave from the Old Market Square between June and August. The choice is between standard 1hr 30min district tours and themed 45min offerings. Advance phone reservations required.

Muddy Water Tourst 204 898 4678, w travelmanitoba.com/listings/muddy-water-tours/. Self-proclaimed “dark tourism specialists”, and certainly offbeat, with theatrical and historically themed tours for kids ($3) to a 3hr attempt to communicate with the dead ($29).

Parks Canada Walking Tourst 204 983 6757, w parkscanada.ca/forks. A “6000 Years in 60 Minutes” walking tour (late May–Aug Mon–Fri 11am & 1pm; $4) sees costumed guides tell six thousand years of history in an hour and offers a geocaching kit to help you unearth the past for yourself ($6). For both enquire at the Explore Manitoba Centre.

Splash Dasht 204 783 6633, w splashdash.ca. River boat tours (daily every 15min: mid-May to Aug 10am–sunset; Sept–mid-Oct 10am–sunset; 30min; $11) from a quay by The Forks; water buses ($3.50 one way) between eight different spots along the river; canoe rental (daily 10am–9pm; $18/hr or $40/day).