Canada Guide
Manitoba and Saskatchewan
Winnipeg
With 706,900 inhabitants, WINNIPEG accounts for two-thirds of Manitoba's population, and lies at Canada's geographic centre, sandwiched between the US frontier 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 became the transit point for much of the country's transcontinental traffic when the railroad arrived twelve years later. From the very beginning, Winnipeg was described as the city where "the West began", and its polyglot population, drawn from almost every country in Europe, was attracted by the promise of the fertile soils to the west. But this was no classless pioneer town: as early as the 1880s the city had developed a clear pattern of residential segregation, with leafy prosperous suburbs to the south along the Assiniboine River, and "Shanty Town" to the north. The long-term effects of this division have proved hard to erase. Most recently, successive administrations have refurbished warehouses and built walkways along the Red River and Assiniboine River, but the new downtown apartment blocks remain hard to sell, and most people stick resolutely to the suburbs.
That apart, Winnipeg makes for an enjoyable stopover, and all of the main attractions are within easy walking distance of each other. The Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature has excellent displays on the history of the province and its various geographic areas; the Exchange District, recently declared a National Historic Site, features some good examples of Canada's early twentieth-century architecture; the Winnipeg Art Gallery has the world's largest collection of Inuit art; and, just across the Red River, the suburb of St Boniface has a delightful museum situated in the house and chapel of the Grey Nuns, who arrived here by canoe from Montréal in 1844.