11
Rails, Trails, Roads, and Lodgings: Networks of Mobility and the Touristic Development of the “Canadian Pacific Rockies,” 1885–1930
Elsa Lam
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), in tandem with the Dominion Department of the Interior, developed Canada’s Rocky Mountain region as a nationally iconic area for nature tourism. Often remembered for its role in consolidating the Canadian nation-state via its transcontinental rail line, the CPR derived its principal revenue from government cash and land subsidies as well as charges for the movement of natural resources, finished goods, and settlers across the country. Yet it quickly realized that tourist travel—particularly to the Rocky Mountains—could provide supplemental income while showcasing railway-owned land in western Canada to potential investors and immigrants. To encourage tourism, the CPR played a key role in creating the landscape image of the “Canadian Pacific Rockies”: a wild yet subdued mountainous playground that embodied both the challenges and the opportunities facing the young Canadian nation-state. One of the most powerful private entities in Canada in the years following Confederation, the CPR actively shaped not only perceptions of the region, but also the physical reality of the mountains by constructing the railway and, later, other mobility networks (e.g., hiking trails and highways) as well as accompanying hospitality structures. These rails, roads, trails, and lodgings remain integral parts of the tourist industry and tourist experience in the Canadian Rockies.
This chapter examines two periods in which the CPR made the Rockies a tourist draw. At the end of the nineteenth century, the company promoted a form of luxury rail tourism that featured train cars designed for landscape viewing and amenities such as the mountainside Banff Springs Hotel. In line with European conceptions of sublime landscapes as aesthetically thrilling but physically nonthreatening, these features encouraged tourists to view the dramatic terrain while swaddled in the creature comforts of first-class railcars and resorts. Then, in the 1920s, the CPR undertook a contrasting set of developments in both form and function: a highway constructed in part with CPR funds, and a network of hiking and horse-riding trails that led to rustic lakeside bungalow camps. This initiative coincided with the growing popularity of automobile travel and recreational engagement with nature. Tourists experienced the Canadian Rockies in a new way, with romantic conceptions of rusticity coming to the fore. This paralleled the popular conception of western American landscapes as remnants of the frontier West in the same period, which William Cronon has characterized as offering an antidote to the ills of an overly civilized world. Yet continuity also marked both periods of touristic development, as both luxury rail and automobile bungalow camps relied upon relatively new technological forms to cater to wealthy travellers who sought an exclusive experience of nature.1
By emphasizing the integral relationships between networks of mobility, accommodations, and tourist experiences of western Canada as a wilderness setting, this chapter contributes a new perspective to the extensive literature concerning the CPR and its many enterprises.2 It also shows the value of understanding mobility as more than simply transportation technology and infrastructure. Indeed, vehicle interior design, lodging architecture, and other forms of accommodations and amenities have been integral to perceptions and experiences of both travel and natural environments. In this sense, the chapter situates itself alongside historical work that interprets hotels and motels as crucial components of mobility networks.3 When it came to moving through the Canadian Rockies, elite tourists saw the natural landscape through a combination of mobility experiences: pleasurable long-distance travel, an array of slower and sometimes adventurous localized treks, and moments of staying put.
Rails, Luxury Hotels, and Canada’s First National Park
In the late nineteenth century, the CPR depicted the Rockies as an untouched natural region by celebrating the mountains as a newly discovered raw landscape that possessed the edifying properties of remote and unfamiliar environments. The company simultaneously promoted travel to the Rockies—which it dubbed the “Canadian Alps”—to prospective American, European, and Canadian travellers with promises of comfortable access and luxurious accommodation (fig. 11.1). The CPR modelled this seeming contradiction—between pristine landscape and civilized amenities—on the precedent of elite tourism to Switzerland, where rail construction had since the 1850s led to the development of the Alps as a tourist destination.4 Emulating the Swiss, the Canadian company offered rail tours with prolonged stays at high-class hotels in mountain settings. Guests even had the chance to participate in mountaineering excursions led by professional Swiss guides. Making the comparison explicit, the guides paraded on railway platforms in traditional costume. Several of these paid professionals were even housed in chalets in the CPR-built “Edelweiss” village, which was visible from passing trains.5
Figure 11.1. Montage of CPR hotels as icons of civilization set against a natural backdrop of forests and mountains. This image was the frontispiece of several CPR tourist brochures in the 1890s, including Summer Tours by the Canadian Pacific Railway (1894). Courtesy of Toronto Reference Library.
The CPR’s promotional material depicted its railway as a force that both accessed and civilized the brutal Rocky Mountains by forging a path through the seemingly impenetrable terrain. The juxtaposition of civilized technology with a breathtaking natural background pervaded one of the CPR’s longest-standing tourism publications: The New Highway to the East, first issued in 1887, appeared in revised versions up to 1912.6 The cover image of the 1893 edition featured a low viewpoint that gave the railroad and trestle bridge a prominent position in the top half of the composition, emphasizing the dominant power of the train and bridge over the rugged terrain of mountains, cliffs, and streams (fig. 11.2). Access to the most dramatic views of this raw landscape was a marker of prestige and thus highly desired by train passengers, who experienced the voyage as a scenic journey. By the 1870s, the panoramic perception of sidelong views through passenger coach windows was a taken-for-granted aspect of long-distance overland travel, but the first trains to run the line allowed select travellers to ride on the front engine in order to attain a piercing, unimpeded forward view; these passengers sat on the train exterior in an iron seat, their feet dangling over the cowcatcher bar. The view imbued an exhilarating and exclusive sense of power. The most eminent front engine passenger, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s wife Agnes, rode the “catcher” nearly one thousand kilometres from Lake Louise to Vancouver, despite her husband’s dismissal of the feat as “rather ridiculous.”7 Lady Macdonald described the mountain landscape not as a static image, but a succession of views experienced as prospects from the moving train. A small, open-air platform at the end of the train provided less exclusive yet remarkable opportunities for open-air, 180-degree views for wealthy passengers.8 Edward Roper, an Englishman who travelled through the Rockies in 1890, described how “out on the platform of the hindmost car,” passengers “assembled and spent hours, scarcely speaking to one another [because] all of our attention was bestowed upon the awe-inspiring scene.”9 Whether riding at the front or the back of the train, passengers sought the best view possible.
In an attempt to generate more dramatic views to attract first-class passengers, the CPR experimented with different carriage designs. By 1890, the company had added three new observation cars specifically designed as viewing pavilions to the mountain portion of the cross-country journey. These cars consisted of ordinary day coaches with an open area between the belt rail and roof as well as an open-air balcony at the back. Traveller Douglas Sladen described these cars as “open like a verandah,” but he also noted that the soot and dirt of the journey made a passenger “feel as if you were being hosed with dust.” Yet, as Sladen complained, views were limited to looking backward, not the preferred and more intuitive mode of looking forward at the upcoming scenery.10 In 1902, the CPR integrated forward-looking perspectives in four enclosed mountain observation cars, which resembled large cabooses with a raised glass cupola at each end and an enclosed glass section at the centre of each car. Seven years later, the company featured lounge and compartment-style observation cars with large windows to facilitate landscape viewing. By the 1910s, the CPR coupled roofless observation cars to the rear of compartment observation cars during summer months in order to permit open-air views of the passing scenery.11 Nonetheless, passengers seem to have preferred sheltered observation areas. The CPR reintroduced mountain observation cars with roofs and glassed-in central portions in the late 1920s, so that passengers had a place of refuge from smoke and fumes, which were especially prominent when the trains passed through tunnels.
Figure 11.2. A passenger train in full steam travels over the Stoney Creek chasm, speeding confidently through a dangerous natural landscape. From the cover of an 1893 Canadian Pacific Railway brochure. Courtesy of Toronto Reference Library.
The interiors of observation cars as well as first-class sleeping and dining cars featured an array of amenities and services, creating a luxurious atmosphere that contrasted with the rugged mountain environments outside. The two sleeping cars on the inaugural run of the CPR’s transcontinental passenger service reportedly cost a staggering twelve thousand dollars each to outfit. One of these twenty-two-metre-long cars, the Honolulu—an exotic name that alluded to the CPR’s rapidly growing worldwide travel network—featured a private stateroom with a bath, even though there was no running hot water to fill it. Eventually, the company added fourteen such sleeping cars to fulfill the demand for its first-class transcontinental passenger service. The dining cars were equally lavish: the Holyrood included a silver service valued at three thousand dollars, while the Buckingham featured tooled leather benches, plush carpeting, bronze and brass ceiling lamps, white linens, and fresh flowers.12 These lush interiors generated a remarkable contrast between the trains and the alpine landscapes through which they passed. “Inside [the railcar] all is luxury; outside is Nature in her most rugged mode,” observed one British tourist in 1888.13 Seen through the frame of large train windows, the viewer perceived a wilderness environment that was safely outside the train, while enjoying an array of amenities inside their compartment. The reassuring luxuries of civilization that furnished the interior of first-class railcars encouraged the pleasurable experience of viewing the rugged landscapes outside, which was transformed into nonthreatening scenery.
The CPR played an instrumental role in establishing the earliest national parks in Canada and developed a related network of accommodations that facilitated tourism in the Rockies. Like the trains, these developments actualized the landscape as a wilderness that had been civilized by technology on a regional scale. The CPR completed a series of simple dining stations with limited accommodation in 1887, but more ambitious plans were underway even before that. The CPR’s American-born general manager, William Van Horne, envisaged a resort on the scale of the luxurious lodgings associated with railway developments in the United States. He discerned an appropriate location in March 1885, when the general superintendent for the Rocky Mountain region reported that railway workers had discovered hot springs “in the vicinity of Banff within a short distance of where the station is located.”14 Van Horne contacted Dominion government surveyor William Pearce, who sympathized with the general manager’s development objectives. In November 1885, Pearce authored the order-in-council that established a land reserve around the hot springs, trumping any claims by the First Nations who were long familiar with the site and by the two railway workers who had “discovered” it in 1884.15 Under the Rocky Mountains Park Act, enacted in June 1887, the Banff reserve grew to 674 square kilometres under the direct administration of the Department of the Interior. The decision to designate Canada’s first national park in the Rocky Mountains resulted in part from the CPR’s lobbying to protect its own commercial interests in the region. The Dominion government, which had taken economic and political risks in sponsoring the CPR’s transcontinental railroad, had a vested interest in the company’s success.
Figure 11.3. The Banff Springs Hotel was both an object to be viewed and a place from which guests could enjoy panoramic vistas of the surrounding mountains and river valley. This image shows a later version of the hotel, as rebuilt after a fire, designed by W.S. Painter and Montreal firm Barott and Blackader. Cover of a 1926 Canadian Pacific Railway brochure. Courtesy of Toronto Reference Library.
The CPR constructed its original Banff Springs Hotel during the late 1880s as a protected platform from which tourists could admire their surroundings (fig. 11.3). The hotel, located in the new national park, occupied a promontory overlooking the fork of the Bow and Spray rivers. This scenic setting was deemed so crucial that the railway was willing to locate the hotel several kilometres from its station, in contrast to most railway hotels in North America, which were built close to their corresponding lines. The CPR’s decision to commission the prestigious American architect Bruce Price was a sign of Van Horne’s early intention to have the hotel rank alongside other internationally renowned resorts. By the time the hotel was completed in 1888, it had cost roughly a quarter-million dollars—an undertaking that a contemporary journalist deemed a “mammouth affair.”16 The wood-frame building contained over one hundred bedrooms, steam heat, electric lighting, a ballroom, and several parlours and dining rooms.17 The establishment achieved its desired status when Karl Baedeker’s 1894 guidebook ranked it among the Dominion’s top five hotels, noting its “hot sulphur baths, open-air swimming baths, tennis court, and bowling alley; good cuisine and attendance.”18 The layout of the Banff Springs Hotel optimized views of its river and mountain backdrop. To achieve this, its original design featured a series of guestroom balconies cascading towards the river junction. Although a construction error had led to a misorientation of the original plans, which resulted in these rooms facing the steep forested slopes behind the hotel, a rotunda pavilion was subsequently built to restore the coveted riverside view for guests.19
The Banff Springs Hotel featured prominently in railway posters, brochures, and guidebooks. These publicity materials usually depicted the hotel from Sulphur Mountain, located to the northwest of the structure. The townsite and railway are out of view from this elevated vantage point, making the hotel appear as an object in a remote, natural setting, surrounded by a ring of alpine peaks. This position captured both the hotel as an architectural object and the view the hotel offered of the Bow River and mountains beyond. Thus, the reader glimpsed what tourists could see in person from the mineral swimming pool, dining hall, or perhaps even their hotel room window. The Banff Springs Hotel, mirroring the CPR’s wider mission, appeared as a bastion of civilization: at once a symbol of luxury arising from within the wilderness and a luxurious vantage point from which to survey an expansive mountain vista. For elite tourists, features of the hotel—similar to the views and other amenities available inside the train—provided an exclusive way to consume the natural landscapes that surrounded them.
Roads, Trails, and the Bungalow Camp Circuit
A CPR hospitality program linked to different—yet equally exclusive—forms of mobility flourished in the 1920s. If a desire to provide views from luxurious vantage points had dominated the company’s tourist operations in prewar western Canada, many of its projects during the interwar years aimed to give well-heeled tourists a more adventurous experience of “roughing it” in nature—while still providing considerable comfort. Foremost among these efforts was a series of CPR lodge and cabin compounds in the Rockies. Several of these “bungalow camps” were built along the Banff-Windermere Highway, the first road designed specifically for automobiles through the Canadian Rockies, which opened in 1923. The development of bungalow camps—along with the road—aimed to attract a high-end (and largely American) clientele who could afford touring cars and the hobby of long-distance recreational driving. Although automobile ownership and auto touring would both grow rapidly in North America during the interwar years, they remained relatively exclusive in the early 1920s.
Bungalow camps, automobile roads, and related amenities facilitated a different way of engaging with natural environments than the CPR’s observation cars and resort hotels did. Railcars and resort hotels catered to tourists seeking health benefits—taking “the cure” in hot springs that had been channelled into swimming pools, or simply exposure to mountain air—and they directed the gaze of passengers and guests towards sweeping mountain vistas. Often it was a highly mediated experience: nature as seen through the windows of a passing train car, or from the verandah or pool of a hotel. In contrast, bungalow camp networks drew from the North American wilderness movement that had flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and emphasized the benefits of more active, direct encounters with the natural world.20 On the heels of the sportsmen’s movement, a broader public enthusiasm for “wild nature” took hold in both the United States and Canada. As Patricia Jasen explains, enthusiasts sought to create a balance between civilization and nature by “cultivating enough exposure to wild nature, or the illusion of wild nature, to offset the debilitating effects of civilized life.”21 By the turn of the century, upper-class and, increasingly, middle-class urbanites embraced a return to nature through hunting, fishing, and cottaging. At their root, these leisure activities were considered a means of coping with the strenuous pressures of living in North America’s growing and increasingly complex cities. The CPR built its bungalow camps in fairly remote, wooded regions, usually with primary access via motorcar, horseback, or boat. This contrasted with resort hotels, which were generally located alongside railway lines on valley floors or, in the case of the Banff Springs Hotel, accessible by direct stagecoach from the railway station. Bungalow camps coexisted with the luxury tourism exemplified by the Banff Springs Hotel. Although they attracted affluent guests during the 1920s, the camps, in tandem with their accompanying networks of mobility, laid the infrastructural groundwork for widespread access to Canada’s mountain parks and created a model for tourist developments that would cater to broader audiences in later decades.
The CPR’s earliest experiment with the bungalow camp form came in 1902 with the Emerald Lake Chalet, an eleven-bedroom log structure located in Yoho National Park. The chalet catered to elite vacationers who sought a more secluded destination with opportunities for forested day-hikes in the backwoods. It had a rustic appearance, including square-hewn timber construction and details such as stepped corbels that recalled Swiss carved roof brackets. This rusticity was echoed in its landscape treatment, as the chalet was set on a plain, unpaved courtyard ringed with coniferous trees. Guests reached the chalet by hiking or riding on horseback eleven kilometres from the railway station at Field, BC.22 In response to Emerald Lake’s early popularity, the railway added cabins along the lakefront and in the surrounding forest between 1906 and 1912. During the 1912 season, more than one thousand guests stayed at the chalet and cabins, and a year later, the number nearly doubled.23 Although originally designed as a hotel, the addition of log cabins—a distinguishing feature of the bungalow camps that would follow a decade later—gave the location the appeal of individual living units that recalled pioneer cabins or the huts used by elite sportsmen on hunting and fishing trips.
Figure 11.4. Several of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s nine bungalow camps in the Rocky Mountains are seen in the insets on this CPR brochure from the late 1920s. Author’s collection.
The CPR used the model developed at Emerald Lake to build a series of camps that supported guided overnight hiking and horseback trips. Although these excursions had been staged for CPR guests since before World War I, they had been considered as side trips rather than a main focus of vacations to the Canadian Rockies, in contrast to what this style of travel would later become with the bungalow camps.24 In 1919, the CPR’s superintendent of construction for its western Canadian hotels, Basil Gardom, arranged to have a small log lodge and canvas-roofed sleeping cabins built at Lake O’Hara, a location where CPR excursionists had previously camped in tents. In 1921, five log cabins replaced the canvas-roofed structures. The result was the CPR’s first development named and promoted as a “bungalow camp.”25 During the following years, the CPR built a succession of bungalow camps in Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay national parks (fig. 11.4).
As the network grew, the CPR identified each camp as a distinct destination with a unique identity and specific recreational opportunities. The company named each lodging after the lake on which it was situated or other geographic features in its vicinity, sometimes employing Aboriginal names.26 For example, Wapta Camp sat on the edge of the continental divide, on a trout fishing lake of the same name and near many trailheads. With no road access, Lake O’Hara Camp was promoted as offering “isolation with comfortable accommodation.”27 Visitors to Yoho Camp could experience a nearby waterfall and hike to an eponymous glacier, named from a Cree word expressing awe. Circling west, Emerald Lake was the “camp de luxe,” with private baths in some cabins, an in-house orchestra for the communal lodge, and tennis courts.28 Moraine Lake Camp, high in the mountains just south of Lake Louise, was situated at a junction of alpine trails. Motorists travelling on the Banff-Windermere Highway through Kootenay National Park had access to four more bungalow camps: Castle Mountain, on a rise facing an alpine vista; Vermilion River, “at the middlemost middle of the big game country”; Radium Hot Springs, near a narrow canyon with mineral springs; and Lake Windermere—named after the most famous natural landmark in England’s picturesque Lakes District—a “peaceful” spot to relax “after all the emotional climaxes of the mountains.”29 By 1925, the CPR had nine bungalow camps in operation or under construction in the Rockies.
Promotional materials noted that specialized forms of mobility associated with the bungalow camps enabled recreational opportunities and close encounters with nature. Active recreation was a primary goal of a bungalow camp vacation and appealed to visitors’ sense of adventure and authentic identity. “Authenticity” here was an idealized, antimodern state of living in nature rooted in a nostalgic sense of strenuous physical activity. CPR publicity depicted day trips as well as hiking, riding, and driving between camps as integral parts of the Rocky Mountain bungalow camp experience; indeed, such activities elicited longer descriptions in brochures than accounts of the actual lodges and cabins. The idea of a multi-day circuit recalled a long-established tradition of Swiss Alpine tourism, in which visitors hiked from village to village, overnighting at local inns along the way. For example, a 1921 bungalow camp brochure was structured around an itinerary that led tourists to the “five camps—each different” that were completed at that time.30 Trekking between camps also served as the main topic of a profusely illustrated 1923 bungalow camp brochure by Betty Thornley, who wrote several brochures about CPR tourist destinations and, later, as Betty Thornley Stuart, became fashion editor of Collier’s magazine. Her second-person narrative addressed a female adventurer undertaking a four-week tour by horseback, hiking, and chauffeured car through the entire network of CPR bungalow camps in and around the Rockies. The subject is constantly on the move: she hikes, rides, or drives almost every day on her journey, with the bungalow camps offering places of respite and reflection after long days spent outdoors. The vacation is structured around a peripatetic journey between nodes, rather than a single luxury hotel, as would have been the norm with larger resort establishments.
Thornley’s account describes the ways in which various forms of mobility provided tourists in the “Canadian Pacific Rockies” with different experiences of local environments. She portrays trail riding as a relatively easy endeavour that yielded opportunities to contemplate the scenery. Thornley asks her reader to imagine sitting at ease on the “philosophic back” of a white horse, feeling her mind “float out between the trees, across the blue-grey distances till it comes to rest on those eternal hills that hump their amazing backs into the sky. . . . It’s all so immense.”31 In contrast to the ease of trail riding, hiking is presented as a more strenuous activity, albeit one with rewards. After “you hoist yourself up another brown aerial staircase” and undertake a “last and stiffest climb,” the hiker reaches a sublime panorama: “an immense and secret valley to the right, a valley that clouds could sail in, and hundred-year forests.” Around the corner lay a “last great tableland where there’s . . . nothing but infinite silence, and white heather, and great tongues of snow in the hollows.”32 The evocation of a solitary, immense view echoed the accounts by American John Muir and other alpinists of mountain peaks as sites of religious or spiritual transformation.33 In the bungalow camp brochure, an amateur hiker attains a similarly revelatory landscape view with no need for extensive equipment or expertise.
Like trail riders or hikers, motorists participated in what they understood as a fully engaged encounter with raw nature. At the turn of the century, motoring had been celebrated for its strenuous nature: drivers (almost exclusively male) took up the opportunity to cultivate new skills, explore new territories, and exercise a sense of self-determination.34 This flavour of adventure lingered even as automobile ownership became more widespread, extending to a broad swath of upper- and upper-middle-class drivers. Experientially, riding in an automobile gave drivers the headlong view that eluded most passengers of train travel, as well as a relatively high-speed, autonomous mode of travel. Within the CPR’s bungalow camp circuit, this sense of daring was most pronounced at Sinclair Canyon, where the Banff-Windermere Highway snaked between towering cliffs. A 1923 Department of the Interior brochure described the experience: “passing through those towering walls of rock, another world at once unfolds to view.” Travelling eastward from the Columbia River Valley, with its wide and pastoral views, a journey through Sinclair Canyon dramatically revealed a creek that “tears its way down the contracted valley, rushing and tossing and rending its way through a series of rocky canyons.” Beyond, the road passed through a second portal known as the Iron Gates, “formed by splendid towers of red rock on either side of the valley,” before climbing up to the summit of Sinclair Pass.35 Emphasizing the ancient nature of the landscape, Thornley effused that “the new world into which the road has bored its way is a world older than Time, yet, in some vivid and tremendous fashion, still unfinished.”36 Views on this section of road were particularly conducive to a dynamic driving experience, which allowed drivers to imagine they were reliving the pioneer discovery of new landscapes.
Figure 11.5. Canadian Pacific Railway bungalow camps and the Banff-Windermere Highway, 1929. Map by Steven Langlois and University of Saskatchewan HGIS Laboratory, after original by James Mallinson.
Automobile roads were central to the expansion and development of western Canada’s park system in the early twentieth century, just as railway infrastructure had inspired the establishment of the earliest parks in the late nineteenth century. This relationship is particularly evident in the history of the Banff-Windermere Highway, a high-elevation road between Banff and Lake Windermere that local promoters hoped would attract American automobile tourists.37 It became a national park corridor when it opened in 1923, the same year that four CPR bungalow camps began operation along its length (fig. 11.5). The CPR had helped build the road in order to create a new territory for tourism and to help sell its land holdings in BC’s fertile Columbia River Valley. A 1911 agreement divided the construction cost of the main portion of the highway between the CPR and the British Columbia government, while the newly created National Parks Branch (NPB) of the Department of the Interior financed the road’s construction within the boundaries of Banff National Park. In 1919, the NPB agreed to finish the road in British Columbia in exchange for a strip of land five miles (eight kilometres) wide on each side of the highway. This area—1,520 square kilometres in total—became Kootenay National Park.38
The new 128-kilometre-long Banff-Windermere Highway connected several roads through the region, allowing drivers to journey between stopping points on a circular route. It completed what a 1922 CPR brochure dubbed the “Premier Tour” of North America: a loop through the western Canadian parks that traversed Lethbridge, Calgary, Banff, Windermere, Cranbrook, and Fernie.39 As a Parks Branch annual report noted, this was a highly scenic drive, comprising “500 miles during which the autoist will at all times be either in the Rockies or in full sight of them.”40 This circular tour also connected south at two points to join the U.S. Park-to-Park Highway, an eight-thousand-kilometre loop through twelve parks promoted by U.S. National Park Service director Stephen Mather. The Banff-Windermere Highway formed the missing link in an expanded loop that included four Canadian parks: Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, and Waterton Lakes. Finally, by providing a route through the Rocky Mountains, the road served as an important segment of a planned motor road from Calgary to Vancouver.
The designation of a ten-mile-wide (sixteen-kilometre-wide) corridor along the Banff-Windermere Highway as a national park encouraged drivers to perceive the landscape around them as wilderness. A contemporary road development during the early twentieth century, the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina, included minimum right-of-way widths of sixty metres and was an average of three hundred metres wide. Observers considered Blue Ridge an exceptionally wide area compared to average highways and previous parkways.41 Along the Banff-Windermere Highway, however, the creation of a park that was fifty times wider would not only protect the scenery immediately visible from the road, but also shelter the wildlife in the vicinity and help qualify it as bona fide wilderness. Going beyond the scenic views available from trains, resort hotels, and even other parkways, the highway immersed the bodies of motorists in a natural environment that was sufficiently intact to hold the possibility of unorchestrated, face-to-face meetings with nature’s denizens. Government and CPR brochures led tourists to expect an experience comparable to today’s safaris, which transport sightseers via rugged jeeps to view wildlife within what appear to be open savannahs but in reality are protected areas. “Much of the country traversed is noted for its big game—moose and black-tailed deer, brown and black bear, big horn and mountain goat,” noted a CPR bulletin issued to passenger department agents in 1916, before Kootenay National Park was founded and hunting within it prohibited.42
As the elite sport of big-game hunting was gradually sublimated into the thrill of big-game viewing, tourism publicity urged automobile drivers to enjoy unrivaled opportunities for wildlife sightings along the Banff-Windermere Highway corridor. A 1923 government guidebook included images of bears and Rocky Mountain sheep on the roadside.43 A CPR bulletin from 1927 included an article titled “Wild Animals Friendly on Banff-Windermere Highway,” which described frequent sightings of “animals in their natural haunts.” These included mountain sheep, “so tame that often motors have to slow down as they will persist, almost to the point of danger, in standing in the middle of the highway”; a semi-tamed black bear named Bozo, who “comes out on the highway as if he had sole right to it”; and deer who appeared “in increasing number annually.”44 People actively encouraged some wildlife to frequent the highway. For instance, motorists clearly enticed Bozo by feeding him, and park wardens installed salt licks along the road so that other game would be drawn in full view of the motoring public.45 These techniques were meant to enable visitors to see wildlife in situ, in contrast to the zoos and paddocks that had housed game in Banff since the late nineteenth century. Like the strenuous experiences encouraged via the trails and bungalow camps of the same era, these sightings were valued by motorists as part of a supposedly authentic, wild nature in the Rockies, a region home to superabundant wilderness.
Conclusion
Beyond providing a simple means of transport, the CPR helped create a rich physical and cultural landscape that they dubbed the “Canadian Pacific Rockies.” Targeting elite audiences who had the time and money for pleasure travel, the company linked exclusive modes of mobility to distinct ways of perceiving and experiencing natural environments. Starting in the late nineteenth century, the CPR provided civilized rail and hotel vantage points from which travellers could view dramatic landscapes. In the early twentieth century, the company also began catering to tourists’ growing desire to experience more active forms of recreation within forest and lake areas. Although both forms of tourist travel in the Rockies coexisted during the twentieth century, a comparison of the networks, accommodations, and amenities of both eras illustrates a shift in the touring public’s expectations of travel within natural environments.
In the Canadian Pacific Rockies, access to the most highly desired experiences of the natural environment were closely linked to wealth and class. But while elite tourist dollars were a strong impetus for the CPR to advance its luxury tourist programs, middle-class tourists who began to acquire automobiles in the interwar years also benefitted from road infrastructure constructed in the early twentieth century. By 1928, 74 percent of the more than ten thousand cars that entered Kootenay National Park from the south end of the Banff-Windermere Highway were owned by Canadians, a figure that suggests use of the road had become more egalitarian. Although these largely middle-class tourists may have avoided CPR establishments because of their high cost, they enjoyed the scenery and wildlife sightings that contributed to the wilderness experience of the drive. In 1931, the Parks Branch started permitting the establishment of small, privately owned bungalow camps at specified locations within the western Canadian parks, overturning the CPR’s monopoly on this type of tourist accommodation.46 Visitors could opt to stay at any of a dozen motor camps on the Banff-Windermere Highway; several of these establishments still exist and carry on the tradition of the bungalow camp. More broadly, representations of the region as both a luxurious North American version of Switzerland and an idyllic backwoods have persisted in publicity materials produced by both the CPR-owned hotels (now operated under the banner of Fairmont) and competing establishments to this day. The Canadian Pacific Railway created not only a legacy of physical infrastructure, but also a set of cultural ideas about the nature of the Canadian Pacific Rockies that has been an integral part of their popular image for more than a century.
Notes
1 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 78–79.
2 On the CPR’s role in developing both the economy and the image of western Canada, see Marc H. Choko and David L. Jones, Posters of the Canadian Pacific (Richmond Hill, ON: Firefly, 2004); John A. Eagle, The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Development of Western Canada, 1896–1914 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada: The CPR and the Beginnings of Canadian Tourism (Banff: Altitude, 1983); and E.J. Hart, Trains, Peaks, and Tourists: The Golden Age of Canadian Travel (Banff: Summerthought, 2010).
3 See, for instance, Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Molly Berger, Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); John A. Jakle and Keith Sculle, America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Auto Age (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009); A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
4 See John Marsh, “The Rocky and Selkirk Mountains and the Swiss Connection, 1885–1914,” Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 12 (1985): 417–33.
5 Calgary-based firm Wilson & Rees designed the dwellings. Blueprints are available at the Glenbow Archives, Calgary.
6 After its initial appearance as The New Highway to the East, the booklet was retitled The New Highway to the Orient and issued in almost-yearly editions from 1889 to 1912. The CPR updated the text and images to include features such as new hotels, but the core text remained the same from edition to edition.
7 Bart Robinson, Banff Springs: The Story of a Hotel (Banff: Summerthought, 1973), 24.
8 Hart, Trains, Peaks and Tourists, 70.
9 Edward Roper, By Track and Trail: A Journey through Canada (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1891), 139.
10 Douglas Sladen, On the Cars and Off: Being the Journal of a Pilgrimage along the Queen’s Highway to the East, from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Victoria in Vancouver’s Island (London: Ward, Locke & Bowden, 1895), 225–26.
11 Oil-burning engines, in use by the 1910s, produced no cinders, which would have endangered earlier open-air platforms. See Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Bulletin, no. 102 (July 1917).
12 David L. Jones, Famous Name Trains: Travelling in Style with the CPR (Calgary: Fifth House, 2006), 11, 16.
13 Clive Phillipps-Wolley, A Sportsman’s Eden (London: Bentley, 1888), 32–33, cited in Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 102.
14 General Superintendent to Van Horne, 19 March 1885, 61.A.8966, Canadian Pacific Archives, Montreal (hereafter CPA).
15 Leslie Bella, Parks for Profit (Montreal: Harvest House, 1987), 11–13; Anthony Roger Byrne, “Man and Landscape Change in the Banff National Park Area before 1911” (MA thesis, University of Calgary, 1964), 112.
16 “The Great Hotel: A Few Facts about the Mammouth Building Being Erected at Banff,” Winnipeg Sun, 1887, cited in Robinson, Banff Springs, 17–18.
17 Hart, Selling of Canada, 18–19.
18 Cited in Robinson, Banff Springs, 37. See also Karl Baedeker, The Dominion of Canada with Newfoundland and an Excursion to Alaska, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900), 218. The other top-ranking hotels were eastern Canadian destinations: the CPR’s Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, the CPR’s Windsor Station in Montreal, and the Russell House and Grand Union in Ottawa.
19 Walter Vaughan, Sir William Van Horne (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 151. Archival blueprints for a later rebuilding of the hotel clearly indicate the orientation, in phrases like “This way faces Bow River Valley and Mount Rundle,” “This way faces the Bow River and the Fairholm Range,” and “This way faces Sulphur Mountain”—perhaps to avoid repeating the earlier error. Canadian Pacific Railway-Hotel Department fonds, M5788-22, Glenbow Archives, Calgary.
20 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
21 Jasen, Wild Things, 105.
22 The CPR had provided simple log-built shelters for trekkers as early as 1891. That year, the company constructed a bare-bones log chalet on the shore of Lake Louise for those adventurous enough to trek the five kilometres uphill from Laggan station. However, after the original chalet burned down, early in 1893, the CPR erected a frame structure more in line with its other hotels. As Lake Louise grew in popularity, the structure was expanded with other additions in European architectural styles. While log cabins would serve for preliminary or strictly utilitarian buildings in this early period, the railway’s showpiece hotels in the late nineteenth century relied on more cosmopolitan Swiss, French, Scottish, and Italianate styles.
23 In 1912, Americans were the primary audience: 66 percent of visitors were from the United States, 25 percent from Canada, 6 percent from England, and 3 percent from other countries. Christine Barnes, Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies (Bend, OR: W.W. West, 1999), 79.
24 Edward Mills, “The Bungalow Trail: Rustic Railway Bungalow Camps in Canada’s National Parks,” Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Bulletin 18, nos. 3–4 (1993): 63.
25 Ibid., 64.
26 During the same period, children’s summer camps across North America often adopted real—or inauthentic but Indian-sounding—names. See Abigail Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
27 See Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Detail Information for Ticket Agents regarding Travel in the Rockies, n.d., p. 20, CPA.
28 Betty Thornley, Bungalow Camps in the Canadian Pacific Rockies (Montreal: Canadian Pacific Railway, 1923), 17.
29 Ibid., 20–23.
30 Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Bungalow Camps in the Canadian Pacific Rockies (Montreal, 1921), 2. A brochure with the same title published in early 1923 recommended a similar itinerary.
31 Thornley, Bungalow Camps, 5–6.
32 Ibid., 9.
33 John Muir, “A Near View of the High Sierra,” in The Mountains of California (New York: Century, 1894).
34 Belasco, Americans, 19–39; Tom McCarthy, Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–15.
35 Canada, Department of the Interior, The Banff Windermere Highway (Ottawa, 1923).
36 Thornley, Bungalow Camps, 18.
37 John Sandlos, “Nature’s Playgrounds: The Parks Branch and Tourism Promotion in the National Parks, 1911–1929,” in A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011, ed. Claire Elizabeth Campbell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011), 61.
38 Bella, Parks for Profit; E.J. Hart, The Brewster Story (Banff: Brewster Transport Co., 1981); W.F. Lothian, A History of Canada’s National Parks (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1976).
39 Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Bulletin, no. 162 (July 1922): 18.
40 Canada, Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Dominion Parks (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1913), 8.
41 Anne Mitchell Whisnant, “The Scenic is Political: Creating Natural and Cultural Landscapes along America’s Blue Ridge Parkway,” in The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe, ed. Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 68.
42 Canadian Pacific Railway, Bulletin, no. 86 (March 1916): 9.
43 Canada, Banff Windermere Highway.
44 Canadian Pacific Railway, Bulletin, no. 223, S1 (August 1927).
45 Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 28.
46 Edward Mills, Rustic Building Programs in Canada’s National Parks, 1887–1950 (Ottawa: Parks Canada National Historic Sites Directorate, 1994), 151.