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Sasko, The Hudson Bay Hotel's pet moose

In the winter of 1911, lumberjacks brought a baby moose to Marcotte’s Hotel at Hudson Bay Junction located in northeast Saskatchewan. The hotel owner, Alcide Marcotte, obtained a government permit to enable him to keep the moose calf in captivity.

In the winter of 1911, lumberjacks brought a baby moose to Marcotte’s Hotel at Hudson Bay Junction located in northeast Saskatchewan. The hotel owner, Alcide Marcotte, obtained a government permit to enable him to keep the moose calf in captivity. “Sasko” became the family pet. Every day, it would climb the steps of the Marcotte’s Hotel to be fed. According to the town’s local history book, Valley Echoes (1980), the moose basically had the run of the hotel.

By the summer of 1911, Sasko must have outgrown the Marcotte’s hotel. The Saskatoon StarPhoenixreported on July 13 that the one-year-old moose had arrived at the CNR station from Hudson Bay Junction, packed in a piano box. “Saskatoon is to have a little zoo of its own opposite the Flanagan Hotel [now the Senator Hotel on 21st Street],” the newspaper stated.  “Sasko … is turned loose inside a small run on 20th Street and seems quite at home.” Mr. G.A. Wilding, the new hotel owner, stated that he planned to present Sasko to the street railway company when it opened up a park after the system had started, as a first donation to their “zoological department.”

None of this ever happened. Saskatoon Municipal Railway did not begin operating until 1913, the same year that the federal nursery station – now the Forestry Farm Park and Zoo – was established in Sutherland just outside Saskatoon. It is not known what happened to Sasko.

Alcide Marcotte came from Quebec to the Prud’homme region of what is now Saskatchewan with his parents and eight siblings in 1897. When the Canadian Northern railway line came through around 1905, Alcide owned hotels in Warman, Osler and Vonda. 

In 1907, Alcide and his father, Joseph A. Marcotte, built the hotel at Hudson Bay Junction (called Etomami until 1909; “Junction” was dropped in 1947). “There was a long bar with a brass rail and beautiful big mirrors over it,” Alcide’s daughter Elsie wrote in the Hudson Bay history book. “The customers were nearly all lumberjacks from the woods and they had every kind of liquor [in the hotel bar] they wanted.”

Alcide and his wife Rosalie, 20 years his junior, raised their four children, Donald, Wilfred, Maurice and Elsie, in the hotel at Hudson Bay Junction. “I sure did love that hotel,” Elsie recalled. “[My father] treated mother like a princess. She was never allowed to work around the hotel, only to dress and look pretty for him. He was so proud of her and of course, she was never allowed to worry about business. When he died in 1920, she knew nothing of money matters or the hotel business.” (Valley Echoes)

After her husband Alcide passed away, Rosalie managed Marcotte’s Hotel with the help of her sons. In 1935, Maurice Marcotte took over ownership of the hotel when his mother and sister, Elsie, moved to Los Angeles, Calif.. A beer parlour opened in the hotel that same year.

The Marcotte family operated the hotel until 1955 when they sold it to a Mr. King. Not long afterwards, Ovide Desrochers and Arthur Kelm became the owners, changing its name to the DesRochers Hotel. There have been several owners since then.