Rosebud.ca

History of Rosebud

Commerce | Early History | First Settlers

Rosebud Commerce

The first settlers arrived in the Rosebud area in 1885. At that time the closest business center was Gleichen, some 30 miles distant so most settlers traveled there for groceries and supplies. Gleichen was also the source of mail service until January 1901, when the official Rosebud Creek Post Office was established in the Hamlet of Rosebud. It provided fortnightly service between Gleichen and Rosebud Creek until the Canadian National Railway began rail service in 1914 and then daily mail service was provided. In 1922 it officially became the Rosebud Post Office.

The hamlet started to flourish after the First World War (1914-1918) and many businesses prospered. The hotel, store, lumber yard, Chinese café and laundry, a dance hall, pool hall, blacksmith shop, drugstore, bank and dray (hauling by heavy horse) business. National Grain had built an elevator in 1913 and two more companies built elevators in 1917 to accommodate the influx of settlers who were breaking up the prairie sod and planting grains. Later several machinery dealerships were established: John Deere; Massey Harris; and Harvester served the farmers in the area.

The Severn Creek School in Rosebud commenced on 1903 and operated for 68 years until it was closed on June 29, 1971. The 1920s were the boom years for Rosebud yet it continued to be the business center for the community until the early 1970s when most of the businesses had shut down as a result of the local school being amalgamated with nearby Standard School.

In 1973, Crescent Heights Baptist Church in Calgary purchased the Rosebud Mercantile Building, which became part of the Rosebud School of the Arts and Rosebud Theatre.

Early History

By the 1880s the buffalo had been exterminated, leaving the native people starving and destitute. Many of the Blackfoot had been affected by Treaty #7 in 1877 and taken to the reservation south of Gleichen.

A group of horse and cattle ranchers from France moved into the area for a time. José Antonio Sala, an old wine merchant wanted to homestead but his family insited the younger members should brave the cold winters and that was how his daughter, Carmen met the notorious cowboy, Jack Morton. His legend of generousity and larger than life exploits permeates the history of this area.

The first white settler in the area was James Wishart, his wife Eliza, three sons and three daughters camped along the Rosebud Creek for a few a days on their journey from Red Deer to an intended settlement in Montana. As told in “The Rosebud Trail” by John J. Martin, Jim awakened early one morning ready to continue the trip to Montana … the rising sun shone down the valley upon thousands of budding wild roses: among the sparkling dewdrops the wild honey bees were gathering nectar. To Jim the scene was beautiful, the best he had ever seen and turning to his wife Eliza who was building a campfire, he said “this is too good to leave, here is the promised land; we go no further!”

Many of the settlers endured severe hardship after moving to their homesteads. They were not prepared for the bitter cold and heavy snow of our Alberta winters. There are stories of women who arrived from the old country with their fancy clothes, fine china, and an expensive piano being forced to spend their first Canadian winter in a tent.

John Martin writes, “some settlers were forced to give up living in the wilds: they could not stand the prairie loneliness, blizzards, illness and at times even hunger. Also recurring prairie fires burnt many of them out before they got themselves well located and protected. In some cases they had been ill-advised as to the many hazardsthey would have to face. Some sold their homesteads for as little as $500.00 while others just pulled up stakes and left for civilization, leaving everything behind. Many of the first homes were made of sod with earthen floors. Those settlers fortunate enough to be near a stand of trees built the luxury of a log house.

Between the 1880s and the intrusion of the sod busters, many large ranches had been established with hundreds of thousands of cattle being brought in to fed off the abundance of grass. Some of these farmers felt that if the Buffalo could survive the winter without extra feed, so could cattle. Many ranchers did not bother to put up winter feed. During exceptionally severe witneres of 1886 and 1906 thousands of cattle died of hunger and severe cold. The blizzards of 1906 saw cattle run with the wind and pile up in coulees and ravines.

First Settlers

The Pioneers who settled the Rosebud area came from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, in contrast to some of our neighboring communities. For example, Standard and Dalum were predominately of Danish extraction, while many Rockyford and Carbon pioneers were of German origin.

James Wishart, Rosebud's first settler, came with his parents from the Orkney Islands near Scotland and spent much of his life in Manitoba before emigrating to Alberta.

Many of the early ranchers came up from the United States with large herds and brought an end to large ranching operations. The National Grain Company built a grain elevator in 1913 and the first wheat was delivered in 1914. One of the best stories concerned this elevator.

"It seems that in 1914 several farmers delivering grain were concerned that they were not getting the proper weight for their wheat. Sometimes the scale weighted light, sometimes heavy, and other times quite accurate. An investigation revealed that two chickens had made their home under the scale where food was plentiful and they roosted on the scale beams, but never in the same place, thus causing the scale to give false readings"

No doubt these two chickens were quickly escorted to the chicken coop (or soup?).

Although the boom days of Rosebud are gone, many of the tools and appliances from the pioneer days still exist.