10/03/2026
The world's most loved bear was Canadian, and she was named after Winnipeg 🇨🇦🐻
August 24, 1914. A troop train stops at White River, Ontario.
On the platform, a trapper is selling a tiny black bear cub. He had killed her mother. She has no one.
Lieutenant Harry Colebourn, a young veterinarian who had made Winnipeg his home, is on his way to war. He steps off the train, looks at her, reaches into his pocket, and hands over $20.
In his diary that day, he writes three words:
"Bought bear $20."
He names her Winnipeg, after the city he calls home. The soldiers just call her Winnie.
She crosses the Atlantic with the Canadian troops and becomes their mascot on Salisbury Plain in England, a little piece of home for men about to walk into the worst war the world had ever seen.
Then the orders come. France. The front lines.
Harry cannot take her into the trenches. So in December 1914 he takes her to the London Zoo, planning to come back for her when the war is over.
He survives the war. He does come back.
But by then Winnie is the most adored animal in London. She is so gentle that children are allowed to feed her by hand. Harry sees how loved she is, and he makes the hardest choice. In 1919, he gives her to the zoo for good and sails home to Winnipeg without her.
One of the children who visits her is a little boy named Christopher Robin Milne. He loves her so much that he renames his own teddy bear after her.
His father, A.A. Milne, starts writing stories about that bear.
In 1926, the world meets Winnie-the-Pooh.
Winnie lived at the London Zoo until 1934. Harry went back to his veterinary practice in Winnipeg and died in 1947. He never became rich or famous from any of it.
But today there are statues of him and his bear in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg and at the London Zoo, and White River, Ontario still honours the cub who was bought on its train platform.
One small act of kindness from a Canadian soldier, on his way to war, gave the whole world a friend.
Did you know Winnie was Canadian? ❤️
