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Regina was founded in 1882, when the Canadian Pacific Railway, then being built across western Canada, reached the site: by the time of the North-West Rebellion in 1885 the CPR had reached only Qu’Appelle (then called Troy), some 30 miles (48 km) to the east of what became Regina.

The Dominion Lands Act encouraged homesteaders to come to the area where they could purchase 160 acres (65 ha) of land for $10. The city was originally known as “Pile of Bones“—the English translation of the Cree place name “oskana kâ-asastêki” (lit. “Bones, which are piled”) – because of the large amounts of buffalo bones on the banks of the Wascana Creek, a spring runoff channel rising some couple of kilometers to the east of Regina and gradually becoming a substantial coulee as it approaches the Qu’Appelle Valley some ten kilometers to the north.

In 1882, Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, wife of the Duke of Argyll, who was then the Governor General of Canada, named the new community Regina (Latin for queen), after her mother Queen Victoria, giving rise to frequent use of the sobriquet Queen City. Alternate names considered for the town were Leopold (for a son of Queen Victoria), Wascana (a mildly anglicized version of the Cree for “Pile of Bones”) and Assiniboia (the Aboriginal people who gave their name to the district of the North-West Territories, corresponding to modern southern Saskatchewan, a famous mountain in the Canadian Rockies, a town southwest of Moose Jaw, and a river (Assiniboine) in Manitoba.