10

What Was Driving Golf? Mobility, Nature, and the Making of Canadian Leisure Landscapes, 1870–1930

Elizabeth L. Jewett

According to golf lore, when David Mulligan arrived at the Country Club of Montreal in St. Lambert, Quebec, agitated after a difficult trip over badly kept roads and a windswept rail bridge, he made a poor drive off the first tee. His golfing buddies offered him a do-over swing, giving birth to the term “mulligan.”1 Mulligan’s game had been affected by his unsettling journey, from an urban centre to a rural setting, in an open-top automobile—still a relatively exclusive form of transportation in the early 1920s. His experience shows how mobility was a problematic but essential component of this particular elite leisure activity. For golfers, strolling though and consuming a natural, albeit highly manicured and even manufactured landscape was at the core of the playing experience. Golfers walked extensive distances on the course, and as their pastime became increasingly popular they also travelled farther and farther from home to participate in it.

This chapter investigates what the lenses of mobility and environmental history reveal about golf course development in the period between 1873 and 1930. Divided into three sections, it takes a nationwide perspective but focuses on examples from Toronto and the national parks in the Canadian Rockies. The first section examines how golf courses were designed with players’ views of nature in mind. It highlights the key aesthetic and playing principles circulating among golf course designers during the game’s “golden era”—from 1910 to 19452—and illustrates how golf course designs steered players along certain pathways, generating shared landscape experiences infused with implicit meanings about nature, leisure, and cultural identity.

The second section examines the relationship between golf courses and modern transportation systems in the borderlands that separated Canadian cities from the surrounding countryside during a period of rapid urbanization and outward sprawl. It focuses on the tension between two desires expressed by golfers while playing a course: easy access to their playing fields (by trolley, train, and automobile) and a sense of removal or distance from the bustle and pollution of city life (including those same transportation systems). The story of the Toronto Golf Club’s multiple relocations between 1873 and 1912 illustrates how the relationship between golf course landscapes and different modes of transportation played out in these borderland environments.

The third section deals with the incorporation of long-distance pleasure travel and golf into the pantheon of tourist activities available at major Canadian resorts. Transcontinental railways allowed (and encouraged) tourists to travel to new destinations in search of new experiences, and visiting the national parks in the Canadian Rockies was one of the most popular activities for well-heeled tourists around the turn of the last century. The rapid growth of tourism and increased competition led resort owners and park managers to develop an array of new amenities, including golf courses. Resorts across the country, and especially at Banff and Jasper, promoted golf as offering special playing experiences, in which traditional golf course characteristics complemented spectacular “natural” scenery.

The Nature of Canada’s Earliest Golf Courses

For almost five centuries before golf arrived in North America, the game’s core social, cultural, and environmental attributes were developing in the United Kingdom, where the majority of golf was played, and especially in Scotland. The traditional coastal links courses situated on sandy, treeless, undulating grazing lands remained dominant in golf culture for generations, but during the second half of the nineteenth century, golf’s growing popularity led to a number of courses being developed at inland and suburban locations. Railways and improved roads made these golf courses readily accessible to wealthy, status-seeking city dwellers with the financial freedom needed to pursue such refined outdoor leisure activities.3 It was during this period of transformation in the United Kingdom that golf crossed the Atlantic.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw golf courses developed across North America. Established in 1873, the Royal Montreal Golf Club was the first organized golf club on the continent.4 In Canada it was followed by courses in Quebec City (1874), Toronto (1876), Niagara-on-the-Lake (1881), Brantford (1881), Kingston (1886), Victoria (1889), Ottawa (1891), Halifax (1895), St. Andrews, NB (1895), Vancouver (1892), Winnipeg (1894), Regina (1896), Edmonton (1896), Saint John (1897), and Fredericton (1897). The earliest American courses were established during the same period, including those in Foxbury, PA (1887), St. Andrew’s, NY (1888), Shinnecock Hills, NY (1891), Brookline, MA (1893), Newport, RI (1893), and Chicago (1894). By the turn of the century, golf courses could be found from coast to coast.5

The game was initially carried from the United Kingdom in the luggage of wealthy Scottish merchants either visiting or settling in Canada; most of the earliest golf clubs had Scotsmen as founders, financiers, professionals, and members. During the nineteenth century, golf in Canada was exclusively an activity for upper- and upper-middle-class men of Scottish or Anglo-Saxon descent. Women from similar backgrounds made modest inroads starting in the late 1890s, when many golf clubs established separate ladies’ leagues and membership. However, it was not until the interwar years that participation in golf began to include significant numbers of individuals from different ethnic backgrounds. Thus, during the period from 1870 to 1930, the game of golf was part of a shared experience that reinforced behaviours recognizable and important to an affluent and privileged segment of Canadian society—precisely the kind of people who could pour substantial time and money into leisure, recreation, and pleasure travel.

Golf periodicals and the writings of important golf course architects show that two crucial principles influenced the design and playing experience of Canada’s private and resort golf courses between 1900 and 1940. The first was that the course had to look natural and be aesthetically pleasing to players as they moved through the landscape, advancing from hole to hole. The second was that the course had to provide a game that was challenging to superior golfers while not overly discouraging to those with less skill or practice time.

What exactly counted as “natural” on these golf courses? For golden-era golf course architects, an aesthetically pleasing course incorporated existing environmental features into the design or crafted artificial features to look as though they were part of the existing landscape. Early on, the features that made a course seem natural and beautiful were those traditionally found on Scottish seaside links—like the famous Old Course at St. Andrews—or in the countryside of England’s heathlands. However, the parameters of what constituted a natural, beautiful golf course broadened gradually as designers and architects encountered North America’s varied physical environments. The emphasis on natural-looking settings also reflected upper-middle-class sentiments about the detriments of urban living and the rewards of reconnecting with pastoral quietude and picturesque nature; playing one’s way through a golf course was akin to strolling through a manicured garden, estate, or park. Thus, an ideal visit to one of North America’s early golf courses would have provided a stimulating game, a respite from the noise, bustle, and pollution of the modern city, and perhaps even a reminder of “home” in the British Isles.

The second principle—that the course should be a challenging but welcoming playing field—required what has been termed a strategic design. Most golden-age golf course architects who worked in the United Kingdom and North America pursued strategic designs instead of the traditional penal structures for course layouts. Penal design had involved mostly predictable, straightforward, tee-to-fairway-to-green movement, with the construction of steep horizontal bunkers across the fairways in front of tees and greens meant to hinder all but the best shots. Strategic design, on the other hand, provided multiple options for the player by permitting different routes from tee to green. Better golfers could attempt the harder and more direct shots, which often involved hitting the ball over hazards like ponds, sand traps, and patches of rough, while less-skilled players could follow less-direct routes to the hole, thereby avoiding the hazards. Strategic course design maintained specific guidelines for length, routing, and the location of tees, fairways, greens, and hazards. Heroic design, which began to appear at the end of the period in question, combined aspects of the penal and strategic.6

The need for both a strategic playing field and a naturalistic landscape aesthetic affected the movement of players through the golf course as well as the sensuous experiences of the environment that movement produced. Golfers were expected to see nature “on the go,” with natural landscape features serving as both scenery and part of the playing field—a situation that distinguished golf from most other sporting activities, with the obvious exception of skiing. The desire to balance these principles and the importance of considering the golfer’s views while moving through the course can be discerned in the works of famous international designers such as the Englishmen Harry Colt and Hugh Alison, who designed the Toronto Golf Club’s new course in 1911, and the Canadian Stanley Thompson, who designed courses for Banff and Jasper during the mid-1920s.7

Colt and Alison sought to emphasize the natural features of each site selected for a golf course. In 1912, shortly before work began on the Toronto Golf Club’s course, Colt stated that “the only means whereby an attractive piece of ground can be turned into a satisfying golf course [was] to work with the natural features of the site in question.”8 Significantly, this emphasis on naturalness did not prevent Colt and Alison from making multiple changes to the environment on any hole where nature was found wanting; for example, they moved earth, cut and planted trees, and created hazards. The key concern was for these “improvements” to blend in and look as natural as possible. While designing the new Toronto course, Alison observed that “the banks of some of the bunkers can easily be modified and if torn out of the hills and natural undulations made, will look more natural.”9 Colt and Alison’s strategic design for the Toronto golf course involved a range of hole lengths, assorted fairway shapes, and variations in hole orientation. It also relied on shifting wind conditions to add an element of unpredictability to playing the course. Sporting principles often influenced aesthetic modifications to the playing field, but sometimes designers compromised these codes in order to incorporate natural features that they deemed especially appealing. For example, Alison, who believed that “three-shot holes are as a rule dull,” nevertheless felt compelled to include one on Toronto’s thirteenth tee because “the natural features give a splendid opportunity for introducing a hole of this kind.”10

Stanley Thompson had similar beliefs about naturalistic aesthetics, and about what players should experience of the landscape while moving through the golf course. Thompson’s golf career began at the Toronto Golf Club, where he caddied for well-known professional and greenkeeper George Cumming, who had overseen the implementation of Colt and Alison’s designs during construction of the new course in 1912. By the early 1920s, Thompson had established himself as a golf course architect and started writing booklets on the topic. In About Golf Courses: Their Construction and Up-Keep (1923), Thompson emphasized the importance of suitable terrain in golf course construction, even recommending analysis of the soil chemistry. However, a natural aesthetic remained crucial. He wrote,

Lately there has been a reaction—and rightly so—against the artificiality and grotesqueness of certain architecture. Nature must always be the architect’s model. . . . The development of the natural features and planning the artificial work to conform to them requires a great deal of care and forethought. . . . Oftentimes the natural beauty of many a golf course, which the average player assumes was always present, has been created by the skill of the engineer.11

Thompson came to be highly regarded for the sculpted characteristics of the courses he designed and for the balance he struck between gaming and aesthetic principles. The courses he designed for Jasper and Banff—which are discussed below—were among his most famous works. Indeed, a 1926 brochure for Jasper National Park described Thompson as a kind of diviner, capable of envisioning a fine golf course “where others saw only forest, rough brule land, swamp, a wild lake shore line and a plain with rocky outcroppings.”12 Designers like Colt, Allison, and Thompson carefully considered the landscape experiences players would have as they moved through the course; the need for a challenging and natural-looking course was a constant concern, whether it was located in a wilderness park, a pastoral country setting, or—as was the case for most golf courses developed during this period—on the periphery of a bustling, fast-growing city.

Golf, Nature, and Mobility in Canada’s Urban Borderlands

Two seemingly contradictory elements were key to the location of Canada’s earliest golf course landscapes. Many club members lived in the city and wanted easy access to a course. However, separation from an urban setting was necessary, to ensure both affordable land for the playing field and the pastoral quietude and naturalistic aesthetic that were crucial parts of the traditional golfing experience. Thus, North America’s first golf course landscapes were developed on the edges of urban centres, in borderland areas that had not been incorporated into the city, but were not fully part of the countryside either. These borderlands underwent massive changes in the decades around the turn of the century, with industrial and residential developments appearing along new and improved transportation corridors. Golf courses came under great pressure from this development, and, as shown below, several original clubs relocated their courses farther from fast-growing cities even before the nineteenth century drew to a close.13

Most of the early golf clubs rented farmland for their courses or made arrangements with city councils to use park areas on the edge of town. For example, the Toronto Golf Club’s original nine-hole course, laid out in 1876, was located beyond the city’s eastern limits on rented pasture and woodland owned (and used) by a local farmer. He insisted that no trees be cut down and that there should be no “demonstrations which might alarm the grazing animals.”14 The property bordered Coxwell Avenue to the west, the Grand Trunk Railway corridor to the north, Woodbine Avenue to the east, and Queen and Kingston roads to the south. It was also conveniently close to the home of club founder and transplanted Scotsman Lamond Smith.15

Other early Canadian golf courses were similarly located in the borderland between city and countryside. Members of the Royal Montreal Golf Club first played golf on Fletcher’s Field, a city-owned park to the east of Mount Royal, near the present-day intersection of Avenue du Parc and Avenue des Pins. The Royal Quebec Golf Club began play at Cove’s Field on the Plains of Abraham. The British military had controlled this undeveloped and partially overgrown space on the edge of the city until 1871, when it turned it over to the Canadian government, which decided to use it as a park.16 Winnipeg’s first golf course was developed in connection with the Manitoba Penitentiary (today’s Stony Mountain), but it was a short-lived affair and was replaced by the Norwood Golf Club, also located well outside the city.17 On Vancouver Island, the Victoria Golf Club rented seaside pasturelands in Oak Bay, six kilometres east of the city centre, on which to play the game.18 In Prince Edward Island, the Belvedere Golf Club found its home on farmland north of Charlottetown.19

Intra- and interurban transportation systems in Canada were changing rapidly in the late nineteenth century. While most country roads remained earth surfaced or wood planked, many city streets were being improved and hard surfaced, thanks in part to growing concerns over health and sanitation.20 Horse-drawn streetcars began to appear in large centres like Toronto and Montreal during the 1870s but had limited success due to high fares, the vagaries of animal power, and the proximity of workers’ homes to their places of employment.21 During the 1880s, the development of electricity as a reliable energy source allowed tramways in these same urban areas to grow and became a vital means of transportation. The same period saw railways become a crucially important mode of transportation. Between the 1870s and 1890s, new railroad corridors connected Canadian cities and the neighbourhoods within them. The Intercolonial Railway had linked Quebec and Halifax by 1873; British Columbia entered Confederation with the promise of a transcontinental railway; and companies like the Grand Trunk were laying tracks across central Canada and into the United States. Cities expanded outwards during this period of improved transportation and rapid population growth, with residential and industrial development pushing into surrounding farm and woodlands. For example, new tramlines that radiated outwards from the city centre led to the development of “streetcar suburbs.”22 Like the urban borderlands in which they were located, Canada’s early golf course landscapes did not remain static. The trams, trolleys, railways, macadamized roads, and other new technologies and infrastructure of mobility that made it possible for Canadian cities to expand outwards made it easier for golfers to reach their playing fields. However, they also raised land prices and threatened the aesthetic principles that governed golf course landscapes.

Many clubs, including the Toronto Golf Club, felt the need to relocate because of development pressures in these urban borderlands. Between 1876 and 1912, the Toronto Golf Club occupied three different sites in the farmlands that ringed the city. Each move involved factors related to transportation and urban development, as can be seen when the club first moved south towards the Woodbine Race Course. Access to this new location was much easier due to the macadamized road and tram service along Queen Street. The club’s papers note that “in other directions no other ‘country’ was so readily accessible as the neighbourhood of the Woodbine racecourse, and there [the members] sought for suitable unoccupied land on which to lay out their projected golf course.”23

The Toronto Golf Club expanded its playing field northwards at this second location in 1894, with the course spanning Gerrard Street so as to incorporate farmland rented from the Molson Bank and from club member and then-captain Walter G.P. Cassels. Early golf course landscape ideals were not at odds with this rural setting; the members had little concern with modifying the rented pasturelands because their sandy soils and undulating surfaces already resembled Scottish linkslands, which many considered ideal playing fields. Club members were especially pleased that the new property comprised only pasture and not crops.

Figure 10.1. The Toronto Golf Club at its second location, near the Woodbine Race Course, c. 1905. The clubhouse can be seen in the background and hazards in the foreground. Author’s collection.

Members of the Toronto Golf Club continued to feel development pressures at this location. The city kept growing, its boundaries creeping steadily eastward beyond the Don River. Transportation to the city’s eastern borderlands improved: the horse-drawn trolleys that ran along King Street were soon stopping within a mile of the course. A train ride from Union Station to Lindenhurst Street Station, located north of the course, provided another option for reaching the playing field. The private automobile became a preferred mode of transportation for the club’s wealthiest members after 1904, when Cassel started driving his Toronto-built Russell electric runabout to the course.24 Membership grew from 150 in 1894 to 220 in 1908, but the increased noise and smoke from the nearby railway tracks and switching yards disturbed many club members. The club attempted to purchase adjacent farmland in order to expand the course again and control development around its playing field, but property prices had risen too high. Relocation again seemed the best option.25

In the summer of 1910, the Toronto Golf Club’s membership selected a property that straddled the Etobicoke River in Peel County—twenty-five kilometres west of its existing course, and nineteen kilometres west of the city centre—as a suitable location for its third golf course. Yet, managing the tension between city members’ desire for easy access to the course and the aesthetic values of a secluded pastoral locale remained a concern. The club’s 1910 annual report emphasized the transportation benefits of the proposed location. Specifically, four transportation routes were available to club members: the lines of the Lake Shore Electric Cars and Grand Trunk Railway to the south and the Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific railways to the north.26 Club members appreciated these multiple options for reaching the new course, but modern transportation corridors also presented drawbacks. For example, while club president G.A. Sweny reported that the site chosen for the clubhouse had a beautiful setting, would provide stimulating views of the course, and was sufficiently distant from public roads, he worried about its proximity to the Grand Trunk Railway line. The rail corridor was only half a mile away, and although it was hidden from view by forest, the smoke and noise produced by passing trains threatened to disrupt the genteel atmosphere desired for the clubhouse.27

Many of Canada’s early golf clubs had experiences similar to the Toronto Golf Club, relocating their courses at least once during the period between 1873 and 1914 as a result of the game’s increasing popularity, urban development pressures, and the imperative to maintain a naturalistic aesthetic for players moving through the course. In all cases, access was an important factor in course location. For instance, in 1891 the Royal Montreal Golf Club decided to relocate in response to encroaching residential development and increased public use of the parklands on the eastern side of Mount Royal. After considering an impractical scheme that would have moved the course farther up the slopes of Mount Royal, the club relocated to farmland that it purchased fifteen kilometres west of the city centre, in an area of Dixie (now Dorval) that was accessible by railway. For the Royal Quebec, concerns about the future of golf on Cove’s Field arose in 1908 when the National Battlefields Commission decided to develop the Plains of Abraham as a commemorative park. After several years of searching, the club relocated in 1915 to a parcel of land near Montmorency Falls, twelve kilometres east of the city centre, which it rented from the Quebec Railway, Light, Heat, and Power Company.28

Transportation and accessibility were issues even for Canadian golf clubs that did not relocate during this period. For example, the Victoria Golf Club arranged for a special tramline to be built from the city centre to the course to help bring members to play. In Prince Edward Island, the Belvedere Golf Club’s location outside Charlottetown remained relatively stable, but local golf enthusiasts complained that it “was just too far from town . . . and that those without horses were at a disadvantage.” Driving to the course was not an option between 1908 and 1918, when the province banned automobiles from its public roads. Consequently, in 1912 a special summer carriage service linked the city and the course, running on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons at a cost of fifteen cents per passenger.29 While these and other golf courses maintained their original location, and many others moved around in the borderland between city and country, a small number of golf courses were built very, very far from any major population centres. Resort golf exaggerated both the practice of travelling to the course and the golfers’ experiences of nature while traversing the course.

Railways and Resort Golf in the Rockies

By the time the Toronto Golf Club began constructing its Etobicoke course, in 1912, new golf course landscapes were emerging in Canada. Resort golf, one of the most important new golf experiences, developed in conjunction with an increase in tourism facilitated by Canada’s largest railway companies. Resort golf merged long-distance pleasure travel, nature viewing, and genteel outdoor leisure activities. The relationship between mobility and the environment was much different in these golf courses than in the fast-changing urban borderlands, where the vast majority of golf was played in North America. Exponentially greater travel distances (and costs) were involved, and the golf courses were also at a much greater remove from the bustle and pollution of the modern city. Furthermore, at resort golf courses, the pastoral garden or estate park aesthetic common to most North American golden-era golf courses complemented the surrounding natural scenery. In some cases, as with the resort courses in the Canadian Rockies owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the Canadian National Railway (CNR), sublime natural scenery came close to dominating the carefully manicured playing field.

The origins of resort golf in Canada can be traced to 1905, when the CPR purchased the Algonquin Hotel and its associated golf course in the New Brunswick town of St. Andrews “by-the-sea.” In the years that followed, golf became an increasingly important component of the company’s tourist operations, with most CPR resorts developing a golf course as part of their recreational complexes. For example, travellers staying at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City could golf at the Seigniory Club or the Chateau Montebello.30 From the CPR’s Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, guests could be driven west to play golf on a course beside the meandering Humber River. On the West Coast, guests of the Hotel Vancouver and the Empress Hotel enjoyed special golfing privileges at the Shaughnessy Heights Golf Club and the Victoria Golf Club, respectively.31

Here the focus is on the CPR’s operations at Banff and on the CNR’s rival operations at Jasper. Two of the most widely advertised Canadian golfing venues, they quickly became famous both nationally and internationally. It is ironic that these courses should become icons of Canadian golf, for they were both developed in wilderness parks that were far from the nearest major population centre at a time when Canada (and Canadian golf) was experiencing rapid urbanization. Being located at very high altitudes, they also offered some of the country’s shortest playing seasons. However, these courses enjoyed special attributes, related to modern transportation systems and scenic environments, that differentiated them from the typical course located on an urban periphery.

The CPR opened its Banff Springs Hotel in 1888, and tourism to Banff grew steadily into the twentieth century. As Elsa Lam discusses elsewhere in this collection, the CPR developed new amenities, activities, and attractions for tourists, and in 1911, the CPR president (and golf enthusiast) Thomas Shaughnessy decided to add a golf course to the company’s facilities at Banff. He hired Scotsman and golf professional William E. Thomson, then working on a golf course in Winnipeg, to design and oversee construction of the first course in Banff.32 Thomson selected a site near the foot of the Banff Springs Hotel, beside the Bow River in the narrow valley directly below the cliffs of Tunnel Mountain. The opening of the nine-hole course on July 15, 1911, coincided with the official opening of the park to automobile traffic.33 The course was popular with guests but expensive to maintain. A wartime drop in tourism to Banff led the CPR to relinquish control of the course to the federal Department of the Interior, which planned to expand the course to eighteen holes.

Resort golf in the Canadian Rockies became a competitive affair in 1922, when the federal government amalgamated several financially troubled railway companies to form the government-owned CNR. Its transcontinental mainline traversed the Rockies in Jasper National Park, and company president Henry Thornton—an avid golfer—wanted to duplicate the CPR’s success at Banff by turning the Jasper townsite into a major tourist resort. Jasper’s first golf course was a rudimentary nine-hole course that park staff developed beside the bungalow camp at Lac Beauvert as an amenity for visiting tourists. However, Thornton had ambitious plans for that scenic lakeside property. In 1924 the CNR leased the bungalow camp, the original nine-hole course, and a three-hundred-acre parcel on which a new, larger course could be laid out and immediately began development of the resort known today as Jasper Park Lodge. The railway hired Stanley Thompson, the rising star of Canadian golf course design, to lay out a high-quality course that would help draw golf enthusiasts to its new resort. Two hundred men and fifty teams of horses laboured to clear and grade the course to Thompson’s specifications; heavy blasting was required in places, and forty freight car loads of topsoil provided the course with suitably natural-looking undulations and a surface more amenable to turf grass. Thompson routed the course so that many of the holes aligned with distant mountain peaks, thereby giving golfers a sublime natural backdrop as well as a prominent landmark towards which to aim. The first nine holes of the new course were opened in 1925, and the full course began operation the following year. Thompson’s work at Jasper Park Lodge helped cement his reputation as one of North America’s most visionary golf course designers.34

To defend the Banff Springs Hotel’s status as the premier resort in the Canadian Rockies, the CPR renovated the hotel and added new amenities in the mid-1920s. In 1927 the railway reacquired control of the Banff golf course from the Department of the Interior and hired Thompson to redraft a design for an eighteen-hole course that Scottish architect Donald Ross had drawn up for the site in 1919. Thompson reworked a few of Ross’s holes with his own signature style but designed the remainder from scratch. Implementing Thompson’s vision for the site required that the CPR acquire more land on the narrow valley floor—specifically, from the adjacent auto camp, a very popular (and nominally egalitarian) tourist amenity that park managers had prioritized over the more exclusive golf course during the early 1920s.35 The park quickly relocated the auto camp; resort golf now took precedence on the section of valley floor beneath the skirts of the Banff Springs Hotel. The golf course had started off as an amenity that catered to a limited number of the CPR’s guests, but by the mid-1920s, golf had become much more popular among North America’s touring classes—from the very wealthy to status-seeking members of the middle class. This led resort managers to treat distinctive, high-quality golf courses as attractions in and of themselves, capable of luring pleasure travellers to the Canadian Rockies from faraway population centres. Not only did the railway companies make their resort golf courses prominent within the Banff and Jasper townsites, but they also assigned them a special place in their tourism promotion campaigns.

Figure 10.2. The expanded Banff golf course, seen in relation to the Banff Springs Hotel, in the early 1930s. American Golfer (1933).

In promoting Rocky Mountain resort golf, the CPR and CNR tended to address older, wealthier, more genteel tourists not inclined to participate in auto camping and other “roughing it” types of park activity—refined customers who had both the financial and cultural capital to pursue golf at a distant, expensive resort.36 The advertisers expected resort golfers to have the health and wealth required to travel long distances for pleasure, as well as sufficient knowledge of golf’s traditional landscape aesthetic to appreciate the special meanings implied in the process of playing their way through the course. The resort courses in Banff and Jasper offered touring golfers something unique. The pastoral or garden-like naturalistic aesthetic of a typical North American golf course was juxtaposed against a backdrop of wilderness scenery: serrated mountain peaks, snowfields, dense timber, and glacier-fed watercourses. In resort golf tourism, then, the pathways that players followed through the environment—that is, the most commonly travelled routes from tee to green on each hole of the playing field—embodied the usual aesthetic and strategic principles of golden-age golf course design, as well as an exclusive experience of what by the 1910s had become iconic Canadian environments. The railways presented their trains, tracks, and hotels as the devices that made this special, doubly exclusive experience of nature accessible to touring golfers.

Advertisements for the Banff Springs and Jasper Park Lodge golf courses emphasized that wild, rugged mountain environments formed a crucial part of visiting golfers’ landscape experiences. A notice for the CPR’s Banff Springs course that appeared in Canadian Golfer magazine in 1915 highlighted the “rugged grandeur” of the surrounding peaks and the rarefied mountain air “that adds years to your life.”37 Promoters regularly described the Bow River and the surrounding mountains as if they were part of the course: one ad boasted that the course had a “romping river for hazards and mile-high peaks for out of bounds.” Players could elevate their game on one of the “finest, most perfectly balanced and most scenically beautiful courses in the world.”38 Similar descriptions flavoured many promotions for golf in Jasper. One booklet described the Jasper course as a “little bit of Heaven” and asked, “What golfer would not want to subscribe to this when he hears that here is a golf course surrounded with snow-capped peaks?” Advertisements for Jasper placed in Canadian Golfer magazine by the CNR in 1927 called the course a “mountain paradise” and boasted of its “tonic air.”39

Even advertisements that emphasized the strategic features of the resort playing field mentioned the aesthetic qualities of the surrounding environment. For example, a 1929 brochure for Banff suggested that “one feature to suit all types of golfers . . . is the use of three tees for every hole providing three courses [in one],” and then went on to describe the course as “superbly located on the banks of the Bow River, and guarded by huge bastions of rock, turreted and pinnacled like the fortified castles of old.”40 Brochures for the Jasper golf course treated the natural beauty and strategic design of each hole as if they were inseparable. For example, hole number nine, which was known as “Cleopatra,” was represented as “a straight decline . . . down to a green of unique configuration, with Pyramid Mountain in grandeur beyond.”41 The brochure Golf at Jasper in the Canadian Rockies reported that “in planning the Jasper Park Course very careful attention was given to the hole arrangement. . . . The course will be somewhat more difficult than the usual run of courses—but alternative routes make it enjoyable for all classes of players.”42 Here, a player’s ability to adapt to atypical environmental conditions counted for as much as their technical skill, as these conditions shaped the way golfers moved through the course and the emotions invoked by that movement.

Figure 10.3. The tee shot at “Cleopatra,” the ninth hole on the Jasper Lodge golf course, with Pyramid Mountain in the background. Golf at Jasper in the Canadian Rockies booklet (1928). Author’s collection.

Other Canadian railway resorts used promotional materials to play up their golf courses’ distinctive settings and natural scenery, though none deployed this theme as strongly or consistently as the resorts in the Rocky Mountain parks did. The CPR, which had more extensive resort and hotel holdings than the CNR, was especially keen to emphasize the variety of its resort playing fields. As early as 1922, a CPR booklet titled Golf in Canada presented golf tourism as a refined way of encountering Canada’s diverse environments:

From the Atlantic to the Pacific a traveling devotee of the “game of games” on the World’s Greatest Highway can have his golf . . . on two hundred and more seaside and inland courses . . . whilst as regards scenic environments, mountain lake, river and woodland—there is nothing in the world that compares to them.43

Instead of distracting from a traditional golfing experience, Canada’s varied environments offered attractions for the touring golf enthusiast, adding natural variety and a degree of exoticism to golf courses that otherwise offered relatively undifferentiated landscape experiences. Alluding to the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, which was world famous as the archetypical and premier links course, the CPR assured golfers that its seaside course in St. Andrews, NB, was “not unworthy to bear the hallowed name.”44 Of the Seigniory Club in Quebec City, the company’s publicists boasted that Stanley Thompson’s course design made excellent use of the “wonderful opportunities provided by Mother Nature . . . [as] tees and greens are being shaped to conform to the terrain, and many a tumbling brook and pocket of bolder is being utilized for a natural, sporty hazard.”45 Playing golf beside the Humber River at Toronto’s Royal York course was described as “delightful” due to the “many groves of pine, elm, maple, oak, and birch, and the land is naturally rolling.”46 In Victoria, publicity warned visiting golf enthusiasts that the beauty of the landscape surrounding the CPR’s course could provide pleasurable challenges: “the emerald fairways of the course fringe the coast-line, with the dancing waves waiting to penalize the unwary golfer who slices or hooks at some of the rocky tees . . . with a superb panorama of cobalt sea and snow-clad Olympics to tempt the eye from the ball.”47 The railways advertised their resorts and passenger lines to dedicated golf enthusiasts as a means to a golfing end, and the language used in their promotional materials suggested that the familiar experience of moving through a natural-looking playing field could uniquely complement Canada’s distinctive local environments from coast to coast.

Conclusion

Modern transportation systems allowed for the development of golf course landscapes outside Canadian cities and helped to popularize the game. They prompted many borderland or suburban golf clubs to relocate, due to the incongruities between these technologies and ideas about what constituted a proper golf course landscape. New and improved networks of mobility also helped create new forms of recreation, such as resort golf, which introduced golf course landscapes to new physical environments. The ability to travel to resorts and play golf created a specific class-based experience of “nature” epitomized in the dual architectural goals of creating both aesthetic landscapes and strategic playing fields. Although the origins of the golf term “mulligan”—in David Mulligan’s terrible drive back in the 1920s—will be unfamiliar to all but the most ardent of present-day golf enthusiasts, his story illustrates how the changing relationships between leisure, mobility, and the environment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century played a profoundly important role in shaping not only Canadian golf courses, but also golf culture more generally.

Notes

1 “The Origins of the Mulligan,” Country Club Montréal website, accessed 14 January 2016, http://www.countryclubmontreal.com/the-club/the-origin-of-the-mulligan.

2 These dates extend the golden age of golf course design commonly accepted by golf architects to incorporate the earliest incarnations as well as the World War II years.

3 Geoffrey Cousins, Golf in Britain: A Social History from the Beginning to the Present (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1975).

4 Golf spread throughout the British Empire during this period. The Royal Adelaide Golf Club in Australia was formed in 1870, the Christchurch Golf Club in New Zealand in 1873, and the Cape Golf Club in South Africa in 1888. The Royal Montreal Golf Club received its royal prefix in 1884.

5 For more information, see George B. Kirsch, Golf in America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Richard J. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

6 Paul Daley, ed., Golf Architecture: A Worldwide Perspective (Victoria, NSW: Full Swing Golf, 2003).

7 Classic texts on golden-era golf course design include Alister Mackenzie, The Spirit of St. Andrews (New York: Broadway, 1995); Donald Ross, Golf Has Never Failed Me: The Lost Commentaries of Legendary Golf Architect Donald J. Ross (Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear, 1996); and Charles Blair Macdonald, Scotland’s Gift: How America Discovered Golf (London: Tatra, 2003).

8 Harry Colt, “Golf Architecture,” in The Book of the Links, ed. Martin H.F. Sutton (London: W.H. Smith & Son, 1912), 195.

9 Harry Colt, “Suggestions in the Toronto Golf Club’s Course,” 12 May 1913, Colt and Alison Letters 1913–1920, Toronto Golf Club Archives (hereafter TGCA).

10 C.H. Alison, “Report on 18 Hole Course,” 3 October 1920, Colt and Alison Letters 1913–1920, TGCA.

11 Stanley Thompson, About Golf Courses: Their Construction and Up-Keep (Toronto: Stanley Thompson & Company, 1923), 10. For more information on Thompson’s career, see James Barclay, The Toronto Terror (Toronto: Sleeping Bear, 2000).

12 Henry W. Thornton, Golf at Jasper (Ottawa: Canadian National Railways, 1926), 8–9; “3 Booklets about Jasper Park Lodge Golf Course,” file 2, MS-2020015, Stanley Thompson Society Archives, Guelph, ON.

13 On America’s urban borderlands around the turn of the last century, see John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 2, 5–6. On Canada’s urban peripheries, see Jennifer Bonnell, Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); and Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

14 “The Toronto Golf Club, 1894–1944,” 4, Historical Correspondences and Sundry Items, vol. 1, TGCA.

15 Lamond’s brother Farquharson was an early member and first captain of the Royal Quebec Golf Club, and he likely fostered Lamond’s fondness of the game, especially when they would play on Lamond’s property outside the eastern limits of Toronto, near where the first Toronto course would be laid out.

16 J. Michel Doyon, The Royal Quebec Golf Club (Quebec City: Royal Quebec Golf Club, 2005).

17 See J. Alan Hackett, Manitoba Links: A Kaleidoscopic History of Golf (Winnipeg: Gold Quill, 1998).

18 See Peter Corley-Smith, Victoria Golf Club, 1893–1993: 100 Treasured Years of Golf (Victoria: Morriss, 1992).

19 “Land Conveyances, 1903–1908,” series 5, ACC 4054, Belvedere Golf and Winter Club fonds, Prince Edward Island Provincial Archives, Charlottetown (hereafter PEIPA).

20 Larry McNally, “Roads, Streets, and Highways” in Building Canada: A History of Public Works, ed. Norman R. Ball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 35–36.

21 Paul-André Linteau, “Urban Mass Transit” in Building Canada: A History of Public Works, ed. Norman R. Ball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 62.

22 Harris, Creeping Conformity, 56–70.

23 “Toronto Golf Club, 1894–1944,” 2.

24 Jack Batten, The Toronto Golf Club, 1876–1976 (Toronto: Bryant, 1976), 35.

25 “Toronto Golf Club, 1894–1944,” 7–8.

26 Toronto Golf Club, Annual Report of the Directors, 1910, 2, TGCA. See also “Toronto Golf Club, 1894–1944,” 9–11.

27 G.A. Sweny, “To the Members of the Toronto Golf Club, December 19th, 1910,” 1–2, TGCA.

28 Doyon, Royal Quebec Golf Club, 24–27.

29 Letters of the Executive, 27 April 1912 and 3 June 1912, Correspondences and Reports 1911–1918, series 4, ACC 4054, Belvedere Golf and Winter Club fonds, PEIPA.

30 “Seigniory Club and Chateau Montebello: Lucerne-in-Quebec” (brochure), 1940, box 6, no. 49, Pamphlet Collection, Canadian Pacific Archives, Montreal (hereafter CPA).

31 “The Royal York” (brochure), n.d., box 8, no. 28c; “The Hotel Vancouver” (brochure), n.d., box 6, no. 69; “The Empress Hotel” (brochure), 1929, box 4, no. 42, all in Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

32 E.J. Hart, Banff Springs Golf: A Heritage of the Royal and Ancient Game in the Canadian Rockies (Altona, MB: EJH Literary Enterprises, 1999), 8.

33 Ibid., 18.

34 Meghan Power, The History of Jasper (Banff: Summerthought, 2012), 94–95, 110–13; C.J. Taylor, Jasper: A History of the Place and Its People (Markham, ON: Fifth House, 2009), 82–85.

35 Hart, Banff Springs Golf, 18.

36 Tourists partaking in resort golf shared what sociologist John Urry has called the “tourist gaze,” wherein the tourist experience is an amalgam of contingently created images, construed according to specific forms of seeing. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). Golf tourism was thus a form of consumption; although the “product” (the golfscape defined as a natural landscape and playing field) was not used up in the consumption process, it was nevertheless the “product” around which conventions (e.g., class distinction) were mediated. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2.

37 Canadian Golfer 3, no. 3 (1917): 169.

38 “Banff: Banff Springs Hotel in the Canadian Rockies” (brochure), 1929; “What to Do at Banff in the Canadian Rockies: Banff Springs Hotel, a Canadian Pacific Hotel” (brochure), 1928, box 9, both in Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

39 “Golf at Jasper in the Canadian Rockies” (brochure), 1926, Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives, Jasper, AB; Canadian Golfer 13, no. 3 (1927): 209.

40 “Banff: Banff Springs Hotel,” 8.

41 “Golf at Jasper Park in the Canadian Rockies,” 14.

42 Ibid., 11.

43 “Golf in Canada” (brochure), June 1922, RG31 X1033, Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

44 “Algonquin Hotel, St. Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick Canada” (brochure), 1935, Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

45 “Seigniory Club/Chateau Montebello: Lucerne-in-Quebec” (brochure), 1930, box 6, no. 42, Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

46 “The Royal York” (brochure), n.d., box 6, no. 26, Pamphlet Collection, CPA.

47 “The Empress Hotel.”