Interactive timeline · 4,000 BCE to 2026
The Wheat City on the Assiniboine: Brandon's story in 26 moments.
26 moments5 eras35 sourcesAbout ↓
4,000 BCE – 1792
The Assiniboine and other nations lived and hunted along the river long before the fur trade.
The Assiniboine (Nakoda) people inhabited the region when the first European traders arrived to build posts along the Assiniboine River. Farther down the same river, at the Forks in Winnipeg, archaeologists have found evidence of people using the Assiniboine for at least 6,000 years. Today the nearby Shilo training area preserves the largest remaining stretch of native mixed-grass prairie in Manitoba.
1793 – 1870
Hudson's Bay Company posts traded along the Assiniboine, and Dakota refugees arrived from the south.
Donald Mackay of the Hudson's Bay Company established Brandon House on the north bank of the Assiniboine in October 1793, the company's first trading post on the southern prairies. Between 1793 and 1832 three posts named Brandon House stood in the area, likely named after the Duke of Brandon, an ancestor of Lord Selkirk. The first was abandoned by 1811 in favour of nearby sites.
After the 1862 conflict in Minnesota, the U.S. military drove part of the eastern Dakota population into Canada, where they later took up reserve lands in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Dakota had long used these northern lands. The Sioux Valley Dakota Nation west of Brandon is one of these communities.
1871 – 1913
Treaty 2 was signed, the CPR founded Brandon, and institutions from an asylum to a college followed.
Weeks after Treaty 1, Canada and Anishinaabe leaders signed Treaty 2 at Manitoba Post. It covered a large tract west and north of the small province of Manitoba as it then existed, including the Brandon area. As with Treaty 1, promised farm equipment and animals were left out of the written text.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedThe omitted 'Outside Promises' were recognized only on April 30, 1875, when an order-in-council made the written memorandum part of Treaties 1 and 2.
Permanent settlement began in the late 1870s at Grand Valley, 3 kilometres east of today's city, and in the Brandon Hills. Protestants from Quebec and the Maritimes were among the first to arrive, followed by British and American immigrants.
Baptist minister John Crawford founded Prairie College near Rapid City in 1880, the first post-secondary institution on the prairies west of Manitoba's original 'postage stamp' boundary. It became part of McKee Academy, which moved to Brandon in 1890.
The Canadian Pacific Railway chose the present site of Brandon as a divisional point in 1881. The new town grew quickly into the transportation, distribution, service and trade centre for southwestern Manitoba.
Brandon was incorporated as a city in 1882, only a year after the railway arrived. Daly House, built in 1882 for its first mayor, Thomas Daly, is now a museum of the city's settlement and economic development.
Brandon factories were producing manufactured goods in the 1880s and 1890s, and the city became a judicial and regional medical centre. By the end of the century it had a federal agricultural research station, a provincial jail and a school of nursing.
The Brandon Reformatory for Boys was built in 1890 for 45 young offenders but held a single nine-year-old boy, overseen by six staff, and drew criticism for nepotism in the appointment of its superintendent, the father of Attorney General Clifford Sifton. In 1891 it was converted into the Brandon Asylum for the Insane, serving Manitoba and the North-West Territories.
The Brandon Residential School operated from 1895 to 1972, run over the years by the Methodist and United churches and later the Catholic Church. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation keeps a memorial list of children who died while attending.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedOn June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in the House of Commons on behalf of the Government of Canada to former students of Indian Residential Schools.
The Baptist Union of Canada formally established Brandon College in 1899, building on the work of Prairie College and McKee Academy. It became an affiliate of McMaster University in 1910.
Brandon's population nearly tripled between the early 1900s and the start of the First World War as the farm economy boomed. McKenzie Seeds grew into one of the largest seed houses in the British Commonwealth.
A fire in November 1910 destroyed the entire asylum complex. Rebuilding began almost at once, and the three-storey Parkland Building, able to hold nearly 700 patients, opened in 1912. The facility was renamed the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases in 1919.
1914 – 1945
Military camps, postwar labour unrest and the Depression marked the city.
Military planners set up Camp Sewell, later called Camp Hughes, northeast of present-day Shilo by 1910. It was a busy training area during the First World War and later a summer camp for the military.
Manitoba women became the first in Canada to win the right to vote and hold provincial office. Asian and Indigenous women faced longer struggles for the vote.
After the First World War Brandon experienced labour unrest and poor economic conditions, in the year of the Winnipeg General Strike. Both the city and Brandon College faced financial crises.
Future Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas enrolled at Brandon College in 1924 and spent six years there finishing high school and training for the ministry. He won academic prizes, became 'senior stick' (student council president) and was drawn to the Social Gospel movement.
During the Depression, the Shilo area became a relief camp for the unemployed, whose workers began building permanent structures for a new military base. In 1938 Brandon College's Baptist sponsors withdrew support for financial reasons, and it became a non-denominational college of the University of Manitoba.
Thousands of service personnel trained in Brandon, at Shilo and at Commonwealth air training schools in the area. Shilo became a permanent year-round artillery base. The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon commemorates the air crews who trained and fought in the war.
1946 – today
A university, national games, food processing and Dakota self-government shaped recent decades.
CFB Shilo, 25 kilometres east of Brandon, became the home station of all branches of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery in 1960. From 1974 to 2000, German troops trained there in tanks and artillery under a NATO agreement.
Brandon College became Brandon University, an independent provincial university, in July 1967. Assiniboine Community College was also established, and the city added a regional library, arts centre, museums and the Keystone Centre arena and convention complex.
Brandon hosted the Canada Winter Games in 1979, the World Curling Championships in 1995 and the Canada Summer Games in 1997. The Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba stages the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair and other agricultural shows in the city.
The province announced in 1993 that the Brandon Mental Health Centre would close, and the last patients were moved to a new facility in November 1998. Two cemeteries on the grounds hold the graves of people who died at the institution from 1898 onward. Assiniboine Community College has since reused buildings on the site.
Food processing, especially a large Maple Leaf pork processing plant, became one of Brandon's main industries, alongside fertilizer, chemical and metal manufacturers. Agriculture, trade, health care and administration remain the city's economic mainstays.
After years of negotiation, the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation west of Brandon gained self-government on July 1, 2014, the first Indigenous nation in Manitoba and the Prairies to do so. The 2021 census counted 51,313 people in Brandon, Manitoba's second-largest city.
About this timeline
The Assiniboine valley around Brandon was home to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Anishinaabe peoples, and later to Dakota who came north from Minnesota after 1862. Hudson's Bay Company posts called Brandon House stood nearby from 1793, and in 1881 the Canadian Pacific Railway chose the site for a divisional point, creating Manitoba's second city. Brandon became a centre for farming, health care, education and military training, and was the site of a residential school that operated until 1972.
2 moments on this page carry a government record note.
FAQ
The CPR chose the site as a divisional point in 1881, and Brandon was incorporated as a city in 1882. Hudson's Bay Company posts called Brandon House stood nearby from 1793.
It takes its name from the fur trade posts called Brandon House, likely named after the Duke of Brandon, an ancestor of Lord Selkirk.
The nickname reflects Brandon's role as the trade and service centre of a grain-farming region in southwestern Manitoba; a 1988 pictorial history of the city is titled The Wheat City.
From 1895 to 1972, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
Written from the sources linked on each moment: the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, provincial and city archives, and others. Where governments acted wrongly, we say so and note whether it has been officially acknowledged, is established by the record, or is disputed. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
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