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Proactive disclosure Print version   | |  The Origins of Canadian City Names
Collingwood, Ontario Collingwood, located on the southern tip of Georgian Bay, was named in 1853 after Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, a British admiral and Horatio Nelson's second-in-command at the Battle of Trafalgar. First settled in 1835, the area originally had several other names associated with it, including Hurontario, Nattawa, and Hens-and-Chickens Harbour, because of one large and four small islands in the bay. Sources: Carter, Floreen Ellen. Place Names of Ontario, Vol. 1. London, Ont.: Phelps Publishing, 1984; Scott, David E. Ontario Place Names. Toronto: Whitecap Books, 1993. Related site: Kamloops, British Columbia In 1811, David Stuart from the Pacific Fur Company explored the area between the Columbia and Fraser rivers. A year later, his exploits drew Alexander Ross, also a Pacific Fur Company man, who established a post at a place the Shuswap Indians called "Cumcloups" -- the meeting of the waters -- near the convergence of the North and South Thompson rivers. Several forts followed, including Fort Thompson, owned by the North West Company, which bought out the Pacific in 1813. The Hudson's Bay Company moved in eight years later. The names Kamloops and Fort Thompson were used interchangeably, but a post-office established in 1870 adopted the name Kamloops. The city was incorporated in 1893. Sources: Akrigg, G.P.V. and Helen B. British Columbia Place Names. Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1986.; Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922. Related site: Kitchener, 91 km from the City of Toronto in the regional municipality of Waterloo, was named in 1916 after Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, a British field marshall who drowned at sea in the early days of the First World War. Originally settled in 1799, the area was named Sand Hills after sand dunes found there. The name was soon changed to Mount Pleasant, and then Ebytown, after Canada's first Mennonite bishop, Benjamin Eby. In 1841, a post-office opened and was named Berlin. A souvenir pamphlet from 1897 describes a popularized version of the renaming: "Early in the (1830s) . . . a group of villagers were one evening seated in the village inn, discussing the matter of a name, when two strangers walked in and called for refreshments. 'Where are you from,' was asked. 'Berlin, Germany, and we are looking for homes.' 'Then,' said the questioner, 'settle here and Berlin shall be the name of this village.'" Anti-German sentiment during the First World War led to an announcement in 1916 that the name of both the town and the post office was officially changed to Kitchener. Sources: Carter, Floreen Ellen. Place Names of Ontario, Vol. 1. London, Ont.: Phelps Publishing, 1984; Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922. Related site: Lachine, Quebec The present location of Lachine, now an urban community of Montréal, was the land grant of René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, a fur trader, explorer and discover of the Mississipi Delta. In 1669, La Salle travelled west under the mistaken belief he could cross the continent and find a shorter route to China. His failed exploits lead to the derisive labelling of his land as "Lachine." Sources: Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922. Related site: Approximately 150 km east north-east of Lethbridge, the name of the site of the present city was noted as Medicine Hat by W. Johnson, a member of the North West Mounted Police, in 1882. There are many possible explanations for the name, which is a translation of saamis, Blackfoot Indian for "the head-dress of a medicine man." One of them connects the name with a fight between the Cree and Blackfoot tribes, when the Cree medicine man lost his war bonnet in the river. Another associates it with the slaughter of a party of white settlers and the appropriation by the Indian medicine man of a fancy hat worn by one of the victims. Another explanation is that the name was applied originally to a hill east of the town, from its resemblance to the hat of an Indian medicine man. Another possibility describes the rescue of a female Indian from the South Saskatchewan River by an Indian brave, upon whose head a well-known medicine man placed his own hat as a token of admiration of the act of bravery. Still another story suggests that the name was given to the locality because an Indian chief saw in a vision an Indian rising out of the South Saskatchewan River wearing the plumed hat of a medicine man. Sources: Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922; Karamitsanis, Aphrodite. Place Names of Alberta, Vol. 2. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1992. Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec Rivière-du-Loup, located where the St. Lawrence and a river of the same name meet 200 km east of the city of Québec, was proclaimed the city of Fraserville in 1850. It was popularly known by its French name long before that, and reverted to Rivière-du-Loup in 1919. The river's name first appeared on a map by the explorer Jaillot in 1685, and its source is still in question. One possibility is that "Loup" refers to the large number of wolves in the area at the time. Local tradition, however, says Champlain came across a local tribe of the Mahingan, or wolf, nation there. Sources : Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922; Quebec Geographical Board. Geographical Names of the Province of Quebec. Quebec: Department of Lands and Forests, 1926; White, James, Ninth Report of the Geographic Board of Canada, Part II: Place Names in Quebec. 1910. The name of this Manitoba city, 85 km west of Winnipeg, is French for prairie portage. Its location marks the point on the Assiniboine river where fur traders embarked north over land to Lake Manitoba. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye described it in 1739 as a place where the Assiniboine Indians made the portage on their way to English posts at Hudson Bay. La Vérendrye built Fort La Reine there in 1738, which continued to be an active French trading post until Canada was ceded to Great Britian in 1760. In 1832, the Hudson's Bay Company erected a post there, and a settlement began in 1851. A post office bearing the settlement's name was opened in 1871. Sources : Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922. The original townsite of Saskatoon, on the east bank of the South Saskatchewan river 235 km northwest of Regina, was part of a 100,000 acre grant in 1882 to the Temperance Colonisation Society of Toronto. The same year, John N. Lake, the leader of the new Temperance Colony, christened the spot Saskatoon. The word comes from the Cree name for "early berries." Lake described the naming of the settlement as follows: "On the first Sunday in August (1882), I was lying in my tent about 3 p.m. when a young man came in with a handful of bright red berries and gave them to me. After eating some, I asked where they were found. He said 'along the river bank.' I asked if people had a name for them. He said they were saskatoon berries. I at once exclaimed 'You have found the name of the town -- SASKATOON.' The name was formally accepted by the directors that winter and entered in the minutes." Sources: Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922. Sydney, Nova Scotia In 1784, in anticipation of an influx of loyalist settlers, Cape Breton became a separate colony from mainland Nova Scotia. The first lieutenant-governor, J.F.W. DesBarres, established a new capital on La Baye des Espagnols, or Spanish Harbour (now Sydney Harbour) named for Thomas Townshend, first Viscount Sydney and home secretary in the British cabinet at the time. Other places named after the obscure minister include the nearby towns of Sydney Mines and North Sydney, the Sydney River, and Sydney, Australia. In 1820, Cape Breton was re-attached to Nova Scotia and Sydney later became the shiretown of Cape Breton County. Sources: Hamilton, William B. Place Names of Atlantic Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Trail, British Columbia Trail takes its name from Trail Creek (it was originally called Trail Creek Landing) and is located where the creek and the Columbia River meet, about 400 km east of Vancouver. Trail Creek in turn took its name from the fact that the Dewdney Trail, a 400 km trail route to the B.C. interior, followed it down to the Columbia. The name of the post office there was abbreviated to Trail in 1897. Sources: Douglas, R. Meaning of Canadian City Names. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922.
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