How Seven Persons Got Its Name

   Seven Persons, a hamlet and a community of southern Alberta, is located about fifteen miles south-west of Medicine Hat, off the Number Three Highway and the Canadian Pacific Railway and on Section 4, Township I1, Range 7, West of the 4th Meridian. It has borne its intriguing name for nearly a century. Most Alberta maps still rank it a place.

   The Canadian Pacific Railway Company completed its railroad, linking the territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean in 1885. Its route touched Winnipeg, Regina, Maple Creek, Medicine Hat, Brooks and Calgary, but did not fill the need of transportation for the area to the south of the South Saskatchewan River to the United States border. A few years later, probably in 1891 another company, American owned, built a railway line, connecting Minniapolis to Spokane. It was known as the Soo Spokane Flier and it went by way of Portal, (the American - Canadian port of entry), Maple Creek, Dauntless,Lethbridge and the Crow's Nest Pass. This pass was chosen because it was the most natural one through the Rocky Mountains, not requiring much extra or expensive construction.

   It was the construction crew of this railway who named this section. Not far from the site, they had come upon seven rough graves, but of white men or Indians was not recalled or established. A decision was made. This would be Seven Persons. It became the name of the hamlet and of the surrounding area.

   Throughout the years, especially with bus drivers and train conductors, such jokes have been: "If you are from Seven Persons how are the other six?" "How can you have a baseball team from there? There are only seven. "I see two of you so the place must be called Five Persons to-day."

   What fun those who named the rail sections must have had in trying to choose appropriate titles.

   "Let's call this one Maple Creek. I'm sure those are maple trees along that creek bank."

   "Grassy Lake is a good handle for this one. It could be a lake here, but I see only a sea of grass."

   "I saw an island in the river, the Bow River. How about Bow Island?"

   "Dunmore is good enough for this division, Boss. We done more work to-day than on any day since we started."

   There is another story concerning the name's derivation. A Blood Indian band, led by it's chief, Calf-Shirt, was travelling through the area, and encountered and did battle with a band of Cree Indians near a creek in south-eastern Alberta. Seven Crees were killed and their medicine pipe taken. The place was called Kitsuki-a-tapi, which could be interpreted to mean seven persons.

Medicine Hat is a retail trading area for southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. The secondary trading area extends eastward to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, westward to the Crowsnest Pass southward into Montana.