Introduction

We do not often think of the iconic Banff National Park being made to serve mundane corporate functions such as storing water for hydroelectric stations. But it does. By the same token, we do not think of electricity as being a major force in the development of national parks policy. But it was. It might be ventured that electricity was as much a factor in the history of Banff National Park as was the CPR.

Why did Banff National Park have to be significantly altered to accommodate hydroelectric storage? More broadly, how did the production and consumption of electricity in southern Alberta shape Canada’s premier national park? This book attempts to answer those questions in a narrative of hydroelectric development in the Bow River watershed.

We do not mean to imply that the Banff we know is the result of something simply being plugged in. Rather, we offer an account in which path-dependent technology and hardening public policy continuously collided, driven by a relentless urban demand for electricity. But this is not a story of technological determinism. There is nothing automatic or predetermined about our story. At every point in the narrative, people made choices.

Almost from the beginning of the electric age, Banff National Park came under continuous pressure to accommodate the Calgary Power Company’s need to modify the Bow River watershed to make electricity. That pressure was not absolute, but relative. It was not so much electricity itself as the method of its generation that led the power company to cast covetous eyes upon a national park. Calgary Power made a strategic decision at the outset to generate electricity using hydroelectric power. There were other ways of generating electricity. In a coal-rich region, thermal electric power represented a viable alternative. But the company chose instead to rely upon falling water in the Bow River for its energy, primarily because hydroelectricity was cheaper to produce over the long term. But as it turned out, the Bow River – a glacier-fed mountain river in a region of hard winters – experienced dramatic seasonal streamflow changes. As a result, it was not ideally suited to the efficient production of electricity on a constant basis throughout the year. To produce enough electricity to meet its commitments in all seasons, and to earn a profit, the company had to redesign the river to make it a better source of power. That is what led Calgary Power into a series of negotiations to create storage and generating facilities upstream in, as fate would have it, a national park.

The phrase path dependence describes a familiar predicament: early choices in system design virtually determine downstream incremental change. Or, in a more elegant formulation, path dependence exists “when the present state of a system is constrained by its history.”¹ Familiar examples of this phenomenon include the gauge, or track width, of a railroad; the choice between 25 and 60 cycles, or 110 and 220 volts in electricity delivery; the QWERTY keyboard; and combined or separate sanitary and drainage sewers in cities. Once these initial choices have been made, it becomes increasingly difficult to make fundamental changes. Major change requires retrofitting or replacing the entire system, and usually it is easier and cheaper to continue on down the path selected at the beginning. The path dependence of hydroelectric generation impelled the Calgary Power Company as it searched for more capacity and more reliable power on the Bow River. And that brought Banff National Park into the crosshairs of hydroelectric engineers seeking to maximize output.

Path dependence may be a demanding master, but it is not necessarily a tyrant. It is a force exerted by the imagination and calculations of relative current cost, not by the machines themselves. It expresses itself through inertia and following the path of least resistance. Its grip can be broken, usually when incremental change no longer accommodates demand or when a new transcendent technology overshadows the legacy system. That too would happen to Calgary Power. here were always other ways to make electricity, but whenever the need for additional power arose, it seemed easier, cheaper, faster, simpler to extend the existing system rather than shift to another basic platform. Calgary Power eventually ran out of river to manage, at which point it redesigned its system around another method of power generation. This, in turn, took pressure off the river, but what would happen to those sunk hydroelectric investments on the Bow and in the park?

There is no necessary incompatibility between power generation and a national park. We may find the two contradictory now, but that depends largely upon our notion of what a park should be, an idea that has changed over time. The concept of a national park in Canada, following the development of the institution in the United States, evolved as a hybrid of several inherited notions of “park,” among them the royal game park as a preserve, the park as a restorative spa, and the park as a place of public amusement and enjoyment. Banff, of course, was originally reserved to preserve its hot springs so that it might become a health resort or spa. The addition of recreational and aesthetic rationales for “emparkment” led to the progressive expansion of the park boundaries to include scenic and wilderness terrain.

The idea of what the park should be was as expansive as its territory. In a frugal, limited state, parks were fragile creatures competing for resources against well-established departments. Acknowledging this bureaucratic disadvantage, the early administrators of the national parks adopted an accommodating plan of growth and survival that has been called the “Doctrine of Usefulness.”² Parks existed to be used and enjoyed by the people. The greater the usage, the logic ran, the greater the income and public support. It was under this latitudinarian management policy that the Calgary Power Company turned its attentions toward Banff.

Nor had the idea of what a park should be coalesced into a coherent perception or policy. For example, the railway predated the park. Whatever Banff might want to become, it would always have trains thundering through. Similarly, the territory encompassed by the park included coal mines, silver mines, logging operations, and considerable private property. And of course, the railroad and the government-built hotels, spas, a town, and leased large lots for the rich to set the tone of conduct by their presence and taste for architecture. Under such a regime, turning shallow Lake Minnewanka – formerly Devil’s Lake – into a storage reservoir did not, on the face of it, violate any principles.

But over time that would change, a phenomenon that we call “policy hardening,” a phrase of our own invention. In part because of experience with these “uses,” park managers began to develop a more restrictive notion of park policy. The park idea itself had evolved into a purer form.³ Seen from this perspective, coal mining, private property, and hydroelectric development were incongruous activities within the bounds of a national park dedicated to the preservation of nature and outdoor recreation. Policy hardening might be thought of as the opposite of “clientalism,” the tendency of state regulators to take on the world view of their clients or to be “captured” by their clients. By contrast, policy hardening describes a process whereby state actors discipline their citizen clients by restricting permissible action in accordance with an abstract principle.

Over time, parks managers would change their minds about the need to accommodate economic activities within their mandates and would write increasingly restrictive regulations. The bureaucrats, in turn, were supported by a small but vocal interest group of park users who amplified their concerns and sometimes stiffened their resolve. As the Calgary Power Company returned again and again to government to find new ways of wringing more power out of the Bow River, it encountered a hardening policy, an ever more resolute bureaucracy, and an external lobby insisting that its aims were incompatible with those of a national park. What would happen when an irresistible force encountered an immovable object?

This struggle between the power company and the Parks bureaucracy of the Government of Canada was not played out in a vacuum. An apparently insatiable demand for electricity in burgeoning southern Alberta sometimes propelled the company to near desperation in its need to expand production. At the same time, it presented the Parks Branch bureaucrats and nature preservationists with a countervailing public good that could not be readily dismissed. At the beginning, electricity had only a few uses, street lighting and commercial illumination foremost among them. But electricity infiltrated all aspects of modern life: public transportation on the street railway and industrial power as well as, in the home, heating, lighting, cleaning, ironing, and, with the spread of radio, entertainment. Getting more electricity was not simply a corporate imperative; thousands of bill-paying consumers put a voters’ face on demand and imparted an implicit political menace to their desires. Popular North American campaigns for electrification – from the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission, to the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, and the Columbia River development, to programs of rural electrification – had taken on a tone of religious revivalism. Electrification was as much a social gospel as an infrastructure project. The demand for electricity was a countervailing force that could also, like national parks, wrap itself in the high diction of social redemption.

Meeting the demand for electricity was also a forward-looking game: the electricity had to be there when the switch was turned on. Since it took years to get approvals and to design and build dams and generating facilities, installations had to be financed and constructed long before demand kicked in. Forecasting demand and anticipating it with installed capacity were inexact sciences, in part because demand – while highly predictable in some circumstances – could change dramatically in either direction. Wars and depressions would make a mockery of the most sophisticated plans, leaving the company in desperately short supply or with embarrassingly large surpluses.

Path dependence meets policy hardening in an atmosphere of unpredictably rising demand: in a nutshell, that is the essence of the story we are about to tell. But it takes more than bloodless abstract categories to make a good story. Strong characters are required, along with unpredictable plot shifts and some raw emotions. Our story has all of those qualities in abundance. The irrepressible and impetuous Max Aitken – later Lord Beaverbrook – sets our tale in motion. A stuffy, bumbling, and somewhat uncomprehending R. B. Bennett becomes the Ottawa fixer. He gives way to an archetypical gruff, hard-driving, square-jawed engineer-businessman, G. A. Gaherty. William Aberhart, Ernest Manning, Mackenzie King, and C. D. Howe make cameo appearances and decisive choices. Earnest bureaucrats, lurking in their offices, struggling to be consistent within ambiguous policies and mindful of shifting political currents, lob convoluted, often turf-defending memoranda into the maelstrom. They can also be counted on for the occasional, if unintended, light comic turn.

Other actors in our story appear more often as collectivities than as individuals. The Nakoda (Stoney) Indians, whose reserve contained the most promising energy resources, had to come to terms with the prospects of hydroelectric development and then had to fight (almost literally) to obtain the compensation that they had been promised. The City of Calgary, as owner of a municipal electric utility and voice of the citizens and electricity users, volubly asserted those not-always-identical interests. The Government of Alberta had to make up its mind over policy within a provincial frame of reference in dramatically shifting economic and political circumstances through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War; over time, shared jurisdiction of lands and waterpowers with the federal government eventually changed the power dynamic in the provincial government’s favour. Then there was the mythical East, home of two of the most powerful players: the Montreal-based Calgary Power Company, and, of course, Ottawa, the seat of the bureaucracy and the federal government. If it seems that the only key player missing from this list is the CPR, let it quickly be said that it also weighed in at key moments on the hydroelectric question.

The story of a decades-long battle between wilderness preservationists and hydroelectric developers would, in other hands, be a simple moral tale in which greedy businessmen try to despoil a pristine wilderness in search of higher profits against the resistance of nature lovers. In such a Manichaean view, Indians are victimized, civil servants strive to uphold the public good, and nature is despoiled. That is not our reading of the evidence. The moral tale quickly becomes blurred. We see no consistent heroes or villains in this piece. Rather, we see largely honourable people on all sides striving to achieve legitimately conflicting versions of the public good as seen from their perspective. But like all of us, in the heat of the moment, they surrender occasionally to their human frailties. And in this struggle, they sometimes unexpectedly exchange black and white hats.

Irony resides, too, in the often-noted ambivalence that Canadians have always exhibited toward the landscapes that surround them. There is so much “nature” in Canada – so vast, so lovely, so challenging, and yet so foreboding – that to tame its resources for their economic rents remains a national obsession. Canadians have expended huge amounts of energy assaulting and destroying the ecosystems in which they live, while at the same time busily celebrating the beauty and importance of unspoiled nature in shaping the national character. But this story raises the question of whether this kind of development is an either-or proposition. Now that these hydroelectric structures have largely outlived their usefulness, who would propose pulling them down? They have become, in a strange way, part of the nature to be preserved.

A word or two about our title. The first word, wilderness, will be a familiar and uncontroversial term to many, if not most, of our readers. It will, however, raise eyebrows among our academic colleagues. Wilderness has become, in the argot of scholasticism, a “contested” term. That is to say, its common usage turns out on close examination to be quite misleading. In ordinary speech, wilderness has historically meant wild, scenic, often rough uncultivated places, where raw nature rather than humanity is in command. It is, in short, a space where humans are absent. But a recent body of scholarship, to which we ourselves have belatedly contributed, argues that this separation of nature and culture in the expression wilderness is overstated.

In the first place, the wilderness frequently had people wandering around in it, often the most ardent proponents of the wilderness experience: hikers, mountaineers, tourists. But that is a minor irony. The fundamental problem is that wilderness is not an objective thing, something out there to be encountered, like rock or trees. Rather, it is an intellectual construct, an idea projected onto a landscape. And the problem with wilderness is that creating an imaginary separation between humanity and nature masks the essential humanness of its construction.⁴ Wilderness, then, in the form of a changing ideal, is man-made. But wilderness is a social construct in another sense. Historically, humans have rarely been absent from the land. Their presence as hunters, fishers, trappers, and travellers has had a significant impact upon the landscape. What was first encountered in the wild at European contact was not simply the work of nature. Native fire, in particular, connected the culture of a people to the natural world in which they were embedded. Modern human activity – railroads, logging, tourism – has also had a profound impact upon wilderness environments.⁵ The casual assertion of an empty landscape devoid of humanity conveniently erased, as has so often been pointed out, the dispossession of Native people that occurred at the point of creating a national park and the continuing police action that permanently excluded them as hunters.⁶ Note in that last sentence how readily wilderness elided into national parks, a matter to which we will return.

But first, we have to defend ourselves for using a word to describe something that does not exist, or rather, that exists as a cultural artefact. We use the word wilderness in the full knowledge of the problem associated with it. Nevertheless, we use it because it has had vernacular meaning for generations of Canadians.⁷ As we have repeatedly run into the word in speeches, reports, newspaper articles, books, and letters ranging over a century, we have come to see it not in an absolute sense, as a noun identifying a specific kind of thing, but rather as a relative term, as a statement about the distance away from a point of observation. Looking out from the city, wilderness was the other end of the imaginative continuum from urban-industrial, human-constructed landscapes. The concept did not imply something pure that could be identified simply by its attributes. Nor did it disappear when some of its supposed attributes were missing. Rather, wilderness expressed the relative absence of human-made things, although that absence need not be complete. Conservationists and wilderness defenders might deplore the presence of industrial installations, like hydroelectric dams, while at the same time building trails, setting up camps, patronizing luxury hotels, doing business with outfitters, golfing, shopping in stores, and opening museums, art galleries, and even zoos. They might resist the symbolic intrusion of industrial humanity rather than quotidian human presence.

In that sense, there was and still is quite a lot of wilderness in Canada: that is, land beyond urban, agrarian, and even mining and forestry frontiers. Wilderness advocates did not think all of it should be preserved. Indeed, even the most ardent proponents of wilderness preservation admitted that much of it should be exploited for human benefit. But certain special places, set apart by romantic conceptions of the sublime or natural wonders (like hot springs), deserved special protection by the state within the bounds of a national park. This was indeed an impulse shot through with contradictions, as the phrases most often associated with the idea of a national park suggest: pristine wilderness, wilderness playground, wilderness sanctuary. To work, wilderness had to be remote and accessible.⁸ It was often referred to as a place of refuge from an alternative life space, but at the same time, it redeemed that other life, at least in Thoreau’s formulation, amplified by John Muir and photographed by Ansel Adams: “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” As a sanctuary, wilderness inspired near-religious experiences; at the same time, it served as a gymnasium for extreme and often dangerous outdoor sports. In wilderness, humanity found renewal. The goal was not that human culture be absolutely absent from wilderness, but that it be reduced as much as possible. So, aware of the plasticity and contradictory nature of the term, we will speak of wilderness as this imaginary alternative space.

Waterpower, also called hydropower, is, by comparison, a fairly straightforward word. Water as it falls releases energy. A high school physics equation summarizes the process: P = hrgk. The height of the fall (h) and the volume of the fall (r) under the force of gravity (g) combine to give an energy output (P). This hydraulic energy can be captured with water wheels and turbines with differing efficiencies (k) to produce kinetic energy, which, through ingenious mechanics, can be made to do work. However, this equation overlooks another very important element of waterpower – the variability of flow (v), and therefore the quantity of energy available on a permanent basis. The results of the equation in an applied world need to be divided by v to reveal the minimum quantity of power available at the site. Hydroelectric facilities are rated on their ability to generate a quantity of power on a continuous basis. Thus, the minimum flow determines the output of the equipment. This little factor, v, will be the driving force in our story. Reducing variability to increase minimum flow became a crucial element in improving the efficiency of hydroelectric production. We should, in passing, also draw attention to the cultural construction of even the term waterpower. Waterfalls in the world are quite widespread. They are not everywhere and always conceived as waterpower by those living around them. Waterpower exists in culturally specific contexts.

Continuing on into our subtitle, we encounter the phrase “Banff National Park.” This is an entity that did not come into existence until 1930. Before then, it bore the name Rocky Mountains National Park.⁹ In the title, we use the current name to cover the earlier period, but in the text, we use the historically contingent names.

What then is hydroelectric storage? Electricity cannot be stored in significant quantities; it must be consumed as it is generated or, alternatively, available when it is needed. However, the water used to generate electricity can be stored in lakes and reservoirs. Our story in these pages will revolve around the need to create or enlarge upstream storage capacity capable of holding back water at certain times of year for release later when it is most needed. As it turned out, the best sites for water storage were located within a national park. We do not contend that the boundaries of Rocky Mountains National Park and then Banff National Park were entirely determined by the need for hydroelectric storage, but we do insist upon it being a major factor. Finally, we do not mean to imply that Banff National Park in its entirety became a storage reservoir or that it only served in that capacity. What we will explain in this book is the way in which hydroelectric storage and generation directly reshaped the ecology of parts of the park and indirectly led to a series of boundary redefinitions on its eastern borders.

Historical narrative, in the interests of coherence, proceeds seriatim, one thing at a time. That is not necessarily how history itself plays out. Historical actors multi-task; they are capable of thinking and doing more than one thing at a time. Readers should be aware, then, that our narrative sometimes separates things that occurred simultaneously in time. Our single-minded approach does not convey the complexity or the whole way in which contemporaries viewed a situation. For example, in chapter 6, for the purposes of clarity, we concentrate on the row over the proposed development of the Spray Lakes, which led to their ultimate excision from the park. But in chapter 7, we show that while the endgame on that issue played out, company officials were also thinking about how to develop the Ghost River site in time to meet a new contract with Calgary.

Before embarking on our story, we should acknowledge the assistance of scholars whose work has influenced our interpretation of these events. To Joel Tarr¹⁰ and Martin Melosi,¹¹ two scholars who over the years have shared our interest in the history of urban infrastructure, we owe our understanding of the concept of path dependence. The writings of environmental historian Donald Worster have sensitized us to the social and political power required to harness nature, especially water; the power, wealth, and social and environmental exploitation involved in that process; and the hubris underpinning the desire to control nature.¹² Readers will note our indebtedness to William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis for an understanding of the incorporation of nature into the city under capitalism and the impact of city’s demand upon the natural world far removed from the immediate vicinity.¹³ From William Cronon, too, we have borrowed and adapted the notion of second nature, the hybrid derivative of human interaction in the environment. Finally, our book is, in a sense, a coda to Richard White’s Columbia River story: here we explain how those machines got inserted in the Bow and how the river in turn became one great natural machine.¹⁴

We conceived this book and did much of the research while we were working on what became Monopoly’s Moment. Soon after, we even roughed out a first draft. But being preoccupied with other projects, the manuscript languished. That was probably just as well, because we uncovered a great deal of relevant material in the Department of Indian Affairs files as we were doing research for The River Returns, and we learned from subsequently published work. That environmental history of the Bow River necessarily contained a chapter on hydroelectric development and another on the development of Banff National Park. But given the many other topics requiring treatment, we had to ruthlessly compress our findings into a few pages. Indeed, two well-informed reviewers of that book chided us for not giving the conflict between hydroelectric development and park policy more extended coverage. We are happy to oblige. Our excursion into environmental history with co-author Matthew Evenden also tempered our original political economy approach to the subject. Research for the Bow River book also entailed following the documentary trail from Calgary Power to its successor company, TransAlta Utilities, through the good offices of our friend Bob Page, then a senior executive with the company. This permitted us to analyze annual reports and other internal documents relating to the transformation of the company in the 1950s, with which our narrative concludes. We have thus touched on certain aspects of this story in several previous publications.¹⁵ However, in drawing these threads together into this focused account, we have considered evidence that has subsequently come to light and have completely rewritten the text – except for the occasional phrase or sentence that we found we could not improve upon. In The River Returns, we expressed the hope that someday we might publish a fuller treatment of these subtle and complicated matters. This book brings that hope into realization.