Rockglen sits in the Burning Hills of the Wood Mountain Uplands, a country of petrified wood and fossils where the Assiniboine, Plains Cree and Blackfoot once left their hammers and arrows. After the Battle of Little Bighorn, about 5,000 Lakota followers of Sitting Bull fled to these uplands, where they came under the North-West Mounted Police and Major James Morrow Walsh. The name Burning Hills traces to 1879, when fires set by the U.S. Cavalry in Montana spread and burned the grasslands, bringing famine.
Homesteading began with the Ferbane ranch, which was a post office by 1910, and German and Austro-Hungarian settlers who built tar paper shacks and sod huts. Valley City grew up as an unofficial community. To the north, the Kent homestead became a post office in 1915, and Beromé Prefontaine's store led to the village of Joeville, named for Joseph Prefontaine, by 1917. When the Canadian Pacific Railway ran a line south from Assiniboia in 1926, Joeville split, 26 buildings moved to the new junction near Valley City, and the village of Rockglen was incorporated in 1927.
Services followed quickly: a school in the Pinking Hotel, a proper three-room schoolhouse in 1928, then a Red Cross hospital, post office, bank and Charlie Switallo's hardware store in 1929. Lights ran from dusk to midnight until Saskatchewan Power arrived in 1950. Hard times and farm mechanization thinned the countryside, but Rockglen reached 500 people and became a town, with L. J. Bolster as first mayor. The Poplar River Power Station, started in 1975, and retiring farmers brought new homes and a new Wheat Pool elevator in 1981, the last in town.
Today Rockglen serves area farms, ranches and power station workers. It is also home to local legend of Zoobey, a tall, ape-like creature said to roam Columbus hill.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Rockglen” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.