Early explorers to the Bow Valley wove a common thread of opening up the West over a century
by Rob Alexander
"At length the Rocky Mountains came in sight like shining white clouds in the horizon. But we doubted what our guide said; but as we proceeded, they rose in height their immense masses of snow appeared above the clouds, and formed an impassable barrier, even to the Eagle."
- David Thompson, 1800
Unlike the hundreds of thousands of people who flock to Alberta every year to take in the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the early explorers had a very different view of these peaks.
To say they were not awed by what they saw would be a disservice, but to these explorers the mountains represented something very different. The great gray wall that rose to imposing heights from the foothills of the eastern slopes was a barrier to trade, travel, science, religion and progress.
But they all knew that hidden somewhere in that barrier were cracks, mountain passes, that would lead them over the spine of North America.
Exploration of the Atlantic Ocean led to the so-called discovery of Canada by John Cabot, who was followed by many more. Cabot was not the first to reach Canada, however. The Vikings settled on Newfoundland, which they called 'Vineland' shortly before AD 1000. This initial trickle grew into a flood over the centuries as more and more Europeans reached Canada to exploit its natural resources.
At the pinnacle of those resources was fur: wolf, coyote, bear, muskrat, bison and of course the ubiquitous animal of the fur trade, the beaver. As the fur trade grew, the Hudson's Bay Company and its archenemy the North West Company began to follow Canada's great rivers, north and west, as both companies sought to broaden their range and subsequently, their profits.
Father Pierre-Jean De Smet became the first priest to travel through the Spray Valley near present-day Canmore, and the first priest to cross the Great Divide north of the 49th parallel, when he visited the area in 1845.
The Holy Grail then was a more southern route, with the Bow Valley as a gathering point for practically every expedition that came west. While the majority of the explorers were associated with the fur trade, others came west in the name of science or the military, while some arrived in the name of God, intent on bringing Christianity to the native people of the Plains.
Each explorer had a reason for making the arduous journey to the Rocky Mountains, usually quite different from one another, but the common thread is how their collective knowledge eventually opened the West, forever changing it and the people who called this land home.
Anthony Henday
The Rocky Mountains was solely the domain of the people of Canada's First Nations until 1754, when Anthony Henday, a trader with the Hudson's Bay Company, became the first European to see the eastern slopes of the mountains.
Henday was not the typical "Bay Man" or explorer, for that matter, as he was a convicted criminal, a smuggler, exiled from his home on the Isle of Wight. Even with his nefarious background, he proved himself capable and willing to undertake the arduous journey offered to him by the HBC: to travel from York Factory on the shore of Hudson's Bay to what is now Alberta; a journey of four months by canoe and foot.
In preparation for this journey, he learned rudimentary cartographic skills, but was later derided for his coarse maps.
Henday travelled with a party of Cree who served as his guides and for protection to find the tribes loosely known as the "Archiethinue" - essentially any tribe, such as the Blackfoot, Peigan, Blood, Sarcee, Stoney and Kootenai, unknown to the HBC. His goal was to convince these people to journey to the Hudson's Bay to trade.
But his task became something of a fool's errand. Once Henday finally made contact with the Blackfoot nation near modern-day Red Deer, Alberta, the Blackfoot chief refused to take his people that great distance to trade. He argued they would run out of food and starve along the way.
Henday spent the winter with the Blackfoot and left with no trade prospects in the spring of 1755. He did, however, learn much about the Plains tribes and the network of trading posts the French had built up in central Canada to compete against the HBC. However, the HBC all but ignored what he had learned. Henday eventually quit the company in disgust.
David Thompson
David Thompson, an explorer, mapmaker and surveyor, is easily one of the greatest Canadians to have lived. But in true Canadian fashion, his accomplishments are seldom recognized.
In 1800, Thompson sat on a mountain, known today as Doorjamb Mountain, near the mouth of the Bow Valley and looked west over the Canadian Rockies. In his journal, he described what he saw of the prairies and the foothills to the east as "vast and unbounded." Looking west he wrote, "hills and rocks rose to our view covered with snow, here rising, there subsiding, but their tops nearly of an equal height everywhere. Never before did I behold so just, so perfect a resemblance to the waves of the ocean in the wintery (sic) storm."
Those mark the first words written about the Bow Valley, which in later years would swell to a veritable torrent, documenting the Bow Valley for all to read and enjoy.
Thompson was a 14-year-old boy when he arrived, in 1783, on the rocky shores of Frobisher Bay as an apprentice to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).
As an adult, he spent 28 years travelling over 128,800 kilometres (80,000 miles) of uncharted interior wilderness, exploring, surveying and finally mapping much of continental North America, an area then generally referred to as Rupert's Land.
A key facet of Thompson's remarkable character was his perception of the aboriginal cultures of Canada. He learned their languages and cultures and sought to integrate himself into their ways, which earned him much respect. He was known to the First Nations as "Koo-koo-sint", roughly translated as "You that Look at the Stars." This name reflected his constant use of his brass sextant. His observations, record keeping and calculations conferred upon him the reputation of having special, even mystical, powers. His journals, in 77 volumes, also reflect the reciprocal understanding and admiration he had for the aboriginal people.
When Thompson arrived in the Bow Valley region in 1800 his goal was to spend the winter with a group of Peigan along the Bow River near Calgary. He came into the Bow Valley as a side trip. He later returned to the Rocky Mountains in 1807 and discovered the more northern Howse Pass, in the north end of Banff National Park. That year he crossed the Rockies and worked his way to the Pacific Ocean.
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Captain John Palliser and Sir James Hector explored the Canadian Rockies, including the Bow Valley region in the 1850s, detailing some of the first written records of plant life in the Canadian Rockies.
Thompson's crowning achievement, his great map of the western half of North America, completed in 1814 and based on his extensive surveying records, hangs in the Provincial Archives of Ontario. His cartography skills were so accurate that his maps were used as a basis for subsequent maps for at least 100 years.
Rev. Robert T. Rundle The Rev. Robert T. Rundle, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, was a man famous for his wanderlust. The Wesleyan ministers were known for their tendency to strike off into the wilderness, but Rundle came to personify that trait, which was an ideal trait for a man intent on converting the native people of the Plains to Christianity.
Rundle became proficient in Cree, a language a number of different tribes spoke, shortly after his arrival in the West. Rundle worked his way south into the Rocky Mountains and the Bow Valley region on at least two different occasions in the 1840s. In this region Rundle encountered the Stoney First Nation whose notion of religion readily fit with what Rundle preached.
In 1847, Rundle preached to the Stoneys in the shadow of Cascade Mountain near the shores of Lake Minnewanka. Another nearby mountain, Mount Rundle - Banff's most famous mountain - bears his name.
After an initial hesitancy about meeting native people, Rundle's feelings changed dramatically as he began to spend time with the Stoney, Cree, Sarcee and Blackfoot, which gave him an unusual view of native people for the time: one built on acceptance. In an 1840 journal entry, he wrote, "What a contrast between my feelings now and on my first undertaking the journey to this wilderness. Then the thought of an Indian was almost accompanied with terror and dread but now my chief delight is to be with them."
The Stoneys took to Methodism so strongly that a decade later when another explorer, Capt. John Palliser, met Stoneys for the first time, he was surprised to hear hymns and prayers from the Gospels that Rundle had taught these people.
Rundle must have had a strong affect on the people of the Plains, for one native is quoted as saying, "Poor he came to us, and poor he went away, leaving us rich."
Father Pierre Jean de Smet
The Jesuit priest, Father Pierre Jean de Smet, a Belgium, was not the typical man of the frontier - he entered the Canadian west in the mid-1840s noticeably overweight; an unusual characteristic for an explorer about to make a rugged trek through the Rocky Mountains.
Regardless of his physical shape, de Smet must have been a strong or at least a determined man, for in 1845, with the help of his Kootenay guides, he used the Spray Valley and White Man Pass to cross the Rocky Mountains. De Smet became the first priest to travel through the Spray Valley and the first priest to cross the Great Divide north of the 49th parallel. He also may have been the first European to see the spire-like Mount Assiniboine, nestled in the Rockies west of the Spray Valley. Some attribute the name 'White Man Pass' to de Smet, as well.
Compared to Rundle, de Smet spent little time in the Canadian Rockies as he intended to preach to the native people of the West Coast. But even his short stint in the Bow Valley left a lasting legacy. De Smet recorded what became the first observations of details on the local flora and fauna, landscape and the Northern Lights. He also noticed the vast coal seams in the exposed rock faces and was the first to make note of the mining potential in the Canmore area. Canmore became a coal-mining town in 1883.
De Smet also inadvertently discovered the secret to losing weight: his endless wanders about the West helped him drop 30 pounds.
The Palliser Expedition
Capt. John Palliser, the son of a wealthy Irish landowner, was born for adventure. He loved nothing more than sleeping under the stars with a thin blanket and the hard ground under him.
Palliser first experienced the wilds of North America in 1847 when he travelled through parts of the U.S. hunting bison for sport. Years later Palliser yearned to return to the life of adventure that he loved so much, and he cooked up a scheme to convince the Royal Geographic Society of England to support him. Palliser's father had fallen on hard times and could not afford to send his adventuresome son on another trip to the wilds of North America, so he attempted to convince the Geographic Society of England to support his dreams. He sold the society, in part, on a rumour of a pass through the Rockies he had learned about from James Sinclair, another man driven by adventure. The society turned Palliser's idea into a scientific expedition meant to gauge the effectiveness of land in central Canada for farming and to find a route for a wagon road across Canada and through the mountains. Part of Palliser's goal was to find a southern route for the road, including a more southern pass, as close to the border with the U.S. as possible to help Great Britain strengthen its claim to its Canadian territories.
The Palliser Expedition, including four men of science, arrived in New York City in 1857. They then proceeded into Canada where they spent the winter. They would not reach the Rocky Mountains until August 1858, at which point the party split into two, with Palliser going up the Kananaskis Valley to explore that region for his fabled pass.
Dr. James Hector and Eugene Bourgeau, meanwhile, carried on up the Bow Valley. Bourgeau stayed in the area around what is now Canmore, creating the first detailed record of plant life in the Canadian Rockies, while Hector explored further into what is now Kootenay and Yoho National Parks. The Kicking Horse River in Yoho was named for an experience Hector had when his horse kicked and stunned him. Thinking he was dead, Hector's guides scraped a shallow grave in the rocky soil and prepared to bury him. Hector came to and while he could not move, managed to alert the two men that he was alive by blinking his eyelids.
Palliser did find his pass, or at least one of three possible passes in the region. He left Canada unconvinced that the pass he found, quite possibly Elk Pass, was a suitable route for a road. He believed, however, that one day a pass would be found. Palliser probably did not consider that the route Hector pioneered through the Yoho Valley and the Bow Valley would one day become the route of Canada's national highway and first national railroad.
History Connections
When you drive through the Bow Valley, take the time to stop get out and imagine the land completely barren of the signs of people. Take away the roads, railroad, buildings and bridges and you'll be left with a good idea of how the valley must have appeared to the early explorers and adventurers who left part of their identity in the Bow Valley's history.
Many more left an impression on the faint timelines that remain of the Bow Valley's history. Almost too many to readily summarize, but each left a unique story, regardless.
Rob Alexander has an endless fascination for the history of the valley he has called home since he was a small child. He is currently working on a historical book about the community of Exshaw, located 15 minutes east of Canmore.
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