Moose Jaw
Why Moose Jaw???
We travel a lot. We’ve been down just about every road in BC. We used to take our Home Stays on tours to the Island, and Vancouver. We also go to Spokane regularly. We have been down the Oregon Coast many times. So it’s time to find new places. Lately we’ve been doing 4-5 day trips, so Moose Jaw was a likely destination. Brent has been there several times, it is Mona’s first visit. We were impressed.
Mona read the reviews on Trip Advisor and chose the Grant Hall Hotel. Wow. It was built in 1927 and renovated a few times along the way. Very beautiful and historical.
The Tunnels of Moose Jaw. This was something we learned about after we decided to go to Moose Jaw. Back in the day (at least 100 years ago). Much of downtown Moose Jaw was heated by boilers. The steam engineers had tunnels built between the buildings to make it easier to move from one boiler to the next. It is said that the tunnels were also used for running booze to the Soos Line train that ran down to Chicago. It is also legend that Al Capone was in charge of this, and frequented Moose Jaw, giving it the title of Little Chicago. There is really little evidence that he ever went to Moose Jaw. However, considering the authorities could only convict him on tax evasion, there was little evidence that he was involved in anything illegal either so go figure.
There are three tunnel tours in Moose Jaw:
The Chicago Connection, which is about Al Capone, his possible connection to Moose Jaw, and its bootlegging operations.
Passage to Fortune: which is about Chinese Immigration and mainly the lives of Chinese immigrants in the laundry industry.
Bunker 24, which is about the Defenbunker. (We did not see this one. There is a Defenbunker here in Nelson, and we have never seen that one either.)
The tunnel tours are guided tours through a series of museum like rooms including the tunnel passages that connect them. The tour guides are “in character” and treat the tourist as though they are either Chinese Immigrants or Bootleggers. While the characters they portray are fictional, the general stories portray the history, even if it is not specific to Moose Jaw. Chinese Immigrants were treated poorly, bootleggers existed, and the underground world was real, even if it didn’t actually take place in Moose Jaw. The only picture we have is of the store front. Photography is not allowed during the tour.
The tunnel tours were amazing and we hope to eventually go back and take the third one…Bunker 24. Maybe we will check out our local one first.
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