Fort Saskatchewan was founded 150 years ago this week.

On April 26, 1875, Sub Inspector Sévére Gagnon left Fort Edmonton to start work here, first building a cattle corral. Inspector William Jarvis arrived at Fort Saskatchewan with the rest of the mounted police detachment on May 5. The fort was then built by the police and hired labour using lumber supplied by contractors.

The site of the fort was controversial. Edmonton merchants wanted it built there, but Jarvis chose to be near the mouth of the Sturgeon Creek. His official reason was that the river banks were less steep, and it would be easier to build a railway bridge here.

His superior, Commissioner MacLeod agreed. "I feel satisfied that the site chosen for the Fort is much more likely to be the centre a settlement than Edmonton," he wrote in a letter to Ottawa that spring.

But it is also true that Jarvis was not happy with the citizens of Edmonton, and did not want to stay there. ”They did not use much tact, and they were trying to coerce the wrong man," Sam Steele writes in his autobiography. “I have no doubt that if the settlers had let him alone he would have built the new post on the opposite side of the river.”