Calgary & Southern Alberta

Images of the West

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Hudson's Bay Company Flag
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

In 1690, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) sent a twenty-year-old employee, Henry Kelsey, to survey the company's vast, "unknown" interior called Rupert's Land. Kelsey's first report, actually a lengthy poem, used the terms "desert" and "barren ground" and described the grassland region as desolate and threatening. While the forested land had utility for the fur trade, the grasslands appeared useless for agriculture and settlement. A hundred years later, other notable explorers — Alexander Mackenzie and David Thompson — reached similar conclusions.

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Rupert's Land

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Two important expeditions were commissioned in 1857 to survey the "North West" further. One was led by John Palliser, and the other by Henry Youle Hind and Simon Dawson. Palliser and Hind were familiar with American accounts that had mapped much of the western interior of the United States as a "Great Desert." They reported that this desert extended into Canada, in a region known since as Palliser's Triangle. They also claimed that a northerly fertile belt existed. This belt allegedly ranged from the Lake of the Woods to the Red River, and then along the North Saskatchewan River to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Although their reports effectively countered previous notions of the sub-arctic character of the prairie climate, settlement prospects remained bleak.

Early Fur Traders Courtesy of the Hudson Bay Company Archives

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	John Palliser, Henry Youle Hind and Simon Dawson
	Palliser's Triangle
	Prairie Climate

After the 1860s, perceptions of the West and its environment underwent several transformations, each of which incorporated new assessments of the West's agrarian and settlement potential. In the prelude to Confederation, the West was viewed as the necessary economic frontier for building a new nation. After Confederation, the national policy laid the foundation for an east-west economic network based on western territorial expansion.

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The West: A Note on Terminology

The British and Canadian governments believed that obtaining legal title to the land now known as southern Alberta was a prerequisite for Canada's peaceful geographical expansion. They therefore opened negotiations with the resident First Nations, who signed Treaty Number 7 in 1877. Shortly thereafter, private entrepreneurs, aided by generous government land grants and financial loans, pushed the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) across the prairies. As rail lines and new river routes began integrating the once isolated West into continental economic patterns, images of frozen wasteland and desert gave way to expectations of prairie productivity. In the 1890s, the government and the CPR launched intensive international immigration campaigns to promote agricultural settlement in the West. Between 1895 and 1914, Alberta's population increased from 30,000 to nearly 500,000.

Peigan tipi interior. This archival photograph shows the spacious interior of a ceremonial tipi. Ceremonial items, including medicine bundles, hang from the tipi poles. Photo from Public Archives Canada. Photo by E.S. Curtis.

Many modern historians and Aboriginal leaders have argued that when the Blackfoot, Stoney and Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee) signed Treaty 7, the First Nations regarded the transaction only as an agreement about who might use their territories. Other historians contest this assessment, stating that the First Nations did see the treaty as a transfer of legal ownership. Regardless of how the First Nations and Euro-Canadians viewed the treaty, however, there can be no doubt that the two groups viewed the land in fundamentally different ways.

For millennia, the vast territories over which the plains buffalo herds moved had been the economic cornerstone of Aboriginal life on the western plains. The disappearance of the bison in the 1870s destroyed the land's traditional economic value. However, it did not diminish the land's vital religious and social significance for the Blackfoot and their Aboriginal neighbours. The Euro-Canadian newcomers, in contrast, imported a radically different perception of the land. To them it was a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for profit. Land on which people could not grow crops (or, at least, raise domesticated cattle) was essentially "wasteland".

The late-19th century lobbying efforts of the towns of Fort Macleod and Cardston to have the nearby Kainaiwa (Blood) and Peigan Indian Reserves sold illustrate this attitude well. The towns' rationale for urging the sale was that the current owners were not properly using their land. The local Cardston paper applauded a suggestion in 1898 that a segment of the Blood Reserve be sold to "white" settlers on the grounds that the "... Indians would never miss it and the settlers would use every acre of it for ranches, farms and gardens." The implication that Native people were threatening private and public "progress" by impeding economic development is clear.

This concept of land as real estate was intimately linked to Euro-Canadian beliefs about the nature of Canadian democracy and "civilised" society. "Civilised" people not only dressed like Europeans, followed European rules of etiquette, spoke English or French, and subscribed to Christian religious beliefs. They also lived in fixed agrarian communities, "improving" their land in "civilised" ways that would produce private gain and further national economic "development".

Most 19th century Euro-Canadians believed that the loss of the plains bison herds had destroyed a nomadic lifestyle innately inferior to a settled agrarian one. Government officials regarded traditional Aboriginal attitudes towards the land, moreover, as incompatible with good Canadian citizenship. The Indian Act (the first version of which appeared in 1876), and the notorious location ticket programme implemented on Aboriginal reserves linked together the right to vote, and the right to own land. Both the act and the programme reflected the Euro-Canadian assumption that to participate in a Western democracy one had to have an appreciation of land as a privately owned commodity that should be commercially exploited.

The chapter "Introduction" is now complete.