Indian Head began in 1882, when the first settlers, mostly Scots from Ontario, pushed into the district ahead of the Canadian Pacific Railway, many travelling by ox-cart from Brandon. The "Indian" in the name refers to Indigenous peoples in Canada. Among the earliest operations was the Bell Farm, which Major Bell started that year on tens of thousands of acres. It was so large that passenger trains sometimes stopped so travellers could watch the harvest. Its telephone line, strung on barbed wire, was the first communication system in Saskatchewan.
In 1887 the Dominion Experimental Farm was founded here as one of Canada's original research stations, serving the whole of the North-West Territories. A tree nursery followed in 1901 or 1902, and it still ships millions of seedlings every year for farm shelterbelts across the three prairie provinces. Indian Head became a town in 1902. That year its grain elevators handled more grain at the first shipping stage than any other inland point in the world, and the district led the Territories in wheat production from 1903 to 1905. In the winter of 1901, farmers frustrated by a boxcar shortage formed the Territorial Grain Growers' Association here, with William Richard Motherwell as its first president.
Hotels served the many travellers arriving by train from Ontario, and the town grew into the district's financial centre, with three banks, an opera house and a hospital that opened in 1905. Curling, hockey and baseball took hold early, and today the town is home to the Saskatchewan Rural Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. The Indian Head Museum sits in the 1907 fire hall, and the Bell Farm's round barn is being preserved. The TV sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie was partly filmed here.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Indian Head, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.