The Tunnels of Moose Jaw is one of the major attractions of Saskatchewan’s fourth largest city. The below-ground theme park, as historian Ashleigh Androsoff explains, offers tours purporting to tell two local stories. One is about Chinese immigration circa 1905. The other is about Chicago-style gangsters circa 1929.
The Tunnels story is that Chinese immigrants built a network of tunnels under the city because they were forced to live underground; the tunnels were then used by gangsters and bootleggers, including Al Capone. Capone’s rumored presence—town historians can find no evidence he was ever there, above or below ground—led to a change in the city’s slogans in 2019. The “Surprisingly Unexpected” “Friendly City” became “Canada’s Most Notorious City.”
In fact, little of that story line, Androsoff argues, is backed up by historical evidence. One of “Canada’s ‘Coolest Downtowns’” is a bit of make-believe, because, as the local paper once put it, “it’s good business to tell tales to tourists.”
“If ‘history’ is understood to mean a plausible narrative of the past based on sufficient, reliable, and compelling evidence, there is little about the Tunnels of Moose Jaw that is ‘historical,’” Androsoff writes. In fact, the
presentation of “history” at the Tunnels of Moose Jaw is riddled with misleading and inaccurate information. This is unfortunate, because part of what makes Moose Jaw historically significant is that the opposite of what is claimed at the Tunnels is true.
Moose Jaw was actually unusual for its welcoming of Chinese immigrants, no small achievement in the often violently racist response to Asian immigrants to North America. Meanwhile, the city’s railroad linkages and tolerance made it a regional hub of vice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But all the drinking, gambling, and prostitution was above ground and out in the open. Local police “preferred management and containment over suppression” and were likely taking a cut of the profits-of-sin. Even during provincial Prohibition (1915–1925), Moose Jaw was a remarkably peaceful and orderly city, a far cry from the “Little Chicago” of the Tunnels.
Yet the attraction has succeeded in playing a “significant role in shaping Moose Javians’ understanding—or rather, misunderstanding—of their city’s history since the first ‘tunnel’ was discovered below the Cornerstone Inn in 1985.”
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Androsoff uses the “physical and discursive construction” of this underground space to investigate “the processes of community building, economic recovery, and urban redevelopment in a deindustrializing city over time.” The theme park was developed by the city’s “entrepreneurial and political elite to help the city recover” from in the agricultural and industrial sectors busts of the 1980s and 1990s.
Business leaders and boosters—if not the public library’s archivist—thought rumors and legends and sub-cellars, basements, coal chutes, and other subterranean utility spaces made for a marketable product. American-style gangsters, or at least the cartoonish, movie-cultivated version of them, were a real draw. The attraction opened as the “Tunnels of Little Chicago” in 1996 and was rebranded as the Tunnels of Moose Jaw in 2000.
The Tunnels helped boost the “city’s economy and reputation,” notes Androsoff, “but it has done so at a cost.” Visitors (judging from their on-line and other comments) and locals are taking the entertainment as historical truth. A “fantasy packaged as history and heritage,” to quote a historical geographer Androsoff cites, is becoming the local story.
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“Instead of seeing Moose Jaw for the fascinating, tolerant, and ‘wide-open’ place it really was,” Androsoff writes, “the city—led by Tunnels supporters—has buried itself in the false narrative of being a ‘Little Chicago’: something other, and less than, itself.”
“Moose Jaw’s vice market and experience of prohibition were not the same as Chicago’s, and it’s worth understanding how and why they differed,” Androsoff stresses.
The primacy of “heritage” commodification over history underlies a bittersweet irony in Moose Jaw. The local Main Street is one of Canada’s best preserved historic streets, yet there are no traces remaining of once-rollicking River Street—the city’s actual above-ground red light district, once renowned even south of the 49th parallel.
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