lake hoskins

it's very peaceful has very good camping facilities large eating areas good boat dock and fair fishing

Over the weekend I brought a group of heritage tourists to the Hoskins Old Settler Monument, which confirmed to me how interesting this feature is. It represents the old-settler impulse to commemorate, being inscribed in 1938 to "Pioneers" of a half-century earlier. And all those names inscribed on the rocks composing the monument amount to a register of early settlement to be read as micro-history. People gathered around, commented on the design of the monument, speculated as to the origins of the settlers named on it. It makes me wonder, though, just where the pioneer townsite of Hoskins was situated. Was it on this side of the lake, along present Highway 11?

There are other reasons for visiting Lake Hoskins, but what I love about the place is the forgotten historical monument located on its south shore, alongside Highway 11. This is the Hoskins Old Settlers Monument. It is in the middle of German-Russian Country, but the monument shows that the earliest settlers, in fact, were not necessarily German-Russians, but included many Anglo-Americans (a common pattern across the plains - Anglos arriving early, ethnic immigrants then supplanting them on the land). The monument, too, commemorates the old settler picnics that used to be an annual event at Hoskins. The monument is pretty rough as to aesthetic considerations, but you have to love its intent and its historical impulse: to record the early families, their names incised into rocks in the cairn, so they will not be forgotten.