Fort Ellice had a lot going for it, but major transportation routes weren’t enough to turn it into a booming metropolis
Fort Ellice was the hub of the wheel. The spokes were the seven Red River cart trails that intersected there.
In fact, in the settlement of the Canadian West, Fort Ellice should be a large city in Manitoba. It’s not. No buildings, no hustle, no bustle. An over-grown cemetery lies silent.
Located five kilometres south of where the Qu’Appelle River joins the Assiniboine River at present day St. Lazare, Man., the lonely site is marked by a fieldstone cairn and barely visible building foundations. Fort Ellice was on the western side of the Assiniboine, perched high on 400 foot bluffs overlooking the river. The view is spectacular. The glory days have come and gone.
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Built in 1831, it was named after a Hudson Bay Company agent, Edward Ellice. It was a major stopping point on the Carlton Trail (roughly the present-day Yellowhead Highway), which was often called the Ellice Trail in Manitoba. Three trails arrived from the east and three trails departed westward. One trail went to the north.
With the founding of Manitoba in 1870, Fort Ellice became a Northwest Mounted Police outpost. The village inside the stockade even included a dairy. The fort became a stopover for canoe flotillas. A modest steamship, the SS Alpha, plied Assiniboine waters all the way from Winnipeg — 19 days upstream, five days to scurry home.
Even with all that traffic and commerce, Fort Ellice never grew. Perhaps the uphill walk from the river lugging furs was too much. Perhaps the rolling hills offered little flat land. Regardless, in 1888 the HBC quit its business there and sold the buildings.
Eventually, the NWMP moved north to St. Lazare, where the railway had punched a route through the intersecting river valleys. However, St. Lazare never flourished either. Named by a Catholic priest who came from St. Lazare, France, the town today has 260 people, a decrease from double that in the 1970s.
The Fort Ellice Rivermen (or Fort Ellice Traders) playing in the NHL? It’ll never happen.
