A Winnipeg Album. John David Hamilton

Winnipeg was Canada's first important city in the west and was the supply point for other prairie cities like Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and even far-off Vancouver. It exploded from a village of 2,700 people in 1877 to a fully modern metropolis of 100,000 in just thirty years and by then had a university, newspapers, publishing firms, a major theatre, and a vibrant mass of immigrants who flooded in to open up the West. Growing Winnipeg was served with paddle-wheelers on the Red River, Red River ox carts, a Canadian-owned railway to St. Paul, Minnesota, and finally the CPR linking Montreal with the west coast. A Winnipeg Album is a pictorial impression of Winnipeg's colourful, dramatic, and relatively brief history, compiled and with commentary by John David Hamilton and Bonnie Dickie. Over one hundred stunning black-and-white photographs record the early days of the city and trace some of the dramatic events that made Winnipeg «Canada's Chicago.»