4 Stewards of Streams in Southern Alberta

Coal Mining Communities, Fishing, and Conservation

By 1911, in the space of only a decade, the population in the Crowsnest valley had jumped from 31,962 to 50,772, with towns forming a variegated social landscape in which native speakers of English struggled to remain in a majority.¹ The ethnic diversity was especially noticeable among mineworkers: federal census takers classified 85 percent of them as “foreign born.” Towns drew a mix of Italian, German, French, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese, Russian, and Scandinavian navvies and colliers.²

For many mineworkers, fishing was a necessity, not a form of recreation. The basic wage for an Alberta miner in 1905 was $3.00 a day, barely enough to survive in the Crowsnest area. The situation only worsened between 1906 and 1915, when inflation outstripped wages, leaving newcomers little choice but to turn to the foothills for fishing, hunting, and berry picking in season.³ Both itinerant workers, whose employment was often precarious, and more settled town residents placed constant pressure on the Crowsnest fishery. Dynamiting, netting, and lime bottle detonations, all against fishing regulations, were rampant in early days. More devastating still, however, was the almost immediate environmental transformation of the valley. Although it is certain that heavy food fishing in the area quickly depleted streams, the sudden structural changes to the river probably had a greater impact on fish populations: siltation smothered spawning beds, coal seeped into the water from slags left at abandoned mine shafts, and chemical pollutants drained from roads and railway trestles.⁴ By the beginning of World War I, stretches of the Crowsnest River were undoubtedly impacted by local industrialization.⁵ The waters here once had a large resident bull trout population, with spawning beds on Allison Creek and possibly on Crowsnest Creek as well. But if the latter beds existed, coal mining probably obliterated many of them, and the Allison Creek diversion further devastated the breeding stock. A long-time resident of the area, Jean Kerr, remembered the bottom of Crowsnest Lake as clogged with coal dust.⁶ This was not a forgiving environment for fish.

The industrialization of the river threatened to wipe out cutthroat, mountain whitefish, and, especially, the bull trout population. Between 1901 and 1911, as the human population boomed, the number of fish plummeted. Very early in the industrialization of the Crowsnest Pass, outlier portions of the Oldman watershed offered relatively better fishing—the upper waters of the “North Fork” of the Oldman from its confluence with the Crowsnest. Some anglers were also going as far as the Livingstone River and its own tributaries, such as Racehorse Creek. The “South Fork” (Castle River) additionally drew fishers. These places could be reached only by hiking considerable distances or by horse travel, thereby rendering them inaccessible to many miners, who often enjoyed only a single day’s rest from work. These river and stream fronts were also subject to greater surveillance and control, chiefly on the part of long-term town residents who took it upon themselves to enforce the law.⁷

Settled citizens took up the cause of fish conservation. Family histories from Coleman, Bellevue, and Blairmore strongly suggest that citizens across ethnic lines embraced the conservation ethic, purchased permits, and dutifully abided by rules regarding fishing dates, catch limits, and the like. In Crowsnest Pass communities, members of professional classes, including ministers, teachers, and doctors, joined with the mining managers and relatively skilled workers to promote conservation. These workers, often British colliers, were long accustomed to strict rules around fishing in their places of origin. Contrary to the familiar image of mining communities as sites of bitter polarization between mine owners and union workers and populated largely by transient labourers, Crowsnest communities had, by the beginning of World War I, become relatively settled and well ordered, with an unusually high percentage of married men.⁸ Some towns, like Blairmore, gained distinction as “labour towns,” where citizens elected council representatives from organized labour, leftists served as aldermen and mayors, and a well-established class of mineworkers wielded considerable power in the town.⁹ In these settings, conservationists generally found co-operation within working-class communities—and, most importantly, within the labour movement itself—to work against destructive practices such as dynamiting and to adopt stringent rules designed to regulate subsistence fishing. The history of stewardship, then, took on a life of its own in the relationships between humans and the natural world of coal-mining Alberta.

Mainstream Poverty and Tributary Prosperity in the Valley

In the coal town of Frank, in the years it struggled to survive after the devastating 1901 rockslide, fish conservation gained momentum immediately after R. A. Darker began his campaign to create the Alberta Fish and Game Protective Association. Taking up the cause was Mark Drumm, who had been a newspaper reporter in Butte, Montana before he was employed in Frank as secretary-treasurer of the Canadian American Coal and Coke Company. In 1905, he helped establish the town paper, the Frank News, and soon became its sole proprietor and editor.¹⁰ In these years, when its population in 1906 jumped to its high-water mark of 1,178, Frank needed a local paper. In 1908, Drumm learned that R. A. Darker was forming a conservation association and expressed hope that it would promote “right thinking about fish and birds, in fact all game” within the community.¹¹

In 1909, he used his newspaper to more forcefully campaign for the cause. Drumm found plenty of evidence to support his efforts. Crowsnest newspapers regularly reported the comings and goings of town fishing parties and their creels. Occasionally, they shared anglers’ classic fish stories, with all the exaggeration expected of them. There was the whopper reportedly taken by a Blairmore hotel manager in 1913, snagged from “a pool containing two gallons of creek water and covering an area of a cubic foot.” The fish landed, the local paper reported, measured two feet from nose to tail, and five and a half inches in circumference.¹² Some stories were simply not to be taken seriously, such as the Hillcrest fishing tale “going the rounds” in 1922, where an angler sighted a fish “eight feet long and two feet broad—a young whale.” Apparently, a posse in town was searching for harpoons to go and catch it.¹³

But a newspaper editor heard enough real accounts of current fishing conditions that he could make reasonable assessments of the overall health of streams. Drumm, himself an angler, saw a dire situation in the Crowsnest valley in 1909. Several parties from Frank early in the season had tried their luck on the South Fork (the Castle River), “and the whole bunch did not get two dozen fish.” With several other parties “now camped on the stream, one coming from as far away as Lethbridge,” he reported “no one is getting any fish.”¹⁴ The “natural consequences of overdoing a good thing,” the river was “fished to death” by anglers who had been “killing every fish possible in about every way possible until what was only a few years ago one of the greatest trout streams in the west appears to be almost entirely fished out.”¹⁵

A week later, Drumm returned to the matter: “streams that have been the best in the country are becoming so depleted it has become necessary to go many miles into the mountains and then to parts so inaccessible that few go there before a decent catch can be made.”¹⁶ With the South Fork once offering “grand fishing,” times had changed: fish were now “not only woefully scarce but are all very small.” In no better shape was the “Middle Fork,” or Crowsnest River, where “Old timers will recall that no better trout fishing was to be found anywhere” when the district opened to settlement. Only a few years after the building of the Crowsnest railway line, linking Medicine Hat to Cranbrook, British Columbia, anglers considered themselves lucky to land a Crowsnest trout.¹⁷ “These streams have become depleted simply through abuse. They have not only been fished at any and all times but by every method conceivable,” Drumm reported.¹⁸ The permit system that was introduced to Alberta in 1907 had set a regulation on the minimum size of a landing, but anglers paid scant attention to landing legal-sized fish.¹⁹ As Drumm noted in 1909, “some have been known to take as high as 200 fish, not one of which but was smaller than the prescribed limit.”²⁰ Without a protective association yet at work, he urged locals to write Calgary conservationists to press the government to restock the streams and enforce the regulations.

Newspaper coverage does bear out Drumm’s assertion that, with mainstreams in decline, better fishing was being had on more remote tributaries. Anglers devoting more time to their outings were hitching horses and packing their camp gear for the better landings found in northern tributaries of the Crowsnest—Rock, Connelly, and Todd Creeks—and Daisy Creek that flowed toward the Oldman north of town via Racehorse Creek. The other great draw: the Livingstone River, higher in the Oldman watershed.²¹ A community history recounted that “transportation left much to be desired” in these excursions. “If you went south, you had two choices: walk or ride a horse. If you went to the North Fork [the Livingstone River] and it rained you had to get back over a hump in the road known as ‘The Hog’s Back.’ Many were the stories of the tribulations endured in the pursuit of catching fish.”²²

It was anyone’s guess exactly what was happening in these camps. Angler parties going into the Oldman watershed beyond the river’s confluence with the Crowsnest so concerned the Cowley section of the UFA that it formed a special delegation in 1910 to speak to Frank Oliver, the minister of the Department of Interior in Edmonton. Besides the forest fire problem were those arising with angler campers. Forest rangers needed dual appointments as fish and game wardens: “our streams are depleted in spite of regulations, and as the fishing attracts the campers, who are the chief cause of fires, it would give the forest wardens an extra hold over them.” The delegates strongly suspected “that nets and dynamite are used in the best fishing grounds we have,” and that forest wardens acting as fisheries officers might help stamp out those practices.²³

The higher one went on the Oldman from its confluence with the Crowsnest, the more one found tributaries drawing anglers. The upper Oldman had already attracted early settlers and ranchers to its luxuriant grassland valleys. This was the home of some of the big Alberta spreads, such as the upper block of the massive Waldron Ranch.²⁴ Anglers as far as Claresholm by 1910 were getting into these back countries. That year, writing a lengthy description in the Claresholm Review, Fred Palmer recounted that he and another town resident, Roy Schram, Roy’s mother, Chester Rick, S. A. Schram and his wife and daughter, used a team of horses, wagon, and “grit” to cross the Porcupine Hills and the Waldron ranchlands to reach the Oldman and, finally, the fishing grounds near The Gap. They first used large spoon hooks and “all kinds of bait,” before switching to “the best persuaders” (grasshoppers), and “tiny spoon hooks.” Palmer wrote that if anyone was “fortunate enough to live to the ripe age of 149 you will never regret having made the trip.”²⁵

The streams were indeed full of trout. Callum Creek offered excellent angling, as an early photograph suggests, showing two anglers still dropping lines into the creek with already some forty-five large trout landed on the rocks around them.²⁶ Bob Creek got its name from “Old Bob,” an original settler who opened a coal mine nearby. He found fish plentiful enough that he shipped them wholesale to I. G. Baker and J. W. Smith to sell at Fort Macleod in the 1880s.²⁷ Nearby was Camp Creek, and a little higher on the Oldman, Racehorse Creek. But the great prize was the North Fork itself, or Livingstone River. Its magnificent waters joined the Oldman in the Livingstone Range before the Oldman flowed through The Gap, a narrowed canyon. The Gap seemed like a doorway to a piscatorial paradise.

By 1909, however, Drumm was seeing declines even on the Oldman River above its confluence with the Crowsnest. The same year that he reported fisheries problems on the Crowsnest and Castle Rivers, he was organizing his own “North Fork” getaway, likely into the watershed of the Livingstone River. With the local Reverend T. Jones taking over his newspaper responsibilities, Drumm, another Frank angler C. V. O’Hara, and Coleman’s postmaster D. J. McIntyre headed out for a fortnight of fishing, the length of the trip to be “measured by the longevity of the grub pile,” his replacement editor reported.²⁸ The trip, however, took a turn sideways. The party’s horses got loose and disappeared into nearby forests. The trio needed a local rancher’s help to get back to Frank. Once there, Drumm posted a reward for anyone finding the horses; but he also reported his concerns about fish in the North Fork. On a stream where Drumm said it was always “possible to take an almost unlimited number of trout” from half a pound to three, “what a difference has come over the stream in two years.” His party had not landed a dozen trout over half or three quarters of a pound and “the vast majority were really small fish, not many going beyond a quarter of a pound.”²⁹ Drumm’s experience was not that far off from that of other anglers. Coleman anglers, too, had reported declining conditions on the North Fork a year earlier.³⁰ Perhaps Drumm was simply observing the end of the halcyon days after increased angling, abusive practices, or the expanded pace of change along main rivers had resulted in smaller-sized creels. But seeing the consequences, he predicted that the North Fork would follow the same fate as the Middle and South Forks, “to be completely depleted of game fish or so nearly that there is no pleasure in fishing.” Strong enforcement of the regulations was needed.³¹

Just how bad the situation was depended on one’s local experience. Certainly, anglers continued to occasionally land biggies in the same streams that Drumm thought were in peril. It is noteworthy that following Drumm’s dire reports early in the season in 1909, a young employee of the Northern Bank in Fort Macleod, Peter H. Douglas, saw the Crowsnest completely differently. Relating his plans for a September fishing trip to his fiancée in Hamilton, Ontario, soon to join him in Alberta, Douglas was confident that bountiful angling awaited him. “The fellows who have been up this year report good sport,” he wrote. “One chap brought back to town 10 trout that weighed over 100 pounds. Imagine what sport it ought to be standing in the stream with a 10 lb. mountain trout on the end of our line.”³² Despite Drumm’s own sense that fisheries were in decline in 1909, the Bellevue Times continued to report great catches on the very streams that worried him. On the South Fork in 1912, a Blairmore angler returned from a two-week expedition in September hauling back enough that “many citizens were supplied with a luscious fish for their Friday’s dinner,” the paper reported.³³ Two women from Bellevue in 1913, “Mesdames Baker and King,” were the “high-liners of a party fishing near Burmiss on the Crowsnest River, landing fish averaging a pound to four pounds in weight.³⁴

Pincher Creek, Ground Zero of the Fishing Crisis

Drumm’s concerns at Frank were nevertheless shared by the Pincher Creek newspaper proprietor E.T. Saunders in 1909. Saunders had moved to Fort Macleod in 1874 with the NWMP, establishing with C. D. Wood the Macleod Gazette in 1882 before relocating to Lethbridge three years later. In 1905, he moved to the bustling ranching hub of Pincher Creek where he established the Rocky Mountain Echo (by 1906, the Pincher Creek Echo).³⁵ The westward orientation of Pincher Creek citizens was captured in the newspaper’s masthead illustration: it looked toward the mountains from the foothills prairie where cattle grazed; a setting sun projected rays of light toward the reader. These folk firmly fixed their gaze on the mountain streams: the South Fork, streams joining the Crowsnest River, and the mainstream of the Oldman River.

Saunder’s paper gushed praise on Pincher Creek flowing nearby. His April 1905 editorial announced the arrival of spring: gophers were digging new burrows, the bluebottle fly was “making merry in the hot sun,” and the “fisherman furbish up his rod and tackle, and prepares to slay the finny monster.” The same was figuring “out fresh tales and measurements, on occasion he poaches, for the season is not yet here.”³⁶ A veritable rite of spring was to see a lad from town “with long bamboo rod, large hook [and] an ounce of beef thereon,” whipping the waters daily on Pincher Creek.³⁷

Above all, townies looked to the Castle River for their sport, enough that the paper carried a lengthy “Ode” to the South Fork in 1906. The tongue-in-cheek poem recounted the exploits of “Gill,” a town lumberyard merchant, and “Ed,” the town’s tailor who, in August 1905, followed up their idea that the “fishing was good—on the South Fork,” and soon reached their spot on the river:

You can talk about whales and I don’t know what,

And the great big fish Gill nearly caught:

But Ed caught one, and as sure as thunder

Twould have jerked Gill in and pulled him under

—Where the fishing is good in the South Fork

The problem was that the fish was so big that once landed and tied onto the cart, it broke its “blooming axle.”³⁸

Pincher Creek anglers fished for sport and for food. The Echo made a light-hearted report of a party including a town lawyer and local minister, loading up “several rods, reels and casts,” to set out for some artless casting on the South Fork, a sport excursion that “entered openly upon a pot fishing campaign.” The only real sport was found in the nearby grasses where the men scrambled to pocket enough grasshoppers to use as bait.³⁹ When they had no luck, one of the members of the party gave up in frustration, speaking “in infinitely unmeasured terms against any man who would go demean himself and so prostitute the noble sport glorified by Isaac Walton. If I can’t catch trout with flies,” said he, “then I’m blankety-blanked if I want to catch trout.” ⁴⁰

All joking aside, Saunders’ paper engaged in serious local fisheries issues. Irksome to Pincher Creek anglers was the fishing season, which until 1912 began on May 1. Though early in comparison to later starts legislated to protect spring spawners, the date still seemed too late, especially with the flush on mountain streams often ruining fishing by that time. More aggravating was the early closure, September 15. “The closed season is intended for the due protection of fish, not the prohibition of fishing,” an editorial fumed. The federal government, “in spite of the various reports sent in from all over the Territories,” had set an inappropriate season, “another case where what is sauce for the east is certainly not for the West.” The paper pointed out that it was “the belief of those who have lived long in this country and have carefully studied the habits of fish, that there is no set time for spawning.” With Pincher Creek townsfolk usually taking their holidays in September or October, “when weather was good for camping and the flies have gone,” to deprive them of the right to fish at the same time when “the fish are biting the best,” was simply and categorically wrong.⁴¹

When R. A. Darker’s Calgary association sent its circular letter to Pincher Creek’s police magistrate, G. D. Plunkett, urging that a local branch form, the Echo gave the proposal its hearty endorsement. An association would check the fish “slaughter” occurring on the North, Middle, and South Forks of the Oldman, these rivers now “being rapidly depleted.” ⁴² The paper’s chief concern was the food fishery, supported by fishers using dynamite. The rapid growth of the coal towns brought hundreds of newcomers, “by no means all sportsmen, but many of the miners prefer to dynamite fish, thus for the sake of making a large and easy bag destroying the sport for legitimate fishermen and killing thousands of immature fish.” ⁴³ The paper especially wanted the government to close the trout market: “those who now make a business of fishing for the market, bringing in two or three hundred pounds of fresh fish in the summer at one time to towns (as has been done in Frank) would find their occupation gone and the fish would have a fair chance.” But this would require an enforcement of legitimate, one-at-a-time, angling. “It is ridiculous to suppose that any man can go out for two or three days by himself and catch that amount of fish with rod and line. It might be done once, but not several times in a season.” ⁴⁴ And if the government was not enforcing rod-and-reel fishing, the Echo endorsed Calgary’s call for more local engagement. It was up to “every man to act as a self-constituted game guardian and not to be afraid to gain the ill will of any person because he not only keeps the Game Laws himself but also insists on others doing likewise.” ⁴⁵

Only a week after Saunders wrote his editorial, both the actual practice of market harvesting and the ways some locals were trying to stamp it out were suggested in a case from Frank. Jack Ruis, while bird shooting, passed by the banks of the Oldman River, where he chanced upon a complete set of neatly folded clothing at water’s edge. Since the river was too cold for bathing, Ruis “concluded someone was engaged in dynamiting fish.” He accordingly laid low for a few minutes, expecting to see the man show himself, but when no one appeared, he alerted the police. Coming back the next day with a couple of officers, the group found on the opposite bank of the river a fishing net with a number of putrefying fish in it. The culprit was never found and there was no means of identifying the poacher from the clothing he had left behind.⁴⁶

The widespread practice of dynamiting or netting streams, especially in the Crowsnest, concerned Calgary conservationists. Shortly after establishing the Alberta Fish and Game Protective Association in 1907, its executive committee pointed out the dynamite problem in meetings with the fisheries inspector, Harrison Young.⁴⁷ Individuals, it claimed, were dynamiting and netting streams to fill the local fish markets. With commercial licence-holders able to sell lake trout to traders and merchants in open season, poachers could work the system to funnel their illicit stream catches to complicit store owners. Young learned that in Calgary the retail market was so hot that poachers selling through stores were flagrantly netting the Bow River right in Calgary as well as in the new community forming at Cochrane.⁴⁸ Darker’s association was particularly concerned by the situation in the Crowsnest. A joint letter, written on behalf of the Calgary association by Darker, Captain W. H. Coddington in Red Deer, and Norman Luxton in Banff asserted that most of the dynamiting in the Crowsnest was being done by “foreign” miners on Sundays, selling to the fish markets. They urged that a guardian be appointed in Frank or Cowley to stamp out the practice and that “some means be taken at the different mines where it is necessary to use dynamite that the foreigners be prevented from getting access to the same for illegitimate purposes.”⁴⁹ They also wanted the restriction on Sunday fishing specifically imposed on these miners. Many of them, apparently, were harvesting fish on their day off from the mines. The problem was that a mine employee could purchase “all he wants cheaply from the company,” Young reported to Ottawa, agreeing with anglers that fishery officers in the Pass should stop such sales.⁵⁰

The association’s lobbying made its mark. In 1907, the fisheries department mandated the purchase of angling permits by the fall of that year.⁵¹ As they did across Canada, angling permits explicitly prohibited an individual from selling their catch.⁵² Particularly pleasing to the Calgary association, the same legislation now banned the sale and export of “speckled trout and brook trout of every kind, including char.”⁵³ The loophole had been closed.

The 1907 legislation redressed, at least legally, other matters. It introduced the twenty per day limit to daily creels and imposed a seven-inch minimum trout size (the 1912 regulations later raised the bag limit to twenty-five per day but a nine-inch minimum).⁵⁴ Many anglers, albeit often begrudgingly, accepted the new rules. The Frank Vindicator in 1912 reported Blairmore anglers landing “some excellent fish” one week, but that “all complain that they are duty bound to consign to the water from whence they came all fish under nine inches in length.” There was, as the paper said, “a limit to the length of fish, but no limit to the ‘wait.’”⁵⁵

As Saunders and Drumm had noted in 1909, many anglers were not about to “wait” for big enough fish to take their hooks. Poachers on unsupervised streams continued to use nets, dynamite, or lime to take fish for their own consumption. Regulations did not translate quickly into change in other respects. F. W. Godsal, who had arrived to ranch in the Pincher Creek area in 1882 to eventually run his spread, the “Cowley Ranch” at the juncture of the Middle and South Forks,⁵⁶ understood the need for permits and, by 1912, was still disappointed by how difficult it was even to obtain them. R. A. Darker’s committee had sent one of its circular letters to Godsal to urge that a local conservation association form at Cowley in 1906.⁵⁷ As will be seen, this proved difficult for Godsal to follow up, but he remained in communication with Calgarians and in 1912, wrote to the then-president of the AFGPA, Arthur Wolley Dod, to express frustrations with local conditions and the lax enforcement of regulations. No one in Southern Alberta had a clue as to how to obtain a permit, even if they wanted to buy one. The Cayley Hustler carried excerpts of the new fishing laws,⁵⁸ but the government had not even sent instructions to magistrates to apply them.⁵⁹ The police “are now prosecuting in the Crows Nest Pass for fishing close season,” Godsal wrote, but with local magistrates not having any official instructions, they “would have to dismiss any case.”⁶⁰

His main concern, in any respect, was the closed season. Saunders in Pincher Creek had wanted a longer fishing season, especially to accommodate holiday camp angling in the fall season. In 1912, the season, opening now July 1, extended to October 30, but Godsal thought the closed period still favoured bull trout and mountain whitefish. He claimed the Crowsnest River had converted to a whitefish stream over the thirty years he had been fishing it. These fall spawners “had worked their way up from the main river and increased, and the trout are disappearing.”⁶¹

Angling or Not on the Lord’s Day

As Godsal knew, there was urgency to see fair play introduced to the streams. To the northeast, many Cayley residents were anglers. In the years of earlier open seasons, they enjoyed spending Victoria Day picnicking and fishing on their nearby rivers. Cayley anglers stayed current with the latest and most exotic materials used in fancy flies, from mouse whiskers to African bird feathers.⁶²

There, as elsewhere, anglers barely contained their enthusiasm to respect the Lord’s Day. Officially, the fisheries department prohibited Sunday commercial fishing; its legislation in Western Canada explicitly ordered that seines, nets, “or other apparatus, used for catching fish” be raised to “admit of the free passage of fish” from Saturday at 6pm until 6am on Monday morning.⁶³ Until the department completely dropped the restriction from its legislation in 1922, purists interpreted the term “apparatus” broadly to including angling gear.⁶⁴ The Cayley Hustler, then, read the fisheries laws as prohibiting Sunday angling, and reminded its readers of the restriction in 1912.⁶⁵ Officially, however, the Sunday closure “has never been interpreted as applying to angling with a rod and line,” as a fisheries official explained to an Alberta government representative demanding its enforcement. All the same, the official pointed out that police could enforce a Sunday no-fishing rule with the passage of the federal 1906 Lord’s Day Act. The Act halted all forms of entertainment and sport on the Sabbath, and that clearly included angling.⁶⁶ The Pincher Creek Echo, in support of the restriction, reprinted the entirety of the Lord’s Day Act to make sure its readers were well aware of its broad application.⁶⁷

Even if fish guardians were not enforcing the weekly closure, the police indeed killed the fun for at least a few Sunday anglers. In 1912, they nabbed and fined angling Blairmore citizens claiming to be only berry picking on the day of rest.⁶⁸ In 1920, the forestry officer in the Bow River Forest Reserve reported seeing carloads of fishermen on Sundays driving to Sheep River, where police did not patrol.⁶⁹

But police only inconsistently enforced the Act. And anglers knew it. Besides, they saw it as their right to engage in a form of restful recreation on the seventh day. For that very reason, many anglers unapologetically fished Sundays. Although a newspaper letter writer in Claresholm did not feel particularly “strait-laced” in raising the issue, he was concerned to see so many townsfolk fishing streams west of town on Sundays. Their justification that angling was a fine activity on a day of rest was “worn out,” he said, asking them to study their own consciences and ask whether in fact their Sunday pastime “may become a menace to our Sabbath keeping.”⁷⁰ By contrast, the Red Deer News editor had few such scruples. He openly admitted to fishing on Sunday after a local minister preached against other forms of Sunday recreation in 1919.⁷¹ Another paper thought that Christians ready to “bounce a fellow right out of church because he went fishing on Sunday,” should instead be faithful to more important laws, such as paying personal debts.⁷² Just how much one observed Sabbath restrictions simply devolved upon an angler’s personal, political, and even ideological convictions. The Blairmore Enterprise, then, reported that local anglers, including the Reverend F. T. Cook, fished at Burmis on a Saturday in 1914, finding the fish “plentiful,” while also noting that W. Patterson, of the same town, fished the very next day to land some “good ones” at Lundbreck Falls.⁷³ God, seemingly, blessed the faithful and unfaithful fisher in respect to the Sabbath. A foursome near Lethbridge were just as bold with their stories of Sunday “big catches” in 1919.⁷⁴ Even the Cayley Hustler’s editor, on identifying the practice locally, could admonish the young people in the town for inaugurating “a revised version of the fourth commandment to read: ‘Six days shalt thou labor and the seventh day go fishing.’”⁷⁵ In 1922, Federal fisheries laws dropped all Sunday restrictions and it became commonplace to spend the day angling, as Nellie McClung suggested in characters created for her 1925 novel, Painted Fires. She described a party regularly organizing Sunday fishing excursions to Eastern Slope rivers, “which abounded in mountain trout.”⁷⁶

Closures and Season Openers in the Crowsnest

As Godsal had suggested in his letter to Wolley Dod, the great issue of concern in the Oldman watershed was not whether anglers were maintaining the sanctity of the Sabbath. He wanted seasonal closures that could protect trout. In Oldman basin streams where whitefish, bull trout, and cutthroat swam ecumenically together, anglers shared a wide range of opinions as to when any of them spawned. Many lobbied simply for an earlier start to fishing. At least that would allow fishers to get on rivers before the notorious flushes on these mountain systems ruined any fishing entirely.⁷⁷ Organizing in the dining room of the Grand Union hotel in Coleman in 1915, town anglers formed a protective association to press the government to open streams earlier in the season.⁷⁸ J. A. Joseph, the Coleman association’s secretary, immediately sought to affiliate the town’s angling association with the Calgary AFGPA, likely to gain lobbying clout.⁷⁹ When in 1917 season dates moved from July 1 to June 15, the Coleman paper attributed the change to the efforts of the associations pushing for an earlier start.⁸⁰ But the one given was not early enough. Coleman anglers in 1918 collected 124 signatures on a petition to urge the fisheries department to return the season start to May 1, the rationale being that locals knew that spring flush ruined fishing between May 20 to July 10.⁸¹ Coleman anglers were not alone in wanting an earlier start. In 1915, when the mines at Passburg closed with work stoppages, members had requested that the government throw open streams as early as April 1, “to alleviate the distress in the district” and as “a benefit to the unemployed.”⁸²

At least some anglers within these communities supported tributary closures when they were inaugurated in 1920. When the Bellevue Times referred to the earlier fishing season established in 1917, the editor stepped back to view the issue more philosophically. Whatever season was chosen, it could not protect all fish in the region, and besides, the various species, whether cutthroat, bull trout, or mountain whitefish, seemed, at least to the newspaper editor, to spawn at all times of the year. Only temporary tributary closures would be effective. Closing streams in the Pass would allow them protection while streams were restocked and allowed to recover.⁸³ With the indefinite closure of headwaters and tributaries of the Oldman and Crowsnest inside and outside the reserves, including the magnificent tributaries of the Castle River, the Blairmore Enterprise wrote that it was “a move in the right direction, which should have been introduced years ago.”⁸⁴ The Enterprise backed the measures in 1922 when closures were then extended: the ongoing abuses of individuals who “go fishing and haul in everything they can, big and little, and keep it up regardless of their requirements for seasonable food,” necessitated that “every now and then” streams and lakes be closed altogether.⁸⁵

Certainly with time, a broad section of Oldman basin anglers came to back tributary closures. As mentioned, closures appealed to anglers who were becoming increasingly alarmed by the numbers of outsiders fishing their backcountry. Yet, paradoxically, at least one community resisted forming a protective sporting association entirely for fear that its very existence might exacerbate the problem. In Cowley, F. W. Godsal had little initial success forming an association after Darker’s call to do so in 1906. In 1915, John Eastwood asked Godsal to try again to create a Cowley affiliate, but his effort failed. Godsal wrote Eastwood to explain that farmers nearby “believed in protecting our native fish, and our native chicken and grouse, but there is a feeling against having any foreign game, English partridge, quail, etc. turned out on our lands or encouraged by the Government.” Knowing that Calgary sportsmen such as Austin de B. Winter were dedicated to such initiatives, Godsal said that “We are troubled enough, as it is, by trespassers on our lands from the towns, doing us much damage.”⁸⁶ He was well aware of the irony that boosting game and fish in Cowley’s environs through the efforts of a conservation association would simply attract yet a larger number of visiting sports fishers and hunters.

Like the situation on the Highwood River, outsiders were already overwhelming Oldman basin areas, using automobiles, especially, to move hunters and anglers farther and farther into the southern Eastern Slopes. Initially it was town folk themselves doing the driving. As early as 1912, the Cayley Hustler, north of Nanton, noted that “All we could hear last Sunday was ‘Hunk! Hunk!’” advising readers, “look out for that new auto.”⁸⁷ Town anglers using autos in the war years, often experiencing mechanical difficulties, provided much comical comment in papers. The Bellevue Times found some humour in the misadventure of two town anglers who used a car in 1916 to get in a day’s fishing on the Oldman River north of its confluence with the Crowsnest. After their car broke down, the paper reported that they got to know the countryside well when they needed to walk all the way back home.⁸⁸ Another set of car-travelling Bellevue fishers visited Lundbreck Falls by car. When they “ran short of gasoline,” the paper reported, tongue-in-cheek, that they “were obliged to fry fish to get oil to run the car home.”⁸⁹

But by 1920, automobiles arriving from very distant communities in much larger numbers disconcerted Crowsnest communities. Lethbridge drivers now gained easy access to tributaries prized by Crowsnest townsfolk. That year, a Lethbridge party could reliably drive right up to The Gap on a road that had three completed bridges.⁹⁰ Even without bridges, Lethbridge auto folk were ready to do whatever it took to get their fish. The Lethbridge Herald reassured readers that crossing streams presented few hazards for tires or car engines in their country getaways.⁹¹ In 1920, there were approximately 2,350 cars licenced to Lethbridge citizens, a statistic that the newspaper suggested could embolden the city’s Good Roads campaigners to push the government to build yet more roads in the province.⁹² The increased roadwork in the Pass thereafter introduced greater numbers of outsiders to the region. Roads bringing yet more outsiders to their region were one of the very reasons that the Coleman and Bellevue fishing associations, the latter forming in 1925, joined together in 1926.⁹³ Anglers believed that their collaboration would help see regulations enforced and tributary closures extended in southern watersheds that were now easily accessed by automobile drivers.⁹⁴ As we have seen, it was in the mid-1920s, as car drivers from towns well outside the Eastern Slopes increased, that Coleman, Bellevue, Pincher Creek, and Fort Macleod angling protective associations all pushed for extensive tributary closures in Southern Alberta. Their efforts seem to have directly influenced the fisheries department’s decisions in 1927 over which streams to close indefinitely in Southern Alberta.⁹⁵ Closed were Crowsnest River streams of prime concern to Coleman anglers: these comprised Connelly Creek and those westward: Rock, Byron, Gold, Lyons, York, Blairmore, McGillivrary Creeks, and, near the B.C. border, Allison Creek. The same legislation closed Beaver Mines Creek on the Castle River and tributaries of the Waterton River.⁹⁶ When R. T. Rodd met with anglers from communities that cast into these streams, including Fort Macleod, they had given him their “unanimous” support for the closures. He reported that only anglers in distant Lethbridge, and most of them car drivers, did not.⁹⁷

A Different Approach to Conservation in the Pass

However, Crowsnest Pass communities had mixed feelings about tributary closures, at least initially. From an early date, conservationists faced the reality of food fishing within coal mining communities. Wouldn’t closing tributaries simply keep law-abiding anglers out while food-hunting poachers continued to do their misdeeds along their lengths? By keeping streams open, and opening them earlier in the spring, many anglers felt that fishing would be better regulated, permitted anglers would act as a deterrence to poaching, and everyone would be pressed to obey the law. Indeed, throughout the Oldman basin, conservationists generally wanted to see streams opened and patrolled, rather than closed.

J. J. Gillespie, as the secretary of the Pincher Creek Anglers’ Association, appreciated the practical ends of fishing in his own community. The association had formed in April 1920 with the express purpose to “watch the streams and prevent if possible the dynamiting which has been pulled off in the past.”⁹⁸ In addition to protecting “the now almost extinct trout” in nearby streams from the work of “unscrupulous dynamiters,” its membership applied for trout fry from the Banff hatchery in order to help revive the fishery.⁹⁹ The association then engaged directly in protective work. After successfully securing some 40,000 rainbow trout and distributing them in one week in the Lower Oldman River, and Mill, Pincher, Drywood, and Yarrow Creeks, with others going to the Crowsnest Lakes and River, its members helped the RCMP slap charges on “six or seven” anglers fishing in closed waters or without permits.¹⁰⁰

But these stream closures did not initially sit well with the association aware of the food fishery nearby. Gillespie wrote to the Commission of Conservation in Ottawa that summer to complain about things. His association was happy with the fishery department’s plan to send fry to restock nearby streams, and he was sure to apply for more the next year. But anglers needed more support to enforce regulations, especially to stamp out what they saw as still-common dynamiting practices. Gillespie underlined the problem of stream closure as a conservation measure. Homesteaders in the area, he said, required fish for food during the summer, and most residents felt that closures were imposed on them by outsiders.¹⁰¹

Farther west in the Oldman basin, fish was certainly a dietary staple for coalminers. Joseph Brown, who chose to mine coal in the Crowsnest valley instead of enlisting to fight in World War I, remembered this reality. Steven Hume, writing Brown’s story from memories he related of the area, said that one of the creeks in the Crowsnest “once supplied Dolly Varden for the table between paydays when men like Joe earned a dollar a week and were thankful for it.”¹⁰² Children of coalminers did their part. Ted Pierzchala, whose father mined at Bankhead before moving to the Crowsnest in the 1920s, remembered spending “quite a lot of time fishing” on the river. “That was some of your fare. The fish you caught went on the table instead of buying something.”¹⁰³ When the fish guardian was not looking, Vince John Bosetti remembered constructing small dams on the river as a kid. He and his friends would use a snare pole to gather up mountain whitefish that his mother would pickle.¹⁰⁴ Miners likely had some difficulty finding time to fish and when they did, they probably restricted themselves to local streams near home. Union executives, such as James Burke, the secretary of the United Mine Workers of America’s Bellevue section, might have had enough time from work to pursue the good “sport” in more distant tributaries, as he did in one fishing expedition reported in 1911, but most miners probably fished more locally and pragmatically, when opportunities arose.¹⁰⁵ In 1908, the railcar shortage in Hillcrest seems to have cut enough mine production that “quite a few number have been putting in the time fishing,” the Coleman Miner reported.¹⁰⁶ The labour unrest leading to frequent strikes and slowdowns in the turbulent 1920s freed miners to fish, and they assuredly did for food now that their wages were cut. Across the Divide in British Columbia, miners on strike in 1922, according to the Lethbridge Daily Herald’s correspondent in Fernie, took up rods and reels along the Elk River and its mountain creeks, becoming, “expert anglers”: “they are following the piscatorial art and are helping out their food supply with daily offerings of greyling [sic].” The miners were following the law, fishing only grayling before the trout season opened on May 1.¹⁰⁷ The fisheries department recognized the effects of strikes, when thousands of miners with “nothing else to do but fish continuously” left their mark, as R. T. Rodd put it. The miners would have been “a great drain on the fishing in any district.”¹⁰⁸

John Kerr knew the reality of the food fishery in his mining community. Born in 1873 in Craigmark, Scotland, Kerr was the son of a coal miner who followed the family’s trade, first in Scotland and then, after immigrating to Canada in 1903 with his younger brother Bill, in Western Canadian coal fields. The two settled permanently in the Crowsnest area in 1906, by 1910 opening a General store in Passburg and later another in Bellevue.. Ardent anglers, he and his brother passed on the “fine points” of angling and hunting to John’s sons, James and John Jr., in a region that the family remembered as “still unspoiled, unfenced and teeming with fish and game.”¹⁰⁹ However, the brothers lived to witness immense changes, particularly as the population in the valley increased and environmental degradation became more evident on the river, prompting both of them to take up trout conservation.

Kerr’s approach was eminently pragmatic. He felt that stream closures announced in 1920 were much too heavy-handed, even “autocratic,” and certainly not suitable to the region.¹¹⁰ Writing an article in response to the Blairmore Enterprise’s editorial supporting closures, Kerr pointed out: “A large percentage of the residents in this district are fishers. It is a pleasant and profitable recreation.”¹¹¹ However, if tributaries were closed, “the hogs who have been dynamiting these streams every season for years would have a better opportunity for doing their dirty work if there were not fishers around.”¹¹² He advanced what he termed the “modern method” of conservation: that of keeping all streams open but using fish hatcheries to keep them fishable. The other element of this modern approach, consistently promoted in Southern Alberta, was that hatcheries could not only restock the waters with native trout, but “introduce other species of game trout.”¹¹³

The Kerr family history remembers John independently following up on his ideas. In the early 1920s, he apparently visited the Banff hatchery and spoke with “the man in charge,” undoubtedly R. T. Rodd, to strike up an arrangement for rainbow trout fry to be delivered by baggage car to the Hillcrest train station. From there, John and his son James did the legwork to get the fry planted.¹¹⁴ They continued to do this before fishing association memberships in the Crowsnest Pass grew to help in the work. Jean Kerr recalled the family’s efforts reviving the streams through fish plantings. She remembered John, his sons James and John Jr., his brother Bill, and others in the family heading out on horseback with wooden crates filled with rainbow trout to discharge into distant lakes.¹¹⁵

Crownest conservationists promoted sport as they recruited adherents from coal-mining communities. The Coleman Angling Association, formed in 1915, tried to involve working classes and got off “to a good start” with a modest fee of 25¢ (as opposed to the $2 charged by the High River association in 1920). The Coleman Bulletin reported “quite a large number have joined.”¹¹⁶ In 1915, the Passburg association similarly formed around the specific issues of dynamiting practices and the local need for an earlier season. How much these associations continued their work after organizing is difficult to ascertain. Born to key issues of the moment, they may well have fallen into dormancy only to revive when new concerns emerged. While John Kerr seems to have continued his individual efforts, the degree to which the Coleman association remained active is difficult to determine in the early 1920s. In 1924, the Bellevue Enterprise did not even recognize associations in the Crowsnest Pass, if they still existed. Pointing to British Columbia’s angling associations being successful in getting hundreds of thousands of fry from the provincial government for their streams (and seeming to overlook John’s own independent work), the newspaper lamented that, “it is too bad that some similar action cannot be taken in this district,” since its streams and lakes were “admirably adapted to the propagation of game fish.” If the Coleman association was indeed still active, the paper nevertheless suggested that on “several occasions” the previous year, residents of Pincher Creek and Cowley had “attempted to secure co-operation of Pass anglers, but were unsuccessful” in driving a campaign for restocking.¹¹⁷

The drive to get hatchery fry for their streams did reanimate the work of associations soon afterwards. In April 1925, a front-page story in the Blairmore Enterprise announced that a fish and game association had formed in Bellevue, when a group of men from the town and adjoining districts got together “for the purpose of organizing in an effort to propagate and protect trout fishing.”¹¹⁸ The organization was open to ideas, but a “general program” was in the works to temporarily close and stock smaller tributaries and suitable areas of small lakes. A Monday night follow-up meeting was “well attended.” John Kerr was named president and James Fisher, of Bellevue, secretary-treasurer; both were “enthusiasts of the first water.” There was talk of persuading anglers in “neighbouring camps” to join up. As the paper observed, “some form of organization is necessary to cope with the willful destruction of our fishing that has been going on in recent years.”¹¹⁹

As seen, Bellevue, Coleman, Pincher Creek, and Fort Macleod fish and game associations were by that point lobbying for hatchery fry and supporting at least temporary tributary closures. They encouraged sport angling and celebrated their work with convivial annual banquets. Held in 1925, the first anniversary dinner of the Blairmore Fish and Game Protective Association was described in the Blairmore Enterprise as quite the event. Hosted at the Bellevue Inn, the evening began at 8:00 p.m. with a “sumptuous” turkey dinner, followed by toasts to the King, speeches, songs from a community chorus, “highly delightful” fish storytelling, and prizes awarded for the association’s annual derby, with the brothers Kerr landing many of the honours for the best single-day baskets of speckled, rainbow, and bull trout. The recently appointed Methodist minister, J. W. Oliver, made a speech, and a certain Miss Hulme led songs while playing the piano. By that date, there were 160 members in the association.¹²⁰ These associations attempted to broaden rules-based angling across communities in such events as Blairmore’s derby in 1930. The local pharmacy donated a split-bamboo fishing rod (worth $20) as the prize for a two-pound-twelve-ounce speckled trout caught by an angler from Lundbreck and a pigskin fly book (worth $10) to the Blairmore angler who landed the largest bull trout, at five pounds, four ounces.¹²¹

All the same, angling associations promoting sport aimed to draw into the conservation movement working-class immigrants from Europe who fished to put food on the table. Residents of mining communities, whatever their cultural background, were encouraged to conserve in the interests of their long-term needs. By 1928, W. S. Purvis, representing the Coleman association, explained to R. T. Rodd that his members had gone to great lengths to “educate the general public” of the regulations, doing so on the understanding that, in return, the fisheries department would plant streams near the community with more fry.¹²² According to Rodd, reporting to his department, Purvis had suggested that “unless they were supplied with some fry for their district, it would be impossible to hold their club together, and as a great many of the members are miners of foreign extraction, they are more difficult to be made observe the laws than the average English speaking person.”¹²³ The association, then, served as a critical lynchpin between the fisheries department and the larger community around it, serving to recruit conservationists using the promise of improved local fishing as key to its campaigning. The association drew, rather than excluded, a mining community into angling as a form of recreation, or at least it would have miners fishing for food conform to the rules. Undoubtedly, these associations also offered a social outlet and, for many, a greater claim to civic status. But whereas Rodd’s report suggests that associations were effective in convincing the “foreign element” to purchase memberships (the Coleman association boasting over 200 members in 1928),¹²⁴ their greater success was in seeing that more people in the larger community purchase permits. In 1925, no fewer than 1,003 permits sold in the Crowsnest, which, according to Rodd, was largely the result of the efforts of members of the Coleman Angling Association.¹²⁵ No wonder, then, that in 1928 the association expressed confidence that it was largely due to its work that infractions in the district, which were significantly reduced from previous years, were only “of a minor character.”¹²⁶

Conservationists, then, aiming to guard trout for their sport, recognized the reality of fish in miner diets and considered the very nature of their work to include, rather than exclude, the broader population in their efforts. But however much these sports fishers acknowledged its reality, the food fishery should not obscure their real aim: protecting sport, and through hatchery work, propagating game species for recreation. When the Hillcrest Fish and Game Protective Association, which formed in 1926,¹²⁷ met with R. T. Rodd in 1932 to discuss their concerns for the Crowsnest fisheries, they pointedly raised the issue of “people catching large quantities of fish to preserve for winter use.” They likely had in mind those, now in the horrid economic circumstances of the Depression years, who were still resorting to illegal means of harvesting large quantities of fish. But the conservationists took it from Rodd’s response that “it is expected this year that some such people will learn (at some cost to themselves) that fish in the rivers are primarily for sport instead of food.”¹²⁸

The Beleaguered Bull Trout

Oldman River valley anglers shared with all Southern Albertans a common enemy in their efforts to revitalize streams: the bull trout. Attitudes toward the fish were set by the 1920s. The uncertain status of the bull trout had been reinforced over a decade earlier in the report of the 1910–11 Alberta and Saskatchewan Fisheries Commission. During the hearings, anglers had expressed their antipathy toward the fish and, by not making recommendations for protecting the bull trout in their report, the commissioners had indicated their agreement that the species deserved no special attention. The resulting regulations, enacted in 1912, explicitly protected cutthroat, mountain whitefish, and rainbow trout by limiting their catch within open seasons. They did the same for pike and pickerel. There were no specific measures introduced to protect bull trout.¹²⁹ Anglers could take this silence on bull trout to mean that the fish was freed for eradication.

Regulations changed critically in 1915, but mindsets did not. That year, the law still protected “trout, grayling or Rocky Mountain Whitefish” and insisted that anglers buy permits to fish them.¹³⁰ Just what constituted the term, “trout,” was contested in a watershed to the north of Calgary, the Red Deer River basin. There, bull trout was one of the only fish available for anglers. They had grown accustomed to fishing in Waskasoo Creek, a tributary of the Red Deer River, without a permit. Refusing to recognize the bull trout as a genuine species of trout, anglers still could claim that no “trout” swam in these waters. In 1916, two anglers who had been fined by the police for fishing at Waskasoo Creek without a permit responded by filing suit. In support of their case, the Red Deer Board of Trade’s A. T. Stephenson argued in a letter to the Red Deer News that the very spirit of both the commissioners’ report in 1911 and the 1912 regulations clearly indicated that the government had concurred with anglers about the unseemly quality of bull trout. Apart from some similar speckling, Stephenson claimed, the bull trout shared nothing with real trout: it had neither the game qualities of a trout species nor the spawning characteristics of trout in the region. Until the prosecutor could prove “that a bull trout is a species of trout,” he wrote, “I intend to fish the Red Deer River or its tributaries near here without a permit.”¹³¹

The Department of Marine and Fisheries was embarrassed when its Red Deer area fish guardian, Arthur B. Nash, published a newspaper letter supporting Stephenson’s decision to opt out of the permit system. Citing the 1915 fisheries regulations that did not require anglers to purchase permits to fish waters “not frequented by Trout, Grayling or Rocky Mountain Whitefish,” he said, definitively, “People will therefore clearly understand, that they are entitled to fish at Waskasoo Creek and the Red Deer River, at Red Deer without permits.”¹³²

Hastening to counter Nash’s damaging statement, the department’s chief inspector, G. S. Davidson, dispatched to the Red Deer News a letter he had received from Red Deer police inspector W. P. Lindsay, who offered his opinion on the law. Lindsay’s letter was published under the headline: “Do Bull Trout Come Within the Law?”¹³³ Lindsay believed they did. The law protected “every variety of trout,” he wrote, “and there is no doubt whatsoever that Bull Trout, otherwise known as Dolly Varden Trout, or Red Spotted Trout, is a trout in the fullest sense of the word.” The law, therefore, protected bull trout.¹³⁴

But the public mind was unmoved to accept the bull trout as a fish worthy of protection. The Calgary Angling Association (CAA) believed that the bull trout needed to go, regardless of what any pencil-pushing bureaucrat in Ottawa said. It continued to press the department to free up all restrictions on fishing bull trout, in and out of the season. In the meanwhile, the law might require anglers to purchase a permit to land “trout”, but the regulations only limited them to a daily creel limit of twenty-five cutthroat, rainbow and/or mountain whitefish.¹³⁵ They could take a limitless number of bull trout. The CAA members used the loophole to go all out against the fish. As mentioned, in 1921, they had hoped to get the fisheries department to reopen all streams in Southern Alberta except in the forest reserves. Those inside the reserves would remain closed for a year so that, in the main rivers, anglers could wage war against the bull trout, “there being no season limit on them.”¹³⁶ The CAA exploited the exclusion of bull trout in the per diem limit in other ways. In 1924, the CAA’s season-opener derby offered a purse for the “heaviest catch of fish taken on the opening day of the season” (with the profits from enrolments supporting Calgary hospitals)—but competitors could continue to land bull trout to supplement their weight even after catching their aggregate limit of twenty-five cutthroat, rainbow, and/or mountain whitefish.¹³⁷

Beyond using loopholes in the regulations against the fish, in 1924 the CAA continued to demand from the department the freedom to weed bull trout from streams outside the season.¹³⁸ Fisheries commissioner Edward E. Prince well knew that allowing unlimited bull trout hauls would empty some streams of fish altogether.¹³⁹ R. T. Rodd made the same point in his own letter to the department on the issue. While he might support weeding out bull trout on cutthroat streams, he feared that allowing anglers to fish them from streams outside the season would lead to disastrous results on Red Deer and North Saskatchewan streams where, he said, only bull trout, mountain whitefish, pike, and suckers were found. Anglers would quickly deplete those streams of fish, and the Banff hatchery, Rodd pointed out, with limited output, simply could not restock all streams emptied in such a way.¹⁴⁰

Rodd, meanwhile concerned by the CAA derby, suggested his department to look into bag limits on any trout, including bull trout, similar to regulations in British Columbia.¹⁴¹ Dominion Parks legislation, including Banff waters, specified bull trout as a game fish for its protection in 1925, and to remove all doubt about the status of the fish and stop culling elsewhere in Alberta, in 1927 the fisheries regulations finally named bull trout along with cutthroat, rainbow, Loch Leven, and mountain whitefish as protected under the law.¹⁴² They also included the fish in the maximum trout per diem allowed to anglers.¹⁴³ Fishing derbies, at least the ones the CAA had hosted, would never be the same.

When members of a community gathered into conservation associations, their efforts to sway government could carry considerable clout, nevertheless. The problem was that the priorities of the different associations depended both on local stream conditions and on socioeconomic needs, and thus were prone to conflict. The lack of collaboration among these associations annoyed fisheries department officials, who looked to them to communicate with each other and find agreement on policies they recommended to the department. Such was not the case. Calgary and High River associations sought, ultimately, to protect cutthroat. Anglers in both communities helped prompt the department to expand tributary closures as a blanket policy across Southern Albertan streams. Although some anglers in the Crowsnest Pass welcomed the same closures extending to the Oldman River basin, others did not: to some conservationists, stream closure was an ill-conceived measure given the reality of the food fishery in the region.

By 1925, the din of competing voices arguing about how to manage Alberta’s upstream and downstream fish stocks revealed sharply divergent views on ideal season dates and brought most anglers in the province into contention. At the same time, the preference of these recreational anglers for a plentiful supply of suitably “sporty” fish demanded a revised approach to conservation, especially in respect to protecting native species or introducing new ones. Whatever waters they fished and whatever their concerns, anglers usually looked in some manner to a common headwater in fisheries management, the work at the Banff hatchery.