The Story Behind Manitoba Names
How Cities, Towns, Villages and Whistle Stops got their Names
- Publisher
- Red Deer Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2006
- Category
- Prairie Provinces, General, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889953413
- Publish Date
- Sep 2006
- List Price
- $19.95
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Description
Get to know Manitoba with the stories of over 500 names, ranging from the humorous to the historic.
Communities included are particularly rich with an array of whimsical, descriptive, historical and aboriginal names. Perhaps because of our frontier heritage, towns and cities in North America come named after all manner of unlikely people, places and things, and they come in dozens of languages, all of which add interest and color to the stories behind the names.
Manitoba's names stand with the best. From a town named after a baking powder can to the village of Dropmore, whose town fathers couldn't decide on a name until they'd had "a drop more" from a shared bottle; towns in Manitoba have been named after everything from bacon to ducks. One village was named after a local species of tree by local residents who only discovered later that they had been mistaken about just what kind of tree they had growing in the town. Other Manitoba communities have been named after early residents, prominent people, local incidents, former homes in other places and Indian legends.
No matter if you're from Manitoba or someplace far away the stories behind the names on Manitoba's map make for stories that seem hilariously unbelievable, but that really are true. They also help illuminate the history and culture of Western Canada.
About the author
Ted Stone, author of the highly successful It's Hardly Worth Talking If You're Going To Tell The Truth, has been collecting stories on the Canadian prairies for 25 years. His numerous titles include 100 Years of Cowboy Stories, A Roundup of Cowboy Humor, Alberta History Along The Highway, British Columbia History Along the Highways and Waterways and It's So Cold on the Prairies: Wit and Wisdom About Winter.
Other titles by
The Legend of Pierre Bottineau & the Red River Trail
Legend of Pierre Bottineau and the Red River Trail, The
Hope Springs a Leak
Alberta History Along the Highway
A Roundup of Cowboy Humor
It's So Cold on the Prairies
Wit and Wisdom about Winter
Great Tales of the Gold Rush
The Complete Cowboy Reader
Remembering the Open Range
Riding The Northern Range
Poems from the Last Best-West