1 The Pioneer Era and the End of Superabundance
Many Albertans in the 1920s had seen it all. A single generation witnessed a widespread transformation of prairie, parkland, and foothills environments. In the decades prior to World War I, pioneers joined a transcontinental reconfiguration of the living landscape as they expanded new ways of life and improved upon their agricultural and urban economies.1 These frontiersmen, first-comers, sodbusters, and “improvers” of the land were both the agents of change and the recipients of the economic payouts attending the progress they directed. At the same time, they gained a sense of alarm for a process that had apparently taken on a life of its own. With new industries and more intensive agricultural and ranching activities spreading across the landscape, the pastoral and idyllic elements of the improved landscapes that they had laid down—160-acre homesteads, rolling rangeland, and towns and cities—raised new questions and quandaries.
The same generation that had taken pride in the land’s settlement recognized some of the collateral damage of economic development. Theirs was an age cohort that could see environmental changes in their own lifetimes. They did not, then, like often happens, forget a previous generation’s experiences and see the environmental situation around them as the “normal state of nature.”2 They saw hillsides gutted and eroded by widespread and intensive forestry practices, overgrazed stream banks deteriorating into mud, fescue ranges grazed to their very gravels, rivers poisoned, and lakes emptied. More impressively, these changes—consequences of the supposed improvements to the wilderness often made by the same generation—occurred remarkably quickly.
Albertans could measure crudely the impact of development in terms of natural abundance. If Westerners of the 1920s imaginatively stepped back in time to compare their world with the streams and fields before settlement, the world they inhabited was the poorer one. Because of the rapid shift toward what John McNeill has described as the exosomatic energy regime—that is, toward a reliance on sources of energy produced outside the human body, by the burning of carbon fuels—processes of landscape change had been quick and widespread, and they proved devastating to birds and other wildlife.3 Even on the prairie, where human labour, rather than machines, was responsible for most of the transformation of buffalo grassland into tree belts, irrigation ditches, and quarter-sectioned cropland, the effects were arresting. There were fewer birds in the air and fish in the water, and the herds of wild herbivores roaming the land shrank in size. After the great settlement rush began in 1896, the toll on the Albertan landscape became quite apparent to western town and city folk. In Saskatchewan’s farming lands, perhaps as much as 80 percent of grasslands and 50 percent of woodlands were lost in the first decades of the twentieth century through intensive settlement. Agriculture had a major impact—even, in some cases, causing extirpation—on the roughly 184 prairie bird species and dozens of grassland wildlife species native to the West.4
Nature’s limits were certainly understood in Alberta streams. If the region’s resources could be quickly exhausted through overuse, waste, and unregulated consumption, it was realized knee-deep in streams where Westerners fished. Certainly not everyone shared in this perspective. Not everyone angled. And surely, only a minority of early pioneers took to the art of fly fishing, where they might develop a keen sensitivity to rivers, environments, and fish behaviour. But anyone who had experience fishing in Alberta’s Eastern Slope streams and rivers saw change by the first decade of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Calgarians grew quite accustomed to newspaper reports of massive landings along the Bow River within city limits. In 1884 (before angling permits with a daily bag limit were introduced to Alberta in 1907), Wheeler Mickle, of Calgary, promised to supply the entire town with fish after taking in three days of fishing seventy-two, forty and thirty-two trout.5 In 1886, “excellent fishing” was reported in Calgary’s river when W. E. Green landed a 10.5 lb trout on a fly.6 There was the fishing spree of Joseph Bannerman, another Calgarian, who caught ten trout all weighing nine pounds on average, this in but a half hour; and Mr. Newson, on the same day and in the same time period, catching thirteen eleven-pounders.7 The newspaper questioned the techniques of another Calgary “sportsman” who took advantage of Chinook conditions in January 1890 to use a shotgun to kill a ten-pounder trout in the Bow, right in town limits.8 Not only the Bow in Calgary teemed with fish life. In 1901, the Calgary Weekly Herald drew attention to the “five pounders” regularly landed at High River, along with a “beautiful” eighteen-pounder whose skeleton was being preserved for display as a reminder to sceptics that “all fishers are not liars” in that town.9
But these massive creels were becoming a thing of the past by World War I. Development had taken its toll, and the land’s wealth was apparently being squandered. Albertans were joining an important new sensibility developing across North America. What is now referred to as the progressive conservation movement took shape as governments promoted science, engineering, and other forms of human expertise to remedy the wasteful and rapid depletion of resources that had occurred during the great leaps of expansion in industrialized mining, forestry, fishing, and agriculture.10 Forest conservation was an early priority for provincial and federal governments, and, by the late 1890s, administrators were hiring engineers and planning experts to encourage resource industries and businesses to organize and mechanize their operations with a view to enabling the long-term exploitation of resources.11 In the first decade of the new century, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration in the United States made conservation a priority, as did Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government in Canada.12 Both nations created commissions of conservation in order to provide federal leadership in promoting more efficient and sustainable use of natural resources. Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission in 1908 and, early in 1909, convened the first North American Conservation Conference, held in Washington, DC, to which representatives from Canada, Newfoundland, and Mexico were invited. That year also saw the signing of the Boundary Waters Treaty between Canada and the United States, which, among other provisions, stipulated that “waters flowing across the boundary shall not be polluted on either side to the injury of health or property on the other.”13
Figure 1.1
Catching a fish, Waterton Lakes, ca. 1920s. W. J. Oliver collection, NA-4868-139os, Glenbow Library and Archives.
In Canada, the Commission of Conservation, founded in 1909, sponsored university and resource experts to disseminate studies and information to provinces. The commission helped develop a framework for wildlife conservation, one of its most important work resulting in the Migratory Birds Convention of 1916.14 The same commission spurred the creation of a federal-provincial Advisory Board on Wildlife Protection, formed in 1916, composed of powerful senior officials from a number of federal ministries, to aid in seeing the convention respected, especially in northern Canada and among Canada’s First Nations, many with existing treaty hunting freedoms.15
Those involved in the movement were inherently optimistic. If its use was properly managed and efficiently planned, nature could provide for sustainable economic growth. This attitude was especially prevalent in Canada, where planners believed that the example of waste in the United States could be avoided.16 Albertans sharing in the experience of nature’s precipitous decline were therefore hopeful that a combination of foresight and their own interventions could correct initial human efforts to tame and transform the natural landscape.
In the case of freshwater fisheries, the growing popularity of fly fishing as a sport played a critical part in the early evolution of the conservation movement. Inspired by works such as Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, sport fishers developed codes of ethics, worked to preserve certain sportier fish species in streams, campaigned against wasting fish, and often took a hand in weeding out what they regarded as coarse species (that is, fish not deemed to be game fish) while at the same time advocating the introduction of new species that would, as they saw it, improve stream environments. In the United States, where completely frantic frontier developments had wrecked streams and pollution had killed fish, sometimes across entire watersheds, anglers took up conservation. They reintroduced species by planting fish cultivated at hatcheries, and they joined associations to champion the principles of anglers in Great Britain who attempted to promote honourable sport along riverways.17 In the 1890s, hordes from the middle class joined their numbers. Anglers on vacation from wage-earning jobs or salaried employment used rail transportation to invade what had formerly been private lakes and rivers reserved for the wealthy often through leases. These middle-class anglers tirelessly advocated the activity in popular magazines and, simply by virtue of their large numbers, considerably broadened the base of the sport.18
Sport in the Last Best West
But whereas conservation and angling protective associations were well established in the United States and eastern Canada, in the settler society of Canada’s “Last Best West,” both had been slower to gather momentum. As the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway opened the prairies to settlement, an interest in conserving fish and game developed piecemeal. So did any widespread adherence to angling as a sport. Despite the numbers of sportsmen in the Territories, it is telling that in 1885 troops at Fort Calgary wanting more fish for their mess had to be reminded by the Calgary Daily Herald that even if nearby “rivers abound in trout, fishing is not a western sport.”19 Fly fishing remained a pursuit of likely a very small minority of the overall pioneer population. The Qu’Appelle Progress in 1892 described two rural fishermen who had become “anxious to become fly fishermen but had had neither the time nor money to indulge in the pastime.” They resolved to try it out, with mixed results. The more successful of the pair resorted to dropping worms as chum from a boat before hooking lake trout with a pole. Apparently, the difficult fly tying, casting techniques and “the new arrangements city chaps use” were beyond these farmer fishers.20
There were certainly sportsmen in the west. On a Saturday evening in 1886, at a “well attended meeting of sportsmen” in Fort Macleod, an organization calling itself the Southern Alberta Game Protective Association was founded.21 Although its members undertook a critical appraisal of existing game ordinances, they focussed most of their attention on preventing First Nations from engaging in what the association perceived as the overhunting of antelope, mountain sheep, goat, and deer in the vicinity of the settlement.22 More popular than conservation-oriented associations in these early communities were the rod and gun clubs that formed in small towns almost as soon as the Canadian Pacific Railway was laid down and the first wooden storefronts sprang up.23 These clubs would sometimes send letters and petitions to the government regarding matters of conservation, with the hunting freedoms given by treaty to First Nations a favourite subject of complaint. For the most part, though, their time was given to providing attractive fish and game opportunities for visiting sportsmen and getting together to swap stories about their own recreational adventures. They found the Canadian West a sportsman’s Eden, and they frolicked in it.24
Meanwhile, conservation was not practiced much by western pioneers themselves. Few would have prescribed to a sporting ethic when it came to wild animals, birds, and fish. Rough times hounded them throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, when crops often failed and a steady supply of meat from domestic animals was not reliably available. Pioneers needed to eat. They had few scruples about fishing and hunting excessively to fill their larders, especially if it could be done quickly enough to leave time for other work. Their fishing techniques were usually rudimentary: throw a net across a stream and come back later, nail used gunny sacks onto the openings of beaver dams, heave pitchforks into spawning runs. They pickled trout in barrels to preserve food for the coming winter.
The supply of fish did seem unlimited, anyways. As described by the earliest European explorers, rivers and lakes were positively teeming with beautiful, large fish there for the taking. First Nations, who had fished in the region for a very long time, had a far better grasp of fish populations. The Stoney, for instance, called Cataract Creek, a tributary of the Highwood, hora winijbi wapti, or “no fish river.”25 But the first explorers on these streams saw the west as pristine and fish abundant. James Hector—accompanying John Palliser’s expedition, a massive inventory and mapping exploration of the West—spent time on the Highwood River where it flowed into the Bow, “a clear stream, 40 yards in width, rising in the Rocky Mountains.” Stoney were there in 1859, camping at the crossing, just as Hector and his companions arrived. Hector’s party then loaded horses and wound a “zig zag” trail up to the benchlands over the Highwood valley, finding it all “very picturesque” and soon set about to fish. “As the evening was dull and overcast,” Hector wrote, “and the river looked favourable, some of us tried fishing with the very rough tackle we possessed.” This amounted to “some common twine and a few large unmounted cod-hooks, without gut, hair line, rod, or any of the civilized appliances.”26 In a scant ninety minutes, his party had caught thirty-six trout, “none of which were less than three quarters of a pound weight and most of them from one to one and a half pounds.” He described two varieties, one “with silvery scales and with firm salmon-tinted flesh and the other brightly sparkled, but the flesh white, soft and watery.” He was likely describing cutthroat and bull trout. He also mentioned, “we had seen a third species, the shape of which was different.”27
Explorers were often military officers and members of Britain’s upper class, most of them ardent big game hunters and anglers who brought with them a predilection for catching fish on the fly. They served, as sportsmen, as the advance guard of Empire.28 The Viscount Milton, the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam, and his personal physician, Dr. Walter Cheadle, angled these western waters. Just outside of Edmonton House in 1863, fur trader Colin Fraser took time to instruct them on fancy fly ties for mountain streams: “We made several large flies on gimp hooks with worsted & coloured silk for bodies & speckled duck’s feathers for wings; resembling no live fly I had seen,” wrote Dr. Cheadle, “but Mr. Fraser assured us Rocky Mountain trout would take them greedily.”29
Arriving with groups of roughshod newcomers, prospectors, and sodbusters, these well-heeled British anglers stood out. In their strange apparel, and with their comparatively complicated rods and reels, they constituted a symbolic and impressive intrusion of new ways to use nature and understand it.30 Such a spectacle was quite foreign to First Nations fishers, who were accustomed to spearing or netting trout, or even catching them by hand, using a technique known as “guddling” or “tickling.”31 Now they found themselves in competition with sports fishers, who were beginning to gain both legal protection and social approval for practicing a method of fishing (namely, with rod and reel) that was considered more artful, as well as for observing some ethic of conservation and landing fish one at a time.
First Nations had, for countless generations, fished in Rocky Mountain streams. The Interior Salish peoples, on the other side of the Great Divide, routinely fished the streams spilling westward, using elaborate traps, nets, and weirs. The Utes were also fishers, using nets and baskets to catch cutthroat, especially, which was a mainstay of their diet.32 Early travellers through the Crowsnest Pass, amazed by the abundance of fish, witnessed First Nations fishing the large trout swimming the depths of lakes in the upper Livingstone River in 1888.33 However, on much of the Eastern Slopes of present-day Alberta, bison-hunting First Nations tended to consume less fish. Many of these Plains peoples avoided fish altogether or ate fish only when the bison hunt failed. Some Plains peoples, such as the Blackfoot (Siksika, Kainai, and Piikani), may even have observed taboos against taking and eating fish. The more dedicated fish eaters of the Canadian West were the Cree and Assiniboine peoples who seasonally inhabited the northerly rim of a variegated environment of prairie, parkland, and boreal forest running across the present-day mixed forest stands of the North Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan drainages. They were hunting and gathering “generalists,” seasonally killing and slaughtering bison, but readjusting their diets in the early spring, this to consume the fattiest animals possible so that they could make the transition to the oily flesh of fish in spring.34 Fishing was important enough to the livelihood of First Nations that fishing rights were, like hunting rights, enshrined in the numbered treaties.
After the transfer of the North-Western Territory to Canada in 1870, actual legal protection for western trout was slow in catching up. The first acts to protect fisheries in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories focussed on commercial stock. Legislation in 1881 inaugurated a closed season on whitefish, abundant in western lakes; it also provided a closed season for speckled trout but specified it as Salmo fontinalis, or brook trout (now classified Salvelinus fontinalis), native to only a few eastern waters of Manitoba.35 A more comprehensive fishery law passed in 1892 to provide seasonal restrictions on the fishing of “speckled trout of any kind,” albeit within a period favouring fall spawners (May 1 to September 14).36 The same legislation required commercial fishers and farmers to purchase licences, allowing the latter to use nets on lakes, but did not require angling permits from those using hook and line.37
In 1894 the law demanded a federal angling permit in all inland waters across Canada, with the exception of the Territories. That made a huge difference. The federal permit restricted anglers to land trout of a minimum size, with a maximum daily creel. And the permit system stopped individuals from selling trout “caught with hook and line.”38 Not so in the Northwest Territories. Without the permit system, fishers could sell whatever they caught, in season, beyond their own needs to traders, hawkers, and peddlers in towns. They not only sold fish legitimately, but quite a few also did so as poachers, using dynamite or nets in season to sell trout in the market.39
Nascent Guardian System
The federal government established a game guardian system in these pioneer settings. In the case of game conservation, English statute and common law transferred in the North-West Territories Act of 1886. After 1892, when the first few game guardians were appointed, the game laws included closed seasons, Sunday hunting restrictions, and several “fair play” principles for “legal” hunting. As Brian Calliou points out, the game guardian system allowed for some of the first inroads into the hunting freedoms granted to First Nations by treaty.40 First Nations in the southern portion of present-day Alberta, entering treaty in 1877, had chosen reserve lands in areas of prime interest to newcomer sports hunters and anglers. Along the Eastern Slopes, the Stoney Reserve was established on the Bow River at a traditional gathering spot for the Stoney (Ĩyãħé Nakoda) called mĩnĩ ѳnĩ wa-pta, or “cold water river.” The Siksika took a reserve at Blackfoot Crossing on the Bow, and the Kainai, by 1883, had lands reserved between the Belly River and the St. Mary, while the Piikani Reserve was located on the Oldman. Much of this reserved land was located within or close to what became the few remaining prized hunting territories and on prime trout rivers.41
With stream fronts, ranch ranges, and now-surveyed Crown land parcelled out in a settler landscape, territorial lines were drawn, despite the fact that, in theory, the treaty ensured First Nations the right to continue hunting on the lands they had, in the eyes of the government, surrendered.42 First Nations, from the earliest pioneer period in the West, then faced governments that backed an angler who, as one commentator said, “kills his fish artistically” over anyone—an Indigenous person, a hungry settler, or a miner—who took fish by whatever means possible.43 First Nations people, like other subsistence fishers competing with this new way of fishing, moved into angling when opportunities arose or circumstances dictated, sometimes appropriating the new order by hiring on as guides to visiting sport fishers.44 It was even hoped that angling might help assimilate subsistence-hunting First Nations people. The Stoneys—falling under the game ordinances in 1894, contrary to their treaty rights—were encouraged by the resident farming instructor at Morley (now Mînî Thnî), P. L. Grasse, to take up hook-and-line fishing. That way, Stoneys could take game during the open hunting season, Grasse wrote, and when it closed, they could fish at “their lake set apart for them in the mountains;” he requested twine, fishing hooks, and a boat that would help them.45 Residential schooling encouraged angling as part of the supervised life and constraining curriculum forced on young First Nations. Father J. M. Salaun, at the Blood Reserve’s residential school wrote that among the “favourite pastimes” of school boys in their “recreation,” beyond football, swimming and shooting with bows and arrows, was fishing the Belly River.46 Schoolboys at the Blackfoot Reserve at Gleichen were also fishing the Bow River as part of their permitted forms of recreation.47 Apparently, in 1917, the Stoneys had still not hastened to embrace angling within their subsistence rounds when the Alberta inspector of Indian agencies, J. A. Markle, informed the Department of Indian Affairs that, although the Stoneys “have not in the past liked fish for food,” it was, he hoped, “within the realm of possibilities to educate them along this line.”48
Despite concerns about Aboriginal hunting, true game conservation—and certainly, fish conservation—did not became an issue before the early twentieth century. In fact, even during the difficult circumstances of the 1890s, when subsistence fishing was often a necessity, game guardians were rarely seen, and in many districts, when the first actual fishery guardians were appointed to Southern Alberta in 1907, the position was often regarded as something of a joke. Pincher Creek, the Oldman River from its confluence with the Crowsnest River, and the Highwood River got fisheries guardians that year.49 However, patrolling by these early guardians was wanting, to say the least. Pincher Creek’s guardian confessed two years after his appointment that “I have not attended to the duties of the office. I have some knowledge of all the streams as I do considerable driving about but I have done no patrol work on any of them.”50 His replacement proved even less effective, having suffered a mental collapse and needing to return to central Canada, leaving the streams around Pincher Creek completely unsupervised.51 The Highwood River guardian in 1908, William Dunlap, though a conscientious guardian, was stretched to patrol the entirety of the Highwood River, the Little Bow, and Willow Creek.
One of the problems with early appointments was that the federal government chose fish guardians as it did postal clerks—through political patronage. It was the “warm party friend,” who may or may not have been interested in conserving fish, who landed the job, along with a small book of instructions, a free riding blanket, and a daily patrol wage of $1.80.52 A guardian could also keep 50 percent of fines in what was called the moitie system (from the French moitié, “half”). But guardians generally patrolled without making a lot of citations. Whether out of a lack of commitment to the job or because of intimidation from locals, they seemed reluctant to interfere with the activities of their neighbours. Their limited effectiveness is perhaps not surprising, given that the individuals applying for these positions continued to list their political party support as their chief qualification. After the Conservative Party’s sweep in the 1911 federal election, one applicant declared that he was “English, and a Church of England man. Also a Conservative.” Another, writing to demand the job of the current guardian in his area, argued that “I have supported your partie [sic] for the last twelve years,” while decrying the incumbent as little more than a Liberal Party “boss.”53
Figure 1.2
Fishing below Spray Falls in Rocky Mountains Park (Banff), 1928. E011073175, Library and Archives Canada.
Many early settlers undoubtedly expected fish guardians to turn a blind eye to their own out-of-season netting, trapping, dynamiting, or salt-barrelling of fish. For the most part, too, the rough-and-ready settlers in the early West did not share much of an anglers’ interest in fishing as sport.54 They devoted their energy to coming up with ingenious nets, weirs, and traps to take as many fish in as little time as possible and thus lay up protein for their straitened diets. They filled bottles with unslaked lime and submerged them in the cold-water streams. The subsequent detonation, caused by the reaction of the lime with water, killed fish by concussion. They used guns, not so much to shoot fish but to set off a loud charge nearby and shock them to death. Or they simply used dynamite, widely available in construction and railroad building works or purchased cheaply from hardware stores. Wrapping a lit fuse in cotton, they dropped and detonated the stick in streams and lakes.
But as settlement proceeded, attitudes changed toward such wholesale slaughter of fish. In 1909, for example, a disgruntled pioneer complained to Ottawa about the intense food fishing near his place at Peavine, Alberta, close to Lac Ste. Anne. Surely, game, fish, and forest “will soon be a thing of the past here,” the man wrote. He described his neighbours plundering the lakes near his home. At spawning time, he reported, “people from around here clubbed, shot and speared any fish they came up with,” adding that the previous winter locals had dynamited a nearby lake, leaving a hole in the ice big enough to sink a house, with fuse lengths blown as far as 150 yards from the blast.55
A shift into a conservation ethic, shaped around angling rules, began to occur up and down class, regardless of gender, divides. Although typically silent in the correspondence of angling associations run by men, archival photographs provide tangible proof of women’s presence in the world of angling: they are pictured standing on railway trestle bridges over creeks, wading ankle deep in mountain rivers, or simply participating in group activities. As Jen Corrinne Brown observes with reference to the American West, during the Victorian era angling became a “respectable sport” for women, “as long as they maintained proper gender boundaries”—for example, by wielding a rod while wearing a skirt. As Brown argues, the fact that women contributed to sporting periodicals and ran angling shops not only gave them a certain agency and authority but also “provided legitimacy to the sport itself.”56 By their very presence, women of the middle and upper classes aided in the association of angling with physical health and good morals. As Mary Orvis Marbury, daughter of the founder of a famous fly-fishing company, wrote in Favorite Flies and Their History (1892), angling offered a healthful form of recreation for those “who seek fresh vigor and strength in a pursuit which occupies mind and body in the open air, and yields excitement without worriment.”57
Figure 1.3
“A Bow River Comedy—Adventures of the Herald Staff,” Calgary Herald, July 21, 1904. The caption read: “Under the combined influence of a ‘John Collins,’ some Calgary Brewing Co’s. best, a big lunch and Col. Porter’s ‘Observations’ of the day before J. D. and Dad do some fancy juggling with an Eau Claire saw log.” Glenbow Library and Archives.
Perception of Nature’s Decline
By the turn of the century, anglers urged government to regulate more closely streams offering recreation, respite, and healthy diversion. Ecological changes were by then undoubtedly altering stream life and very likely changing the species composition and the availability of fish.58 Gone, too, were the heady days of truly whopper trout tales on the Bow. Observers attributed most of the decline in fish to the sheer number of settlers now “pot fishing,” as contemporaries termed the practice of intensive fishing for food. As one worried observer said of conditions on the Bow in 1908, “the river is lined with pot hunting fishermen from morning till night,” with the result that the streams were depleted before visitors even arrived at Rocky Mountains Park later in the season.59 If hungry working-class people lined streams, so too did growing numbers of middle-class urban recreationists, who sometimes relaxed in more ways than focussed fishing. Bob Edwards, early Calgary newspaper editor of the Eye Opener and well known for his love of drinking, once counselled “budding anglers that bottled beer makes the fish bite splendidly.”60 Then, as now, sport fishing was, for some, a serious activity requiring concentration and skill, while, for others, it provided an excuse for heavy tippling and free-for-all carousing—a contrast neatly captured by a cartoon that appeared in the Calgary Daily Herald in 1904. In the cartoon, the newspaper’s staffer, pictured with his father, are unaware that they are landing a log rather than a fish after an afternoon of heavy drinking.
After 1896, in what is referred to as the “Laurier boom” years of immigration, the West experienced massive growth. Alberta’s population skyrocketed. It grew 5.5 times between 1901 and 1911, from 73,000 to 374,000.61 The granting of provincial status to Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905 led to the first efforts to transform rod and gun clubs into conservation associations. In 1906, Calgary’s Robert A. Darker, the sales manager for Standard Life Insurance, began that process by establishing the Calgary Fish and Game Protective Association (CFGPA) and striking a committee to extend its work throughout Alberta. Meeting in Darker’s business office in Calgary, the committee discussed the “ways and means of interesting true sportsmen in all parts of the province in the slaughter of fish and game.”62 They struck on sending a circular letter asking prominent businessmen, aldermen, and other elected officials in forty-three Alberta communities to form associations of their own with the view of later coming together in Calgary. The letters reached individuals from all walks of life, from Banff Brewster transport partner, P. E. Moore, to businessman and civic leader H. M. Shaw in Nanton, the new High River mayor, Dan Riley, and rancher F. W. Godsal in the small town of Cowley on the Oldman River. Darker followed up the letter with a tour of Southern Alberta to rally more support for the cause.
Darker was ideally suited to head a region-wide association. He was prominent as a leader of the Kiwanis Clubs in Western Canada, helped found the Shriners in Calgary, promoted Calgary’s tourism and business sectors, and helped lead the Calgary Good Roads Association. Darker cherished getting out of the city, away from his hard work and civic duties, to hunt and fish. He and his friends would take the CPR to be dropped off at a siding in the Eastern Slopes, returning days later “bearded and smelling of fish.”63 When Standard Life featured Darker in its company magazine, Life, the writer described him as “seven feet of muscular manhood.”64
Figure 1.4
Robert Darker, 1920: conservationist, civic leader, Calgary booster and businessman, photographed here as president of the Kiwanis Club of Calgary. NA-3852-11 detail, Glenbow Library and Archives.
His imposing size and leadership abilities might explain how Darker was able to convince no fewer than eighty delegates from all over Alberta to attend a three-day convention in Calgary in January 1907.65 Some of the attendees were those sent the circular letter a few months before. Others, however, had learned of the meeting and came with specific issues to raise. These included Board of Trade member A. T. Stephenson from Red Deer, Morley missionary John McDougall and his businessman brother, David, game wardens from Southern Alberta, and prominent sportsmen from Stavely, Gleichen, Fort Macleod, and the small village of Pekisko on the Highwood River.66 Modelling its constitution on that of the Ontario Fish and Game Association, “subject to revision to meet the requirements of Alberta,” the association, taking the name Alberta Fish and Game Protective Association (AFGPA), promptly voted the provincial premier, Alexander Cameron Rutherford, as its honorary president. The attendees then made strong recommendations in respect to the game laws to Benjamin Lawton, the province’s newly appointed game guardian, who was present. Newspaper coverage suggests that the concerns of hunters shaped most of the meeting discussions, especially to change game regulations now that Alberta provincial status was achieved a few years before.67 But meetings also addressed fishing concerns. A federal fisheries overseer who was present received and took seriously the association’s own recommendations for changes to the fisheries laws. Reassuring Ottawa, he felt that the group comprised the “best settlers in the country and principal men of the towns and villages.”68
Darker aimed to create a province-wide association, but while vice-presidents for northern, central, and southern districts were appointed, Calgary sportsmen shaped the agenda to the point that it was characterized, even in Edmonton Bulletin coverage, as an organization of Southern Alberta.69 The association’s president was Reverend G. H. Hogbin, the principal of the Calgary Indian Industrial School. The rest of the executive was composed of Macleod, Red Deer, and Calgary members. Three Calgarians, including Darker, ran the association’s special committees.70 With Calgary sportsmen dominating its early conservation work, and Edmonton’s own work not really beginning until 1920, Darker frequently wrote Ottawa simply on behalf of the Southern Alberta Fish and Game Protective Association.71
The association was quick to pressure the federal fisheries department to change regulations better suited to the realities of western watersheds. Its members were on hand to influence the outcomes of the 1910–11 Alberta and Saskatchewan Fisheries Commission. The AFGPA continued its work during the war years, however, in 1919, anglers within the association formed a separate group to take the name Southern Alberta Angling Association (SAAA). According to the Morning Albertan, its executive board boasted that the SAAA had a membership of “several hundred” and seemed confident that its ranks would shortly grow to over four thousand, when “every settler in the vicinity of the creeks and rivers of Southern Alberta” joined up.72
Darker’s initial drive to organize the many rod and gun clubs in Alberta met with encouraging results. In 1908, newspaper editor Mark Drumm in Frank, Alberta, within the frantic coal-mining areas of the Crowsnest, spread word about Darker’s association, expressing hope that the “energetic campaign” to see every town with its own association would promote “right thinking about fish and birds, in fact all game.” Drumm tried to dissuade readers from thinking that the movement was only “a good deal of a fad.”73 It is difficult to know how many towns formed associations on Darker’s lead. Two years later, almost fifty citizens in Wetaskiwin formed a local chapter, each member pledging to observe the fishing regulations and impose them on fellow townspeople on nearby streams.74
The war years magnified the importance of angling and fish conservation efforts. Just before the war, the cost of living in the boom years of immigration and urban growth had caused fishing to expand in Calgary. With the war came economic hardship. Pot fishing increased among Calgarians who saw wartime food prices soar and meat supplies rationed. The Calgary News-Telegram in August 1915 reported that, “Hundreds are searching the Bow from one end to the other for the finny swimmers, and every stream running into the Bow has been visited.”75 In the Crowsnest, anglers formed an association, vowing to better regulate streams while pleading with the government to open the streams much earlier in the season “to alleviate the distress in the district” and “benefit . . . the unemployed.”76 Toward the end of the war, the federal wartime food controller asked Red Deer’s city council to encourage the consumption of fish, “at the rate of one pound per head of population.” Responding to the request, the council secretary complained about the high cost of market fish and asked, “that fishing licenses be done away with in this district,” apparently to allow citizens to eat more fish from local streams.77
Compounding wartime problems was a period of drought that dried up mountain tributaries and critical trout-spawning habitat on the Eastern Slopes. In 1917 and 1918, a scourge of wildfires swept through the foothills. With brush and trees burned out, snow could not accumulate, and, as a result, meltwater was low in most of the principal streams. One alarmed fisheries officer noted that Pekisko Creek, which flowed into the Highwood, was so parched that fish were “cut off in pools with a temperature of water so high that it is doubtful if they could survive.”78 In 1919, drought and bad conditions downstream from Pekisko Creek prompted High River anglers to petition Ottawa for help, and in 1920 they formed their own angling association. By then, many other communities were lending support. Claresholm’s “angling fraternity” hastily met at W. MacKenzie’s barber shop on a Thursday night in May 1921 before the fishing season opened (the barber-proprietor was duly sworn in as vice-president) and devised a strategy to ensure that the fishing rules were observed.79
Other factors drove the emerging conservation movement. The bleak post-war economy had given a sense of panic to most of the towns and villages in the region. Many communities had grown almost explosively during the early 1910s, benefitting from the massive investment flowing into the West before the great crash of 1913. The war abruptly ended the boom, and towns slumped into sluggish and disappointing growth in the years immediately afterwards. At the same time, the expansion of railway service and the unveiling of faster, more powerful, and more reliable automobiles that could travel over rougher terrain encouraged urbanite escapades, weekend fishing trips, and family angling excursions. One serial that appeared in the Red Deer News in 1922, entitled “Mr. Peavey’s Car,” suggests that urban dwellers turned to cars as a means of escape. The protagonist tries to convince his wife of the benefits of buying an automobile. “It will be the making of all of us,” he says. “We’ll take fishing trips along the river. We’ll go somewhere every Saturday afternoon. We’ll carry our suppers to the parks, and just live in the open. We’ll get brown and hearty.”80 The “jolly parties” heading from towns and cities into rural areas soon had fishing stories inseparable from automobile technology, as exemplified by one Red Deer group who went fishing in what is now Clearwater County, to the northeast of Banff National Park. A Red Deer News writer claimed that the anglers caught such a “whale” of a fish that they had to use their automobile to drag it to shore.81 The Macleod Times reported on a foursome from Fort Macleod heading to the Crowsnest area in 1923 having a similar experience: they snagged such an inconceivably massive monster of a lake trout (ninety-six pounds) that they reportedly used their car to land the fish.82
These rollicking and frequently disruptive visitors troubled the post-war countryside. In the foothills, rail links and auto travel spurred unprecedented numbers of visitors. The increased pace of recreational fishing during a post-war economic downturn presented a real problem to rural communities. In the eyes of the local population, these outsiders, especially those driving automobiles, were prospering in a boom from which no one nearby seemed to be benefiting—and these invading anglers were plundering prized local streams and hauling creels back to their presumably already well-stocked homes.
The numbers spoke for themselves. In 1916, there were 1,200 anglers holding permits in Alberta. By 1921, the number of anglers issued permits had almost doubled, to 2,272, and by the next year their number had nearly doubled again, to 4,300.83 The most heavily fished streams—the most desired river getaways—were, in order of preference, the Highwood River, Pincher Creek, and the Oldman River. These were frequented by outsiders, whether urban folk from Calgary or rowdy townies from new communities springing up along the Eastern Slopes.
In the end, then, it was a combination of factors—the economic downturn during and after the war, the drought, and the steady increase in pot fishing, coupled with an influx of recreational fishers—that prompted people in small towns to take up the cause of the fish in their local streams and rivers. But, as they joined associations, it soon became clear that achieving agreement among anglers on exactly what measures should be taken would be no simple matter.