Preface

Sometime before dawn on 28 July 2010, High River’s museum caught fire. Housed in an old railway station originally built in 1893, the Museum of the Highwood had withstood the tests of time. Given its age, it was something of a miracle that the building wasn’t destroyed. All the same, the collection was nearly ruined by the smoke and, ironically, by the sprinklers that doused the flames.

Hearing the news on the radio the next day, I headed south from Calgary to see if I could lend a hand. Other people had had the same idea. In the crowded parking lot, volunteers were milling around triage tents, piecing together and boxing up salvaged artifacts. An awning, flapping in the wind, sheltered flats of bottled water. No one had much time to stand around, however. A co-ordinator hurriedly suited me up in protective white plastic coveralls, hardhat, goggles, and a stiflingly hot mask. Now duded in my own search-and-rescue outfit, I joined others entering the building to retrieve anything that could be saved.

Volunteers had already cleared most of the main floor, so I worked with a couple of others in the basement. We followed electrical cords to emergency lights propped here and there on steel stands in the bowels of the building. Water pooled on the wooden steps and across the large cement boiler-room floor.

Here was the community’s morgue of material culture. There were water-soaked saddles, boxes upon boxes of vintage milk bottles from the 1950s, rodeo event trophies, musical instruments, typewriters, and 1920s radios. Something struck me while attending them: the Museum of the Highwood preserved the pastimes, passions, and profits pursued along the Highwood River, which flows right through High River. Not many communities build museums in honour of their rivers.

As I lugged heavy brass spittoons and kerosene burners to the truck outside, I began thinking about that. High River was, and is, a fishing community. Its special relationship to fish seems to set High River apart from agricultural towns farther east, especially in the drier irrigation districts of the prairies. For well over a century, town citizens ardently defended their river to preserve its angling. The folks in High River took up fish conservation a lot earlier than most people now realize.

A few months later, serendipitously, Calgary’s Chinook Country Historical Society asked me to speak about early trout conservation in Southern Alberta. Although I had written on the topic in the past, it had been years since I had even thought about anglers and fish conservation. Nevertheless, the fire at the museum started me thinking about how quickly stories are lost. While preparing for the talk, I revisited notes taken during visits to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, where I had discovered boxes and boxes of letters and reports sent to the Department of Marine and Fisheries by members of local angling associations in Alberta before 1930. Given the challenges of navigating the murky depths of the fisheries archives, it was perhaps not surprising that much of the correspondence had largely languished unread. But opening the files, I had found anglers opining on the characteristics of Alberta’s native fish and sharing their alarms about conservation and fisheries policy. It was impressive to me that anglers were hardly of a single mind about how to save their streams from overfishing, how to protect native favourites, how to jigger with season dates to promote certain fish and discourage others, and whether to introduce exotic species and, if so, which ones. In my talk, then, I ended up discussing not only the aims of but also the squabbles among early conservationists, whose infighting revealed the varying perspectives on nature that animated them in those years.

After the talk, an individual came forward. He worked with numerous groups of conservationists concerned with, among other things, the proliferation of exotics in the province and the drift toward privatizing access to fish and game resources. The story I had told that night was playing out in Alberta streams in the present, he said, impressing on me the importance of telling it to a larger audience. The lecture was thirty-five minutes long. But those two events—my talk and the burning of the museum—got me thinking and writing. This book grew from that.