Liquor House in Winnipeg

The photo shows a well-stocked Liquor House in Winnipeg around 1915. By that time, the facility is an example of improvements made to hotel bars and liquor stores compared to what the Ontario and British settlers would have seen in Winnipeg on their journey to York Colony in 1882, 1883, 1884, etc. In the 1880s, Winnipeg was a stopping place for settlers going further west and it is the city that many towns and cities yet to be built would eventually pattern themselves after. However, as we are told by author James Gray in his book BOOZE, the Winnipeg of the early 1880s was a pretty rowdy and shabby frontier community. Its police chief in 1882 described many hotels as resorts for thieves and blackguards and hotbeds for drunkenness. For a city that had 8,000 people in 1881, jumping to 16,000 in 1882, the hotel accommodations and bars were quite deplorable and would have hurried the new settler on his way. Yet, co-existing with this less desirable life style was a large population of religious folks who would eventually help turn the city's life style around by organizing Temperance movements, lobby their government to make changes in liquor laws and finally win total Prohibition legislation starting in 1916.

There is no mention in the early York Colony records of a desire for the establishment of any liquor outlet. The first bar would have been in the Royal Hotel built at the present site of Yorkton in 1891.

Contact Terri Lefebvre Prince,
Heritage Researcher,
City of Yorkton Archives,
Box 400, 37 Third Avenue North
Yorkton, Sask. S3N 2W3 306-786-1722
[email protected]