In the spring of 1881, Major-General Thomas L. Rosser, American Civic War veteran and engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway, chose the six year old settlement of Grand Valley as the railroad’s first divisional point west of Winnipeg. But an argument over a money settlement with the town’s major landowner, Dougald McVicar and the site’s susceptibility to flooding, forced Rosser to choose an alternate location. At the end of May, 1881, he selected a site on the south side of the Assiniboine River two miles west of the recently established Grand Valley settlement. It was named after Brandon House, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post established in the 1790s at the junction of the Souris and Assiniboine rivers