Introduction | Bison Economy | Kootisaw | Fort Calgary | Ranching | Agriculture
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Calgary & Southern Alberta
The Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) of the 19th century referred to the present-day location of Calgary as Kootisaw or the "meeting of the waters." Located between the Highwood and Elbow River junctions along the Bow, Kootisaw was a Tsuu T’ina camping and parleying site. The Tsuu T’ina were not the first people to have inhabited the area, however. They immigrated to the region from the northern forests only in the time just prior to the arrival of Europeans. Buried beneath many of Calgary's parks, streets, and building foundations is abundant evidence that thousands of years earlier, other First Nations people lived along this stretch of the Bow River.
The area's earliest residents probably began arriving soon after Glacial Lake Calgary drained, approximately 10,000 years ago, and the newly exposed land started to attract the plants and animals on which human beings depended for survival. Around 8,000 years ago, one group of Aboriginal hunters trapped a small number of a now-extinct variety of bison in the backwaters of the Bow, then a braided river with channels extending as far south as the present-day Mount Royal district. They left evidence of the kill at what 20th century archaeologists have dubbed The Mona Lisa Site on 17th Avenue, S.W. Around the same time, early visitors to the Calgary area also camped in what is now the residential subdivision of Hawkwood. As a label of convenience, archaeologists refer to these ancient hunters as Paleo-Indians.
The Hawkwood site, initally occupied about 8,250 years ago, is located on the southwest escarpment of the Nose Hill uplands, which extend from Nose Hill Park to Cochrane. Directly exposed to the Chinook winds that periodically ameliorate winter temperatures and reduce snow cover in the Calgary area, the Hawkwood site would have provided good winter grazing conditions for local bison and other game. Probably for this reason, the site remained popular with the area's human population as time passed. Archaeologists have found evidence that people visited it several times around 5300 BCE and between 2650 and 2050 BCE, and used it frequently again between CE 200 and 1720.
These early inhabitants of what is now Calgary were ancestors of North America's First Nations. Whether the First Nations people living here in the 1700s descended directly from the Paleo-Indians who hunted on the Bow and in what is now Hawkwood is uncertain, but archaeological evidence and oral tradition suggest strongly that people of the Blackfoot Nation were present in southern Alberta for many centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans. Based on archaeological data alone, establishing with certainty the specific cultural identities of any but the most recent occupants of particular archaeological locales in the Calgary area is extremely difficult.
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