The Diocese of Qu'Appelle in the Anglican Church of Canada lies in the southern third of the civil province of Saskatchewan and contains within its geographical boundaries some 50 per cent of the province's population of one million. Establishment The diocese was established by the Synod of the Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert's Land in 1884 at the beginning of European settlement on the Canadian prairies beyond the vicinity of Winnipeg; it geographically corresponds to the former District of Assiniboia in the then North-West Territories : indeed, until the 1970s it precisely so-corresponded, and included a strip of territory lying over the Alberta provincial boundary once the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were created in 1905. This was ceded to the Diocese of Calgary. At the beginning of settlement it was unclear where the District headquarters and territorial capital would be; the diocese selected the then-burgeoning village of Troy (now Qu'Appelle), some east of present-day Regina as the cathedral city, and the first pro-cathedral was St Peter's in that village. The original Bishop's Court was there but subsequently relocated to nearby Indian Head: it is in a verdant rolling parkland immediately adjacent to the Qu'Appelle Valley, amply treed with aspen and birch groves, with spring-fed creeks in lush coulees and plentiful local supplies of water. Early difficulty in coping with the majority of prairie settlers Relations between the English immigrants of the Anglican pro-cathedral parish in Qu'Appelle and the native-Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and Roman Catholic settlers from Ontario and Quebec as well as numerous settlers from the USA across the border to the south were at times frosty and the Anglican Church was long referred to in some disparagement as "the English Church" by eastern Canadian settlers who perhaps regarded themselves as more authentically Canadian. Growth of the diocese was hindered in early years by a number of factors: [E]astern Canadian dioceses did not respond in a liberal manner to the numerous appeals for financial support and volunteers. As a result, the western Canadian dioceses relied on money and manpower from the Church of England and its missionary societies. Heavy dependency on overseas help in turn created problems for the Church on the frontier: inadequate funding by far-removed committees, party divisions, the "Englishness" of the Church, a laity not used to voluntary giving, and the failure of the clergy to adjust to frontier conditions all hurt the Anglican cause. Owing to