HISTORY51 - Southwestern Canada: Seaports, Trains, and the Canadian Rockies

Pat and I are signed up for a future tour of southwestern Canada:  starting in Vancouver, British Columbia, traveling by the Rocky Mountaineer train to Jasper National Park in Alberta, and then by bus through the Canadian Rockies to Calgary.

Map for upcoming tour of southwestern Canada.

Following my usual process of learning about the region we will be traveling to, this blog will cover the history of southwestern Canada, with emphasis on the areas we will visit.  I’ll start with a short introduction, and then (following the order of the tour) discuss the history of the Canadian Province of British Columbia, then the history of the city of Vancouver, followed by the history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Rocky Mountaineer.  Next, I’ll discuss the national parks of the Canadian Rockies, then the history of the Canadian Province of Alberta, and finally the history of the city of Calgary.

My principal sources for this article include “Geological Regions,” “Canadian Pacific Railway,” “History of Vancouver” and “Calgary” all from thecanadianencyclopedia.ca; “History of British Columbia” and “History of Alberta” from britannica.com; “History of the Rocky Mountaineer,” rockymountaineer.com; “Calgary, Alberta,” newworldencyclopedia.org; and numerous other online sources.

Introduction

Canada.  Canada is the second largest country in the world in area (after Russia), occupying roughly the northern two-fifths of the continent of North America, and is made up of ten provinces across southern Canada and three territories in the northwest.  Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 5,525 miles, is the world's longest bi-national land border.  Despite Canada’s great size, it is one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries.

Canada today is made up of ten provinces and three territories.

Geologically, Canada was assembled from continental fragments by the process of plate tectonics, interaction of huge rigid plates near the Earth’s surface, which (still) move slowly over the underlying mantle.  Scientists think that this process started more than 3 billion years ago, when the continental crust first began to form.

Indigenous peoples have continuously inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years, having proliferated from ancient people who crossed over a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 45,000 to 12,000 years ago. 

Beginning in the 16^th century, the British and French explored the Atlantic coast, then settled there, and began to move inland, establishing extensive colonies.  In the French and Indian War, 1754-1763, between Great Britain and France, fought (in America) over possession of New World colonies, France lost all its territories on the North American mainland, leaving what would become Canada in British hands.

In 1867, the Dominion of Canada was formed as a federal confederation of four provinces.  From there, over the years, the number of provinces increased to ten, and Canada acquired three territories.  (The name “Canada” was derived from the indigenous Huron-Iroquois kanata, meaning a village or settlement.)  Meanwhile, Canada experienced widening autonomy from Great Britain, culminating in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the last vestiges of Canada’s legal dependence on the Parliament of the United Kingdom, making Canada an independent country.

Today, Canada is a parliamentary democracy.  The country's head of government is the prime minister.  Canada is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association, with no legal obligations among members.  Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain is the current head.

Canada is officially bilingual in English and French, reflecting the country’s history as ground once contested by two of Europe’s great powers.

Canada has a population about 38 million people, most of its residents living within 125 miles of the U.S. border.  Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.  Canada’s expansive wilderness to the north plays a large role in Canadian identity, as does the country’s reputation of welcoming immigrants.  Canada is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations.

Canada has the 24^th highest per-capita income globally.  Its advanced economy is the ninth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.  While the service sector is Canada’s biggest economic driver, the country is a significant exporter of energy, food, and minerals.  Canada ranks third in the world in proven oil reserves and is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer.

Southwestern Canada.  For reference, I include two maps here.  The first is a modern map of southwestern Canada - specifically, the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.  

Modern map of British Columbia and Alberta.

Vancouver Island is located at the extreme southwest corner of British Columbia, with Victoria as the provincial capital.  The city of Vancouver is located on the mainland, across from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. 

Edmonton is the capital of Alberta, with the national parks of the Canadian Rockies southwest along the border with British Columbia, and the city Calgary to the southeast.

The second map is a relief map showing terrain elevation variations. 

Terrain variation map of southern British Columbia, southwestern Alberta, and the northwestern U.S.

British Columbia has very diverse geography; its landscapes include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts and grassy plains.

Most of British Columbia was formed in a succession of tectonic plate collisions, volcanic episodes, and periods of metamorphism (alteration of the composition or structure of a rock by heat or pressure), and folding - producing the rugged landscape that extends from Alaska down through British Columbia to the western United States.  One important effect of the plate collisions was to push giant slabs of rock lying at the eastern edge of southern British Columbia, upwards and eastwards along thrust faults to form the front ranges of the present Canadian Rocky Mountains.

The Canadian Rockies are the easternmost part of the mountains of western Canada.  They straddle the border between the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, and include 2,283 named peaks, the highest and most prominent of which is Mount Robson at 12,972feet, located in British Columbia, just west of the northern end of Jasper National Park in Alberta.

Most of southern Alberta, east of the Canadian Rockies, consists of prairies, gently, rolling grasslands with numerous lakes and depressions, relatively dry and mostly treeless. 

Between about 550 to 360 million years ago, a gigantic inland sea covered almost the entire continent.  In it, some of the earliest invertebrate life forms flourished.  The limestones that were deposited at this time are apparent in the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains.  Reefs formed by primitive organisms flourished in present-day Alberta, and became the host for much of the oil and gas that forms the foundation for the modern economy of the province.

British Columbia

Indigenous Peoples.  At the time of their initial contact with white European explorers, the indigenous peoples in present-day British Columbia numbered about 80,000.  They had developed an economy based on utilizing the products of the sea and the huge cedars growing in the coastal mountains.  Expert fishermen, they used traps, nets, hooks, spears, and even an ingenious toggling harpoon for hunting whales.  Their clothing was made of skins and cedar bark covered by beautifully patterned blankets woven from the wool of mountain goats.  Dwellings were large rectangular buildings of cedar beams and planks, divided into compartments for families.  Houses were located in clusters along beaches suitable for canoe landings and just above the high-tide mark.  These peoples were enterprising traders of copper, blankets, elk hides, furs, shells, candlefish oil, and slaves along the intertribal routes that ran north-south into California and east-west into the interior

Explorations and Trading Posts.  The area that was to become British Columbia first caught the attention of European countries in the late 18^th century.  Spanish ships visited the coast in 1774, followed by the British explorer James Cook, who was searching for the Northwest Passage.  Cook’s account of the fur wealth of the area stimulated the interest of British and American traders, who soon arrived to trade with natives for the highly prized sea otter pelts.  The growing interest of Great Britain in the area was indicated by the dispatch in 1792 of the navigator George Vancouver, who arrived to chart the coastline of British Columbia.

Simultaneously, British fur traders penetrated the region from the east.  Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company of Montreal entered the region through its winding waterways; he completed the first overland journey across the entire continent when he arrived on the central coast, in 1793.  A fur trade followed, based on fixed posts in the interior.

After years of near conflict between Britain and the United States, the southern boundary of Canada was fixed in 1846 at latitude 49 N, and Vancouver Island was recognized as solely British territory.  In 1849, Great Britain made Vancouver Island a crown colony

Gold Rush and Permanent Settlements.  The gold strike of 1858 in the Cariboo Mountains in eastern British Columbia opened the mainland to settlement.  The gold rush transformed the frontier into a prosperous and dynamic society that was proclaimed the Colony of British Columbia in 1858.  Hordes of gold seekers from California, Australia, and other parts of the Pacific community joined with British and Canadian migrants to work the gold deposits.

By 1865, the gold days were over, and most of the miners had departed with nearly $25 million in gold dust.  But the rush had attracted an army of ranchers, farmers, hotel operators, storekeepers, and civil servants who, although diminished in numbers, formed a nucleus for an ongoing, settled society.  Also left behind was a fairly well-established transportation and communications network.  In 1866, Vancouver Island crown colony united with British Columbia to form a single colony, the Colony of British Columbia, which in 1871 entered the Dominion of Canada as the sixth province, with Victoria, Vancouver Island’s chief city, as the provincial capital.

Depiction of signing the proclamation making British Columbia an official province of Canada, 1871.

The arrival of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway to Port Moody, just east of Vancouver, in 1885, opened a new era.  Permanent railroad and lumbering settlements sprang up along the railroad route. The extension of the line into Vancouver was completed in 1887, the year after the city was incorporated.  The establishment of a steamship line connecting it with East Asia, in 1891, ensured Vancouver’s future as a port.

Early 20^th Century.  With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, British Columbia experienced its first economic boom since the heady days of the gold rush.  The province’s raw resources, particularly lumber, were able to compete in foreign markets.  Forest tracts were allotted to eager American, British, German, and Canadian investors by a poorly funded provincial government eager to make an impressive fiscal showing and ensure its perpetual reelection.  A similar situation prevailed in the mining industry, with the initial prizes going to British investors.  Simultaneous with the opening up of these resource industries, the province was rapidly settled.  As the economy was revitalized, the population increased and Vancouver emerged as the leading city.

Canada entered World War I in 1914 as part of the British Empire, when Great Britain declared war on Germany.  Along with other nations in the Empire, such as Australia and India, tens of thousands of Canadians joined the army in the first few months of the war.

Following World War I, British Columbia found its newly acquired markets swept away by the economic depression of the 1930s.  Recovery was delayed until the economy was stimulated once again, by war, with Canada entering World War II in 1939.  This time, military demands were extensive enough to ensure the continued prosperity of the province’s industry, even beyond the end of World War II in 1945.

After World War II.  The wartime growth of British Columbia continued throughout the second half of the 20^th century and into the 21^st.  The province’s population more than tripled in size to 5.2 million people in 2021, and Vancouver emerged as a world-class metropolis and major port on the Pacific Rim.

Today, British Columbia’s economy is primarily based on forestry, mining, cinematography and filmmaking, tourism, real estate, construction, and wholesale and retail business.  Its main exports include lumber and timber, pulp and paper products, copper, coal, and natural gas.  Because of Vancouver, British Columbia is a center of maritime trade, and although less than 5% of the province’s territory is arable land, significant agriculture exists in the southern British Columbia.

Vancouver

The city of Vancouver lies on a peninsula in the southwest corner of British Columbia’s mainland, just north of the mouth of the Fraser River.  The surrounding waterways provide a sheltered deep-sea port and convenient access to the Pacific Ocean, while the Fraser River provides easy access to the interior.

Modern map of the Vancouver metropolitan area with historic areas identified.

 

European Settlement.  José Maria Narváez, a Spanish explorer, was the first European to see the site of what is now Vancouver in 1791.  A year later, English sailor Captain George Vancouver and Spaniards Dionisio Alcalá-Galiano and Cayetano Valdés were also in the area.  Captain Vancouver circumnavigated Vancouver Island (later named for him) and charted the mainland’s intricate coastline.

During these initial explorations, both the Spanish and the English made contact with Indigenous populations, but the area was only peripheral in the maritime fur trade.

In 1827, the first permanent European settlement in the region was made at Fort Langley, the home of a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post, located just east of present-day Vancouver, along the Fraser River.

In 1858, the first city in the area, New Westminster, was founded (in the southeastern part of the present Vancouver metropolitan area; see map above).  Also in 1858, British Columbia was proclaimed as a colony of Great Britain, with New Westminster as the first capital city.

19^th Century.  Vancouver was founded when the Canadian Pacific Railway announced that the company would extend its transcontinental railway line 12 miles westward from the then current western terminus, Port Moody (see map above) in order to take advantage of a better harbor and terminal site.  The provincial government and private owners donated land for the new site.  On 6 April 1886, the provincial legislature incorporated the city of Vancouver, named in honor of the English explorer, and in 1887, the railway reached Vancouver.

The continent-wide depression of the mid-1890s temporarily checked growth, but during the 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush, excitement and prosperity returned to Vancouver.  By the turn of the century, it had displaced Victoria, the provincial capital, as the leading commercial center on Canada's west coast.

Early 20^th Century.  A pre-World War I economic boom expanded markets for such British Columbia products as fish, minerals and lumber.  But, the beginning of a worldwide economic depression in 1913, and the First World War in 1914, severely reduced trade, slowed railway development, and, coupled with declining resources, ended much of the mining boom in southern British Columbia.

After 1918, post-World War I dislocation, strikes, and sporadic unemployment fed the flames of anti-Asian feeling, which had always been strong in Vancouver.  Politicians, union leaders, and the local press eagerly laid the blame for lack of prosperity on Asian workers.  Exclusionist legislation was passed in 1923 and remained in force until the late 1940s, when Asians were enfranchised.

Note:  Owing in large part to the importation of large numbers of Chinese laborers to work the gold rushes and to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, Vancouver had always had a prominent Chinese community, including a Chinatown, which, from its earliest days, served as a residential, social and commercial hub.  Chinatown developed in the face of restrictions preventing Chinese people from buying property outside the area until the 1930s.  Today, Chinatown exists mainly as a social and commercial district as the descendants of the pioneer Chinese tend to live throughout the city, while newer immigrants have moved primarily to the suburban city of Richmond.

During the 1920s, growth resumed, and Vancouver replaced Winnipeg as the leading city in western Canada.  The export grain trade held up remarkably well during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the city suffered extensive unemployment.

The outbreak of the Second World War and the development of war industries, particularly shipbuilding, ended unemployment, but sharply reduced the grain trade.  The general population grew as wartime industries, especially shipbuilding, drew people to the city.  Trade grew again, once shipping became available after the war, especially after Canada began selling large quantities of wheat to China in 1961.

Mid-20^th Century to Present.  Following World War II, Vancouver expanded its role as the head office center for such provincial corporations as: British Columbia Forest Products, Cominco (since 2001, Teck Cominco), and MacMillan Bloedel; a variety of smaller firms; the major provincial labor unions; and the regional offices for national enterprises such as the chartered banks.

In 1967, as part of a controversial project of urban renewal, the city of Vancouver began the levelling of selected long-standing African Canadian and Chinese neighborhoods, whose residents were unable to live elsewhere in the city due to housing discrimination.

Vancouver was in the spotlight when it hosted Expo 86, an international exposition devoted to transportation.  The Expo was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and had over 20 million visitors.  It is credited with having been a catalyst for change.  Several luxury hotels, Canada Place (home of the Vancouver Convention Center, the Pan Pacific Vancouver Hotel, Vancouver's World Trade Center, and the virtual flight ride FlyOver Canada), and the geodesic dome (now housing the Science World Museum), are among its legacies.

Despite declines in the forest industry and the disappearance of major firms such as MacMillan Bloedel and British Columbia Forest Products, the city remains a regional business and financial center.

Two notable events for Vancouver and the province were Expo 86 in 1986, a world’s fair to commemorate the city’s centennial, and the city’s selection as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

In 2014, Vancouver city council voted unanimously to acknowledge that the city was located on unceded indigenous lands.  The decision called for greater involvement of indigenous representatives in developing policies and practices, which respect indigenous traditions, although it had no legal impact on treaty negotiations conducted with the provincial and federal governments.

Today, Vancouver is the most populated city in the province of British Columbia.  It is also Canada’s third most populated city after Toronto and Montreal, with a metropolitan population over 2.6 million people.  Vancouver is Canada’s main port city and major economic center, as well as the political, cultural, tourism, and transportation center of western Canada.  

While forestry remains its largest industry, Vancouver is well known as an urban center surrounded by nature, making tourism its second-largest industry.  Major film production studios in Vancouver and nearby Burnaby have turned Greater Vancouver and nearby areas into one of the largest film production centers in North America.  The city has been rated as one of the world’s most livable cities for many years.

 

Aerial view of Vancouver today, looking northwest.

Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Rocky Mountaineer

Canadian Pacific Railroad.  The Canadian Pacific Railway company was incorporated in 1881 to construct a railway westward across Canada to British Columbia, a promise made to the province upon its entry into the Dominion of Canada in 1871.  The main line was built between Montreal, Quebec and Port Moody, British Columbia between 1881 and 1885, connecting, with existing lines in Montreal, and becoming Canada's first transcontinental railway.

Canadian Pacific Railway transcontinental railroad route.

 

The transcontinental railway played an important role in the development of Canada, by facilitating communication and transportation across the country.  As was mentioned earlier, the railway was extended westward from Port Moody to the new town of Vancouver in 1867.

The difficulty in obtaining an adequate work force in British Columbia led to the controversial employment of thousands of Chinese workers.  Upward of 15,000 Chinese laborers helped to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.  Working in harsh conditions for little pay, these workers suffered greatly and historians estimate that at least 600 died working on the railway.  The employment of Chinese workers caused controversy, particularly in British Columbia, where politicians worried about the potential economic and cultural impact of these workers.

Rocky Mountaineer.  The Rocky Mountaineer Canadian rail-tour company began in 1988 as Canadian Crown corporation, VIA Rail Canada, providing once-weekly daytime service between Vancouver and both Calgary and Jasper, called the “Canadian Rockies by Daylight.”  To maximize scenic views, this service operated only during the day, with an overnight stop in Kamloops.

After the end of VIA Rail Canada service on the route in 1990, the route's branding was sold to Vancouver businessman Peter R.B. Armstrong.  

The Rocky Mountaineer departed on its inaugural trip in 1990, providing daytime service from Vancouver to Jasper.  In 1995, the company launched its GoldLeaf Service, featuring bi-level rail cars, with dome windows and panoramic views on the upper level, and large windows in the lower-level dining area. 

Today you can also travel by Rocky Mountaineer train from Vancouver to Whistler and Quesnel, British Columbia; and from Denver, Colorado to Moab, Utah in the United States.

Today, Rocky Mountaineer is the largest privately owned luxury tourist train company in the world and has welcomed more than 2 million guests onboard.

 

The Rocky Mountaineer in the Canadian Rockies with Mount Robson in background.

Canadian Rockies National Parks

The parks of the Canadian Rockies exhibit significant and on-going glacial processes along the continental divide on highly faulted, folded, and uplifted sedimentary rocks.  There are four national parks in the Canadian Rockies - Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay.  See the map below.

The four national parks of the Canadian Rockies.

 

Jasper National Park.  It is the largest national park within the Canadian Rockies, spanning 4,200 square miles.  The park contains the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield, springs, lakes, waterfalls, and mountains.  Jasper was named after Jasper Hawes, who operated a trading post in the region for the North West Company.  The park was established in 1907, as Jasper Forest Park, and was granted national park status in 1930.

Banff National Park.  Canada's oldest national park; established in 1885.  Banff encompasses 2,564 square miles of mountainous terrain, with many glaciers and ice fields, dense coniferous forest, and alpine landscapes.  The Icefields Parkway extends from Lake Louise, connecting to Jasper National Park in the north.

Aerial view of Lake Louise with the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in the foreground.

Yoho National Park.  Located along the western slope of the Continental Divide.  The word Yoho is a Cree expression of amazement or awe, and it is an apt description for the park's spectacular landscape of massive ice fields and mountain peaks, which rank among the highest in the Canadian Rockies.  Yoho covers 507 square miles, the smallest of the region's four contiguous national parks.  Yoho National Park was created on October 10, 1886.

Kootenay National Park.  Consists of 543 square miles of the Canadian Rockies, including parts of the Kootenay and Park mountain ranges, the Kootenay River, and the entirety of the Vermilion River. The park was created in 1920 and initially called "Kootenay Dominion Park. 

Alberta

Indigenous Peoples.  Like British Columbia, the area now known as Alberta has been inhabited by various indigenous groups for at least 10,000 years.  Southerly tribes eventually adapted to semi-nomadic bison hunting, originally without the aid of horses, but later with horses that Europeans introduced.  More northerly tribes hunted and trapped smaller game, and fished.

Later, the mixture of these native peoples with French fur traders created a new cultural group of mixed ancestry, who mostly established themselves to the east of Alberta, but after being displaced by white settlement, many migrated to Alberta.

European Explorers and Early Settlement.  European explorers first appeared in Alberta in the 1750s as the fur trade expanded across western North America.  Two rivals, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, began building trading posts in the last quarter of the 18^th century along the major northern rivers.  From 1821, when the companies merged, until 1870, when (future) Alberta was transferred to the Dominion of Canada as a part of the Northwest Territories, the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled and governed the area, which was populated by indigenous groups; people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry; and a few European fur traders, missionaries, and settlers.  After 1870, settlement in southern Alberta began, based on a ranching economy. 

Treaties and Law Enforcement.  The indigenous peoples were decimated by European diseases and the disappearance of the bison, their main source of livelihood.  The signing of treaties relegated the remaining indigenous people to reservations, but not before the abuses of unscrupulous traders had hastened the creation of the North-West Mounted Police (now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police).  In 1874, the Mounties established Fort Macleod, about 110 miles south of present-day Calgary, and became the instrument of Canadian law enforcement in Alberta.

Emerging Economy.  The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 (which provided low-cost homesteads), the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (which reached Calgary in 1883), and vigorous promotional campaigns brought an influx of settlers from eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe.  By 1901, Alberta’s population had reached 73,000, and by 1911 it had ballooned to 374,000.  The development of earlier-maturing and more disease-resistant varieties of wheat made crop farming less risky and, in northern areas, newly feasible.  Subsequently, a wheat-based economy expanded throughout most of the arable parts of the province.

Government and Economic Growth.  A government of elected representatives developed gradually from 1875, when the Northwest Territories Act went into effect, until 1897, when a fully responsible legislative assembly was elected.  Made a district of the Northwest Territories in 1882, Alberta was enlarged to its present boundaries in 1905, when it was made the eighth province of Canada.  Crown lands and natural resources remained under federal control until 1930. 

 

Crowds in Edmonton celebrate Alberta becoming an official province of Canada, 1905.

Edmonton, a distribution center that became Alberta’s capital, grew rapidly, as did other urban centers.  Calgary boomed with the discovery of oil at Turner Valley (37 miles southwest of Calgary) in 1914.  In southern Alberta, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, the latter a coal-mining area since the 1870s, developed into important distribution centers.  Railways spread over most of the province, increasing agricultural development and providing a ready market for Alberta’s vast coal deposits.

World War I and Aftermath.  During World War I, the growth of the population and the economy slowed.  During the 1920s, the economy improved and population again increased, but years of depression and drought in the 1930s had a devastating effect. 

Economic Recovery.  The World War II construction of the Alaska Highway from Fairbanks, Alaska to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, there connecting to existing highways southward, provided a land-based connection to move goods and people between Alaska and the continental United States, and helped to revive Alberta’s economy.  Greater growth came with postwar discoveries of oil and natural gas.

The boom in the oil and gas industry rippled throughout the economy in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, fueling growth in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and making Alberta one of the choice destinations for migrating Canadians.  In the process, the formerly agrarian province has become an increasingly urban and industrial one, with nearly two-thirds of its population found in its two metropolitan centers, Edmonton and Calgary.  Alberta’s population in 2021 was 5.5 million people.  Alberta remains one of the world’s leading oil-producing regions.

Alberta is also renowned for its natural beauty, richness in fossils, and for housing important nature reserves.

Calgary

The city of Calgary is in southern Alberta, about 130 miles north of the American border at the meeting point of the Canadian Rockies foothills and western prairies.  Calgary's elevation is approximately 3,440 feet above sea level downtown.  The city proper covers a land area of 278 square miles, and as such, exceeds the land areas of both Toronto and New York City.

Modern map of Calgary, Alberta.

  

There are two major rivers that run through the city.  The Bow River is the largest and flows from the west to the south.  The Elbow River flows northwards from the south until it converges with the Bow River near downtown.  Since the climate of the region is generally dry, dense vegetation occurs naturally only in the river valleys, and on some north-facing slopes.

European Settlement.  The westward movement of the fur trade brought the first Europeans to the area in the late 18^th century.  In 1787, cartographer David Thompson spent the winter encamped along the Bow River.  He was the first recorded European to visit the area.  Irish immigrant John Glenn was the first documented European settler in the Calgary Area, in 1873.

In the late 1860s, bison hunters from the United States appeared in southern Alberta in increasing numbers, joined by illicit-whisky traders who erected a network of fortified posts from which they sold alcohol to the local indigenous peoples in return for bison robes.  The whisky traders' activities in part led to the formation of the North-West Mounted Police by the federal government in 1873 to protect the western plains from U.S. whiskey traders.  The North-West Mounted Police established a post at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers in 1875, and named it Fort Calgary in 1876. (Alberta’s Calgary was named after Calgary on the Isle of Mull, Scotland.)

The transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway reached Fort Calgary in 1883, and the company subsequently laid out its Calgary townsite west of the Elbow River and south of the Bow River.  The railway company built a rail station, and Calgary began to grow into an important commercial and agricultural center.

Calgary was incorporated in 1884, receiving city status in 1894, the first city in what was then the Northwest Territories.

Development.  Calgary's economic growth was closely associated with the development of the ranching industry, and with the city's focal position as the chief transportation center in Alberta, which had become a province of Canada in 1905.  Before 1906, the open-range cattle industry was the dominant economic activity, and Calgary experienced its influence commercially, industrially, and socially.  The beef cattle industry, especially following the crippling winter of 1906-07, contributed a vital element to Calgary's urban development.

The opening of southern Alberta to cash crop farming in the early 1900s brought rapid growth in Calgary, which increased its population by more than 1,000 per cent from 1901 to 1911.  Rails stretching in all directions solidified the city's position as the prime distributing center for south-central and southern Alberta.  After 1912, Calgary's development slowed along with that of rural Alberta, especially after the end of the immigration boom, and the onset of the First World War.

A third and crucial element in Calgary's economic development was the emergence of the oil and natural gas industries.  Beginning with the first strike in 1914 at Turner Valley, a few miles southwest of Calgary, local entrepreneurs continually promoted Calgary's future as a major oil center.  Alberta's first oil refinery opened in Calgary in 1923.  Subsequent important discoveries at Turner Valley in 1924 and 1936, established Calgary's pre-eminence in Canada's oil and natural gas industries.  The lid was lifted off western Canada's vast oil reserves in 1947 with the major discovery at Leduc (20 miles south of the provincial capital of Edmonton); Calgary reaped the rewards.

The subsequent phenomenal growth of the city from a regional center in southern Alberta to a metropolis of international status is a direct offshoot of its diversifying economy and its increasingly cosmopolitan population base.  During these boom years, skyscrapers were constructed at a pace seen by few cities anywhere.  The relatively low-rise downtown quickly became dense with tall buildings, a trend that continues to this day.

This transition culminated in February of 1988, when the city hosted the XV Olympic Winter Games.  The success of these games essentially put the city on the world stage.

Another aspect of Calgary's development is a long-standing and intense rivalry with Edmonton, the capital of Alberta.  The two cities have competed keenly at every level, and have produced one of Canada's most identifiable urban rivalries, which is expressed in professional sports, politics and culture.

Calgary was the fastest-growing city in Canada between 2006 and 2011, with Edmonton a close second.  Its growth is due in large part to the continued prominence of the oil and gas sector, as well as an increasingly diversified economic base.

Since the late 1990s, the economy in Calgary has been booming, and the region is the fastest growing in Canada.  While the oil and gas industry comprise most of the economy, the city has invested a great deal into other areas.  Tourism is perhaps one of the fastest growing industries in the city.  Many people now visit the city on an annual basis for its many festivals and attractions, as well as the Calgary Stampede.  The nearby mountain resort towns of Banff, Lake Louise, and Canmore are also becoming increasingly popular with tourists, and are bringing people into Calgary as a result.  Other modern industries include light manufacturing, high-tech, film, transportation, and services.

The population of Calgary in 2021 was 1.4 million people.

 

Calgary today, looking west towards the Canadian Rockies.

Conclusion

Well, that’s probably enough for now; Pat and I are excited about our coming tour to southwestern Canada.