Adventurous women had an important role in exploring the wilds of the Canadian Rockies
by Rob Alexander
The West has a wonderfully stereotypical tradition of robust men ranging across the Canadian wilderness, risking life and limb to further their careers or the business of the fur trade. These explorers and fur traders were brave to a fault and capable of momentous physical feats; they ruled the West with iron fists. After all, they had to be larger than life, as the West was a dangerous land filled with wild animals, starvation, loneliness and a high chance of death at the hands of unruly Indians.
Hardly a place for a lady.
It's a great, romantic stereotype, still perpetuated in movies and books, but it is an awfully stupid one. Some of the early explorers and fur traders had some of these traits, but like the legend of the Mounties, it does get overblown.
The reality is, Native people in the West often welcomed these men, fed them, gave them advice and supplied them with guides - without this assistance many of these powerful men would have likely died of starvation, lost in some corner of the West's vast wilderness.
One of the worst stereotypes of all, aside from the brutal stereotyping of Native people that stills happens today, is that the early West was a man's world.
Tell that to Charlotte Small, Mary Schäffer or any of the female members of the McDougall family and they would probably refute that in their own way, by demonstrating their strength and abilities as they did time and time again.
These women, and many others like them, shucked the usual stereotypes and proved, quite readily, that the West was a woman's world, as well.
Charlotte Small
Charlotte Small exemplified the abilities of women in the early West.
Charlotte, a Métis of mixed Scottish and Native (possibly Cree) blood, accompanied her husband, explorer David Thompson, on many of his journeys in the early 1800s, often with three or four children in tow.
Charlotte married David, a then 29-year-old employee of the North West Company, on June 10, 1799 at her Île-ā-la-Crosse home in northern Saskatchewan when she was 14 years old. The couple had 13 children, five of whom were born in the West. The other eight were born in eastern Canada after 1812.
Victor Hopwood, a Thompson biographer, described Charlotte as a "slight, active and wiry" woman all of five feet tall with straight, black hair, black eyes and "almost copper coloured skin." She was a gentle person, known for her kindness and reserved nature.
Hidden behind that reserved nature was a strength that even Thompson, a man known for traveling 55,000 miles during his lifetime while exploring the Canadian wilderness, drew inspiration from. Many of those miles were in the Rocky Mountains.
"She was a source of strength to her husband and family for nearly 60 years," Hopwood wrote in 1971.
How could she not be anything but a source of strength for Thompson? This "slight, active and wiry" woman could match Thompson step-for-step while caring for children, and more than likely, the camp duties.
During these travels, Thompson relied on Charlotte to communicate with the many Native people they met as Charlotte could speak Cree and English fluently. Most of the various tribes in the West spoke Cree, and knowing that language was beneficial for anyone living and working in the West.
Thompson had also taught her how to read and write English.
After nearly 60 years of marriage, Charlotte and her husband died within a few months of one another. They are buried side-by-side in a cemetery in Montreal's Mont Royal.
The McDougalls
The McDougall family, the first white family to settle in Alberta, spent their first winter in the West, 1863-64, in a bison-hide tent.
Winters in the mid-1800s were known for their ferocity and length, and for the six women in the McDougall clan, ranging in ages from infants and up, it was likely an inauspicious start to their new life.
The McDougalls, a Methodist missionary family led by the Rev. George McDougall and his wife Elizabeth Chantler, were not strangers to hardship, as they lived and worked on a farm in Upper Canada before coming west.
Their lives were anything but normal, compared to their eastern Canada roots. In her memoirs, Eliza McDougall, one of Elizabeth's daughters, described one of their early Christmas celebrations in the West in a piece titled 'An Alberta Christmas, 1865'. Eliza wrote, "Our Christmas would have seemed strange to many people. No Christmas tree, for there was nothing to put on it; no Christmas gifts, for there were none to buy, and nothing to make them of. Even the Christmas turkey was missing. Indeed it was difficult to get up a dinner one thousand miles away the nearest town, no butcher, no baker... a bag of flour cost thirty dollars and we only had two for that year. White flour, indeed, was a luxury, kept for sickness, holidays, or Sundays, barley flour being used in its stead. Buffalo meat, turnips, potatoes, plum pudding and barley cake a novel Christmas dinner!" (Glenbow Archives, M-728).
Improvisation and self-sufficiency became a common theme for the McDougall women as two of the brothers, John and David, along with their father, spent much of their time away from the mission, hunting or Christianizing the Native people of the West.
Elizabeth ran the household and the mission while her husband, George, and sons were gone, often for months on end.
She led Sunday services with her oldest daughter, Georgina, translating the sermons into Cree for the Native parishioners. Harvesting, planting and the rest of the farm duties were also up to her and the children. Curious Blackfoot were also known to enter the house without invitation or stand at the windows staring in. While no one was hurt during these encounters, it was initially unsettling enough to cause the McDougall women to barricade the doors and take up guns and axes for protection.
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The family of Reverend John McDougall, a Methodist missionary, was the first white family to settle in Alberta. They lived near Canmore, in Morley. Pictured in this 1900 photo are: L-R back row: Morley McDougall; Elizabeth McDougall, wife of Reverend John McDougall; George McDougall, the first white child born in Alberta. L-R middle row: David McDougall; Lillian McDougall; Reverend John McDougall; John McDougall. L-R front row: Douglas McDougall.
Much later, once they came to accept and understand them, all of the McDougalls would profess a great love and respect for Native people.
In 1870, the smallpox epidemic that swept through the West, practically wiping out the people and the traditions of the western tribes, also tore the McDougall family apart. Elizabeth was forced to watch as two of her daughters, Georgina and Flora, and her adopted daughter, Anna, died within two weeks of one another. Most members of the McDougall family had been struck by the disease, but unlike Natives, people of European descent had some immunity to smallpox.
The McDougalls left a lasting legacy that is well recognized, but that legacy is not just based on the exploits of the male members of the family. It also recognizes the role Elizabeth and her daughters, and later daughter-in-law, played in Alberta's early history.
Lady Susan Agnes Macdonald
In 1886, Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, and his wife, Lady Susan Agnes Macdonald, crossed the nation by rail.
The Canadian Pacific Railway had just opened its transcontinental rail line for business and the Macdonalds were traveling in luxury in one of the CPR's top coaches, the Jamaica, from Ottawa to Vancouver.
But unlike her husband, Lady Macdonald was not content to ride in luxury through the Rocky Mountains. Instead, once they reached Laggan station, now Lake Louise, Lady Macdonald announced that she intended to ride on the cowcatcher mounted on the front of the locomotive.
Her husband promptly called her idea "ridiculous", and retired to the luxury of the coach to watch the mountains pass by.
As the train puffed away from the Laggan station, Lady Macdonald sat on a candlebox in abject pleasure, surrounded by the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, while telling the superintendent of the CPR who sat next to her, as was his duty, that "This is lovely, quite lovely! I shall travel on this cowcatcher from summit to sea!"
Lady Macdonald, however, happened to choose the most dangerous section of the Rocky Mountains to ride at the front of the train. The trip from Laggan to Field dropped a remarkable 330 m (1,082 ft) in six kilometres (3.8 mi.) - a 4.5 per cent grade in places - and the site of a number of derailments. Once the Spiral Tunnels were built in 1908, the grade dropped to an average of 2.2 per cent.
Lady Macdonald was true to her word. Until the train reached the Pacific, she spent a part of every day riding on the cowcatcher.
Lake Agnes, a stunning mountain lake located in a narrow valley high above Lake Louise was named in her honour, as was Mount Lady Macdonald on the north side of the Bow Valley at Canmore.
Mary Schäffer Warren
In a time when it was improper for a lady to be gallivanting about the countryside, Mary Schäffer Warren, born into a wealthy Quaker family in Pennsylvania, took to gallivanting with a vengeance.
Mary, a writer, photographer and artist, first arrived in the Canadian Rockies in 1889 with a group from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. She met her future husband, Dr. Charles Schäffer during that trip at the Canadian Pacific Railway's Glacier House located in the Selkirk Mountains. The couple returned to the Rockies every year to collect plants for a book Dr. Schäffer was writing on the botany of the mountains. Dr. Schäffer died in 1903, but after 14 years of exploring the Rocky Mountains, Mary was not about to stop coming. She finished the book, Alpine Flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and had it published in 1905.
In 1904, while still working on the book, Mary and a friend hired two Banff-based outfitters who guided the two women into the Little Yoho Valley, northeast of the Kicking Horse River in Yoho National Park. That trip laid the groundwork for what would become more and more adventuresome expeditions, which finally culminated in a four-month long pack trip in 1907 into what is now Jasper National Park.
On that expedition, Mary, along with her friend Mollie Adams and their two guides, sought the legendary Beaver Lake - a lake unknown to non-natives.
This expedition gave Mary, in her 40s at the time, the distinction of being the first non-native woman to travel into the Jasper region, and to find Maligne Lake. In 1911, Mary wrote a book of her travels titled Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies.
Mary finally settled in Banff in 1912 and married Billy Warren, one of her guides from her famed Maligne Lake trip.
Rob Alexander has spent most of his life in Canmore, and is currently working on a book on the history of Exshaw, the small community with an intriguing story just 15 minutes east of Canmore.
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