No one knows for sure the identity of the two aboriginal men whose images decorate the light standards on Moose Jaw’s Fourth Avenue bridge.
Bear Ghost and Mike Oka were not members of the Moose Jaw Sioux, a remnant group of Sitting Bull’s followers who camped here until 1913.
Nor can they be found among the Assiniboin and Cree tribes whose traditional hunting territories straddled Moose Jaw Creek.
The design of the viaduct was conceived on the drawing board of C.A.P. Turner, a Minneapolis architect. Detailed planning appears to have been drawn up in Minneapolis, and even the 1929 Moose Jaw city council was left in the dark.
Fourth Avenue viaduct stands on or near one of the old crossings of Thunder Creek, probably dating from the fur trade era.
James Hamilton Ross and his four companions, the first settlers to reach the site of Moose Jaw, found three men belonging to the railway survey crew living in a dugout abode along Thunder Creek near the site of the present viaduct. Track laying was still almost eight months away.
Early travellers and settlers remembered the beauty of the Thunder Creek valley before the days of industry. The creek meandered through swampy ponds fringed with willow bushes.
Short shrubs grew along the banks and the entire wide valley was a “paradise for birds.” Muskrats were abundant and fish came in plentiful numbers from the Qu’Appelle Valley.
Until 1910, a footpath crossed CPR tracks at the site of the present viaduct, while the crossing of Thunder Creek was made via a flimsy wooden footbridge with railings.
A generation of the town’s youngsters grew up on that footbridge which to their great delight could be rocked with very little effort. Sometimes it was called Fifty Cent Bridge because the kids would try to hoodwink unsuspecting pedestrians into paying a toll charge.
Wagons and teams crossed the creek a short distance west near to where the CPR Outlook line now branches from the main yards. This trail came out of the valley near the site of the old Swift Canadian plant and meandered across the prairie to the southwest.
By 1909, Moose Jaw had grown sufficiently to warrant something more substantial than a shaky footbridge over Thunder Creek, and a footpath over a busy trans-Canada rail line.
Late in 1909 work commenced on an impressive viaduct, which would straddle the broad valley. Three concrete piers carried the steel structure over the CPR tracks in a span over 200 feet long. On the south side of the tracks, the bridge was carried on piles for 915 feet. The flooring of the entire bridge consisted of creosoted blocks.
This structure stood until 1929 when the burgesses of Moose Jaw gave their approval to the erection of the present viaduct on the site of the 1909 one. On Dec. 19, 1929, Mayor James Pascoe officially opened the new concrete bridge and the images of Bear Ghost and Mike Oka were admired and wondered upon for the first time.
Ted Bison of Sayre, Oklahoma, claimed that one of the images, Bear Ghost, was his great, great grandfather. In the tragic aftermath of the Little Big Horn battle, Bear Ghost and his fellow Sioux fled to Canada.
Like many of the refugee Sioux, Bear Ghost soon returned to the United States. He died in old age near the Black Hills.
From the Blackfoot of Alberta comes the name Mike Oka, who was a member of the Many Tumors division of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the most warlike and feared of all the plains tribes (and the earliest known occupants of the Canadian plains).
Mike Oka was born in the Porcupine Hills in what is now southwestern Alberta, and was given the name “Mike” by the early settlers.
In the 1930s, now an old and respected gentleman, he recalled some of the great battles fought between his tribe and other tribes of the plains.
“I was quite a lad when the great battle was fought between the Bloods and the Assiniboins of Montana. My father took part in that battle. I could hear the guns very distinctly.
“Our camps were at Fort Whoop-Up. That is where the fight began. Many of the enemy never reached the east shore of the Oldman River. They were killed in the water.
“I never saw so many scalps in all my life as on the next day in a victory war dance. The heaviest part of the battle took place on the present site of the city of Lethbridge.
While it is unlikely Mike Oka and Bear Ghost ever visited the site of Moose Jaw, they do represent the first people of the western plains who, for countless generations, hunted and lived near the valleys of Thunder Creek and the Moose Jaw River.
