Winnipeggers learned of the lost Métis community where Grant Park Mall and Grant Park High School now sit when Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961 was published in 2018. The book attracted much local attention and prompted a renewed focus on such settlements.
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| The authors of this scholarly and very thorough research put Rooster Town on the map, literally. |
By the 1950s, Rooster Town’s dozen or more shacks housed 30 to 50 people. They were desperately poor, had no running water, sewer, lights, or roads, and faced much racism and prejudice. Local newspapers presented Rooster Town as an impoverished, filthy, and disease-ridden squatters’ shantytown. In 1959, the City of Winnipeg offered families $50 to $75 to move or face eviction. Residents were pushed off their properties and their homes were destroyed.
Wedged between the CNR railway line (just south of Taylor Avenue) and the Grand Trunk & Pacific Railway track (removed in 1950 and rebuilt as Grant Avenue), the area was a typical “road allowance community.” Todd Paquin and Patrick Young explain:
The aftermath of the 1885 Resistance proved devastating to the Métis’ standard of living. Until the mid-twentieth century, seasonally employed and landless Métis had an extremely difficult time finding suitable housing in the face of extensive Euro-Canadian and European settlement in the Prairie West. Dispossession and grinding poverty resulted in the creation of Métis shanty communities near immigrant settlements. Since these homes were built beside crown lands and road allowances—land set aside for road development by rural municipalities—the Métis squatters became derisively known as the “Road Allowance People”. Road Allowance houses were usually tarpaper shacks, which lacked insulation and were built largely from scrap lumber and other “recycled” building materials. For poor families, many of whom were on relief, broken windows were often covered with cardboard or rags. [Paquin and Young 2003]
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| Rooster Town, March 1959 [Gerry Cairns, Winnipeg Free Press Collection, Archives of Manitoba] |
Rooster Town may be Manitoba’s best-known and most-studied road allowance settlement, but there were many others. Lawrence J. Barkwell has catalogued 23 such communities scattered across the province. [Barkwell 2016]. Likewise, Jason Surkan states at least 26 Indigenous fringe communities in Manitoba were “erased to make way for suburban development.” [Surkan 2017]
In addition to Rooster Town, Winnipeg had Dog Patch (just north of Logan Avenue near the CPR Weston shops), Tin Town (metal shanties south of Rooster Town near McGillivray Blvd.), and another of particular interest here: Weak City.
Owen Toews writes that traces of Weak City (said to have existed since the 1820s) remain in an area we know well:
Tucked away between the Trans-Canada highway, Winnipeg’s Perimeter Highway, the Assiniboine river, and the Glendale Golf and Country Club, there is a small neighbourhood, known as St. Charles, of small, good-quality, postwar bungalows […] and two or three old prewar two-story brick houses with large porches. Along the river is a Catholic complex consisting of St. Charles Church, built in 1905, and St. Charles Catholic School, founded in 1906. […] The area has the feel of a formerly rural area, oriented toward the Assiniboine river, that, overtaken by the two big highways and the golf course, has been transformed into a typical, modern suburban neighbourhood. [Toews 2020]
The area has a long history that many present-day residents do not know.
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| Métis buffalo hunters [Gordon n.d.] |
Barkwell tells of “Rivière Esturgeon,” that was a Métis community until 1854. We know it as St. Charles:
It was located on the north and south banks of the Assiniboine River to the west of Sturgeon Creek. Currently it is a community within Winnipeg. By the early 1850s there were 200 French Metis and a smaller number of English Metis living at St. Charles. After the flood of 1852 more people moved to this location in search of higher ground. There was a buffalo crossing and later a ferry at this location. From the early 1800s hunters would gather at this location on a seasonal basis to get buffalo as well as for the sturgeon fishery. This parish had a population of about 200 Metis in the 1840s, the original community was formed by about 60 families of Plains buffalo hunters. By 1856, the parish of St. Charles had a population of 348, two-thirds Roman Catholic and one-third Protestant. Bishop Taché changed the name to honour his superior, Monseigneur Charles de Mazenod (OMI). [Barkwell 2013]According to Toews, “From the 1820s to the 1940s or 1950s, this was the location of the Métis settlement of Weak City.” A log chapel was built in 1854 on the high and dry St. Charles riverbank.
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| In 1866 a new frame church was built to replace the original log chapel of 1854. [Gordon n.d.] Note the steps and fence to keep livestock out. In 1905 a gothic church was erected on the site, but was destroyed by fire in 1928. It was replaced the following year, and a large addition doubled its size in 1987. |
Weak City was a bustling community:
Nineteenth-century residents of the settlement worked in occupations other than hunting as well, including as midwives and as labourers on barges for the Hudson’s Bay Company. […] As the fur trade gave way to export-agriculture and an urban merchant economy, the people of Weak City combined wage work—as farmworkers for nearby landowners, as ferry operators, and more—with more independent economic activities, including cutting cordwood and small-scale pork and poultry production. [Toews 2020]
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| The St. Charles ferry operated between 1908 and 1959, connecting the Catholic church and school with Charleswood to the south. This ferry replaced one a mile or so to the east that had operated since 1870. [Gordon n.d.] |
Weak City is considered a road allowance community, but likely included land owners as well as squatters. The City of Winnipeg claimed Rooster City residents were on city-owned, tax-forfeited land when it evicted them in 1959. While this may not have been the case in St. Charles, Toews claims that, “Given what became of Weak City, it would make sense that many residents did not possess title to their land.” He writes that, “At some point in the 1940s or 1950s, Weak City ceased to exist as such.” [Toews 2020].
It evolved into a post-war Winnipeg suburb:
Weak City found itself in the crosshairs of two of the city’s biggest new expressway projects and must have felt the brunt of suburban construction especially intensely. The St. Charles Ferry made regular trips across the Assiniboine River until the day it was made obsolete by the new Perimeter Highway bridge in 1959, coincidentally the same year that Rooster Town was evicted. […] Barkwell writes that, by the 1940s, most residents of Weak City had moved across the Assiniboine River to Charleswood.
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| A Métis home in Charleswood [Van Roon 2003] |
Local road allowance communities may be long gone, but Rooster Town has recently been commemorated with a symbol of hospitality and welcome: the Rooster Town Kettle by Métis artist Ian August.
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| The Rooster Town Kettle, installed in 2019, was modelled after those that sat on wood stoves in virtually every Rooster Town home. |
Sources (retrieved June 27, 2023)
- Barkwell, Lawrence J.; Hourie, Audreen; Head, Ed; Morrisette-Rozyk, Rosemary. “Manitoba Métis Communities: Historical Overview.” Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, April 26, 2013. https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/13795
- Barkwell, Lawrence J. “20th Century Métis Displacement and Road Allowance Communities in Manitoba.” Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, November 8, 2016. https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/149555
- Gordon, I.T. “History of St. Charles Church.” https://www.saintcharleswpg.com/church-historical-roots
- Paquin, Todd and Young, Patrick. “Traditional Métis Housing and Shelter.” Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, May 30, 2003. https://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/00720
- Surkan, Jason. “On the Fringe Urban Colonial Planning in Rooster Town, Manitoba.” Communities: Rooster Town. The Métis Architect. August 9, 2017. Sudbury: McEwen School of Architecture, Laurentian University. https://metisarchitect.com/2017/08/09/communities-rooster-town/comment-page-1/
- Toews, Owen. “Rooster Town World Remapping the Suburbs.” Aboriginal Policy Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2020. Edmonton: University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/aps/index.php/aps/article/view/29371/21399
- Van Roon, Len and Van Roon, Verna. Photos & Fragments of Charleswood History: A Collection of Historic Photographs of Our Community and the Stories They Tell. 2003. https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A3098642#page/1/mode/2up
See also:
Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, Adrian Werner, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901-1961, published by University of Manitoba Press, 2018.
Rooster Town Archive, University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections
"Rooster Town Kettle and Fetching Water," Winnipeg Arts Council
