Estevan riot
1931 event in Saskatchewan, Canada
The Estevan riot, also known as the Black Tuesday Riot, occurred when members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police attacked striking coal miners from nearby Bienfait, Saskatchewan, on September 29, 1931. The miners had been on strike since September 7, 1931, hoping to improve their wages and working conditions.
Background
The region's mining work was seasonal; during the rest of the year, between April and August, miners would work in the fields to supplement wages before they returned to the mines. However, the droughts in the prairies and the overall economic situation in Canada made that impossible. That led to an increasing number of men looking for work in the mines, which let mining companies to choose their workers.
Furthermore, according to the Royal Commission that investigated the strike, Saskatchewan miners made half as much as their counterparts in Alberta and in British Columbia. Most of the miners and their families lived within company housing. Annie Barylik, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a miner at Bienfait Mines, described the conditions: One bedroom, two beds in there, dining room, no beds in there, kitchen, one bed, and eleven in the family.... I think we need a bigger place than that. When it is raining the rain comes in the kitchen.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Estevan riot” as 1931 event in Saskatchewan, Canada. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1931 event in Saskatchewan, Canada. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5401098. The Library of Congress control number is sh85027360. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Estevan riot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.