Did You Know?

Did you know?

• The Assiniboine River is the chief tributary of the Red River? The first trading post along its banks was built in 1738 by La Verendrye who called it the St. Charles River.
  
  
• The S.S. Alpha, an Assiniboine River steamboat hauling freight from Winnipeg to Portage & Brandon, ran aground north of Littleton, the original site of Cypress River, on April 27, 1885. Its remains can still be seen today when the river water level is low.
   
• Postage stamp province – In 1877, Manitoba’s west border was east of Cypress River.
   
• An 1880s-era feature was Cypress River’s Union Hotel. Once advertised as "the best temperance hotel in the West”, it now serves as a grocery store.
   
• In 1905, Holland became the location of the first consolidated school district in Manitoba, when the Holland and Dawson school districts joined to become School District No. 117.

What's in a name?

• The first written record of a European crossing the Cypress River was in Alexander Henry’s diary of August 11, 1806.
   
• Holland was named after the first postmaster, Mr. A.C. Holland.
   
• Landseer was named in 1904 after the noted English animal painter, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer.
   
• Littleton’s founder, Robert Little, is thought to be the first European settler to have crossed the Tiger Hills area with a wagon during a move in 1879. In 1885, the railroad "missed Littleton by a mile”; the settlement moved a few miles south west, and was named Cypress River. The community describes itself as the "Best ‘Little Town’ on the Prairie”, which is a play on the name of Robert Little, and his brother Nathaniel Little. Littleton’s site is now marked with a cairn, erected in 1995 by the Cypress River Agricultural Society during their centennial year.