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| Photo credit: Brenda Carson |
The closest I've ever been to Medicine Hat was in the summer of 1996. I was traveling with a church group for boys called the Cadets and we were attending a Camporee somewhere in the province of Alberta. Our plane landed in Calgary and I distinctly remember not having enough money to buy a donut at the airport. Having no experience with tip-jars up to that point, but plenty with the Take-a-Penny, Leave-a-Penny trays, I reached into the nearby glass jar and pulled out enough change Canadienne to pay what was lacking. None of this has anything to do with the city of Medicine Hat, the sunniest place in Canada. Due to the extensive gas fields in the surrounding environs, it has earned the nickname of Gas City. When the city considered changing its name to Gasburg, no less than Rudyard Kipling wrote a letter to the local paper encouraging the people to maintain their unique identity: "This part of the country seems to have all hell for a basement, and the only trap door appears to be in Medicine Hat. And don't you ever think of changing the name of your town. It's all your own and the only hat of its kind on earth."The origin of the city's name is an English interpretation of the Blackfoot tribes' word Saamis, which refers to the eagle tailfeather headdress worn by medicine men. This headdress was, depending on who you ask, either: 1) lost by a Cree medicine man in the South Saskatchewan River as he was fleeing from a battle between the Blackfoot and the Cree, or 2) the physical manifestation of mystical powers granted to a hunter in exchange for sacrificing his wife to the mythical merman river serpent, Soy-yee-daa-bee.
Sources:
Wikipedia: Medicine Hat O Canada: Reasons to Love Medicine Hat
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