Canada Guide
Manitoba and Saskatchewan
The Manitoba Museum
Address: 190 Rupert Ave
Opening time: Late May to early Sept daily 10am–6pm; rest of year Tues– Fri 10am–4pm, Sat & Sun 11am–5pm
Website: www.manitobamuseum.mb.ca
Price: $8
The Centennial Centre incorporates the Manitoba Museum, an excellent introduction to the province's geography, history and peoples.
Highlights of the natural history galleries include an imposing polar bear diorama, a well-illustrated explanation of the Northern Lights and the evocative Boreal Forest gallery, where you'll find a waterfall, a family of moose, and a diorama of Cree gathering food and painting sacred designs on rocks. The Grasslands Gallery has a small display of Assiniboine Indian artefacts, along with a reconstruction of a tepee and a copy of a pioneer log cabin.
The museum's most popular exhibit, moored in a massive display area that reproduces a seventeenth-century River Thames dockside, is an impressive full-scale working replica of the Nonsuch, the ship whose fur-collecting voyage to Hudson Bay in 1668 led to the creation of the Hudson's Bay Company. The new Hudson's Bay Company Gallery comprises more than 10,000 artefacts and documents amassed by the Company and which form a record of its links with Manitoba and its impact on Canada as a whole. The last section of the museum is the Urban Gallery, which re-creates the Winnipeg of the early 1920s, a street complete with pharmacy, barber shop, dentist, promenade and cinema showing period films.