Conclusion

In 1928, a new, pan-provincial organization, the Alberta Fish and Game Association, effectively brought together Calgary and Edmonton associations and the many town clubs scattered across the province. In its subsequent history, the association has gone a long way toward creating a single, coherent voice for anglers and hunters in the province. Its clout was felt in issues pertaining to fish and game conservation in the Eastern Slopes region that emerged during the difficult drought and economic downturn of the 1930s. By this time, baitcasting had grown in popularity, and fish conservation had likewise evolved. This book has examined earlier efforts in conservation. Before resources were transferred to Alberta in 1930, anglers in communities up and down the Eastern Slopes worked with the federal government to save their fish. Albertans took up fishery causes, drove hatchery fry to tributaries, added their names to petitions to demand changes to season dates, or rose as whole communities to have streams closed or opened, in response to perceived changes in fishing conditions in their local streams and lakes.

Many of these angler-conservationists practiced fly-fishing, an art that demanded an intimate knowledge of stream environments. That does not discount the experiences of other fishers. As master angler and writer Jim McLennan explained, “any method of angling will to a greater or lesser degree provide the thrill that comes from being connected to a wild, fighting fish.” But he pointed out that for himself, “the real objective of fishing is an understanding of what is going on in the fish’s world, and fly-fishing is simply the most entertaining means of furthering that understanding.”¹ “My desire to understand the fish’s world, of course, is presumptuous, for such understanding is never complete and therefore never certain.”²

Fly fishers in the Eastern Slopes, like those elsewhere, certainly gained a depth of knowledge of how fish rested, fed, rose, and chased insects above or prey below the water’s surface; fishers perceived the effects of ambient air and water temperatures, and they knew a stream in sunlight or shade. Tying dry and wet flies for specific circumstances required patience, knowledge, and experience acquired only through close observation of fish behaviour. Even the solitary art of casting engaged the senses of the participant in relation to the fish’s realm. Accomplished fly fishers of the period, such as those in the High River Angling Protective Association, finely trained their attention to the natural world: High River folk knew, and appreciated, the Highwood River very well, and they sought to defend it accordingly.

The onslaught of automobile tourism shattered the quiet of their streams, and the pressure of urban-based recreationists transformed angling dramatically. Many a tourist in park settings fished clumsily and was largely indifferent to the fish species they landed. They barely appreciated the debates firing conservation of cold-water trout: the introduction of exotics, season dates that would variously protect or endanger the native cutthroat, wars against species deemed undesirable, and so on. These anglers camped alongside their vehicles. They geared up from wages or salaries earned in economies very different from the natural one in which they fished on weekends and holidays.

Fundamental tensions always existed between rural and urban anglers about access to streams and about the kind of fish that should swim within them. In Calgary, anglers were divided over what kind of sport to preserve. Among purists, the cutthroat, at least initially, reigned supreme in the interests of anglers. Frank Kemish wanted a later start to the fishing season to preserve that trout, and he believed that throwing open a tourist-pleasing earlier season would only undermine the finest and the most “natural” fishery in the mountain watersheds. But Calgary business interests and, eventually, numerous anglers up and down the Eastern Slopes grew impatient with cutthroat. In Calgary, city anglers concerned by the growing competition for fish among human predators, and envious of the browns and brookies already transplanted into American mountain streams, demanded German, Scottish, and Ontario species of trout to replenish their waters. They were more than happy—in fact zealous—to live in a second nature of their own making.

Not everyone agreed. High River anglers thought that excessive meddling with nature was a dangerous path to tread. They pragmatically ceded to rainbow introductions on the Highwood because it was really the only fish available to them in hatchery production after World War I. But they remained ardent cutthroat preservationists. Then again, in their efforts to preserve cutthroat, High River’s anglers imposed their own idea about the river and likely a distorted view of its history. They believed that the Highwood had been a pristine, abundant cutthroat stream and that mountain whitefish and coarse species were overrunning it in real time. Maybe they were. Or maybe in the tumult of mass angler tourism in the 1920s, their own catches were changing, and the river simply looked different to them. In such circumstances, old-timers could swear they were seeing an invasion of coarse fish, bull trout, and mountain whitefish in the Highwood watershed. To them, restoring the river required weeding out coarse fish, controlling mountain whitefish populations, and culling bull trout, all fish in fact indigenous to the same waters. The fundamental challenge facing conservationists was that human activity changed the environment. Likely their own conservation efforts, including stream hatchery plantings, did too. Restoring nature to a theoretical trout purity could be achieved only through human persistence, including the imposition of new regulations, a lot of culling work, and supercharged hatchery production. Arguably, there was nothing “natural” about the ends and means of early cutthroat preservation efforts.

Indeed, “Nature” itself was undergoing revision before and during the progressive conservation era. The accumulated weight of even incremental environmental change in the pioneer world was very early revising the ecological integrity of Alberta’s lakes and waterways. As biologist and angler Lorne Fitch reminds us, change “happens slowly, insidiously and cumulatively.” It was, he points out, “a series of seemingly innocuous compromises made over the health of the watersheds trout rely on” that nearly exterminated the cutthroat.³ Irrigation ditches were built, and new varieties of weeds exploded in them; sewage was dumped into rivers, boosting biotic productivity and changing fish in nature. As Fitch stresses elsewhere, changes in the landscape and in fish abundance were evident early in the pioneer environment. Native species, including the bull trout, dropped in number as pioneer developments, railway construction, quarrying, coal mining, and irrigation works in areas such as the Crowsnest made steady inroads into local flora and fauna and altered the ecology of the worlds through which fish swam.⁴

Many angler-conservationists were thus struggling to protect fish in a natural world in upheaval around them, and they worked hastily as river environments were taken up among competing land uses and economic pursuits. Aside from changes in habitat that threatened certain species, however, the drive for conservation was (and still is) fuelled as much by human priorities. Just what anglers sought to conserve depended, in large measure, on what they valued in a world that they themselves were transforming. A fisher in the lower reaches of the Bow basin would have been happy to land what the High River folk were anxious to rid from their own streams. That the bull trout still swims in Alberta waters—albeit precariously with a highly threatened status—is something of a miracle of piscine history. Not many Albertans at the time believed it was even a trout. Today, when fishery policies aim to protect the bull trout and cutthroat, finding a suitable home for them is a challenge. Many mountain waters are so fundamentally changed ecologically that hands are often tied. Native fish have been overrun by brook trout and other introduced species after the 1950s to the point that, in Alberta, culling programs have been directed to remove the interlopers—fish so prized by anglers in the 1920s.⁵

The point of this book is not to condemn the struggle of well-meaning conservationists who turned to numerous remedies—including the introduction of exotics—to strike a balance between preservation and use. Nor is it to champion a view that looks back at the 1920s as the halcyon days when local anglers pulled a lot of weight in forming fishing regulations. As this book has made clear, Ottawa and its appointed experts and managers in Alberta provided a critical balance to the views of anglers. The fisheries commissioner, Edward Prince, knew current specialized aquatic science very well. He put a firm brake on exotics introductions, at least the sportier species many newcomer Albertans, especially from the United States, wanted freed in their Southern Albertan fishing grounds. The federal appointee R. T. Rodd gained a form of expertise eluding anglers in their sport. Supervising the gurgling water troughs at the Banff hatchery, Rodd knew fish culture, species characteristics, and fish spawning season dates probably better than anyone at the time. Later in his inspection work, Rodd had the time and public funding to closely study steams near and far from the Banff hatchery and gain impressive knowledge across many watersheds. That expertise proved essential when Rodd had to strike compromises in policy to meet the demands of very different communities up and down the Eastern Slopes, communities he ultimately counted on to see that all anglers abided by regulations. The significance of early fish conservation is that it reveals how fishers, many of them having witnessed the comparative abundance offered in early streams, discerned how quickly nature could be depleted around them. This realization became crystal clear to individuals like R. A. Darker in Calgary, Mark Drumm in Frank, and E. T. Saunders in Pincher Creek in the first decade of the century. By World War I, anglers such as John Kerr worked hard to control waste with the full knowledge that, without regulation and intervention at a community level, a local resource would be lost. At a time when the new province was promoted for its resource superabundance to prospective town and city developers, investors, land companies, and farmers, anglers understood a sobering reality earlier than a lot of other early Albertans did. Knee-deep in the province’s cold-water streams, they knew that nature could become unbalanced, quickly depleted, or worse.

Moreover, the infighting, controversies, and divergent opinions in the early conservation movement reveal the broad range of responses and adjustments within a pioneer society confronting significant and rapid change. Early conservationists rarely shared a single conceptualization of nature or necessarily agreed on what, exactly, should be conserved, and why. A striking element in this story, nevertheless, is the close engagement of Albertans with their natural world in the 1920s. When, in the late 1920s, Dave Blacklock counselled High River folk to “guard your tributaries,” the closure movement he supported prevented High River anglers, as much as outsiders, from fishing in areas believed to be the ultimate sources of their wealth. Their numerous campaigns, and probably their own forbearance on streams like Flat, Sullivan, and Pekisko Creeks, was perhaps only possible because of the close rapport and inestimable respect High River citizenry had gained for the river running through their town. Communities of anglers conserved that which they valued. As McLennan pointed out, quoting one of the pioneers of modern American fish conservation considered the father of catch-and-release, Lee Wuldff, “A river that is only fished by a few people, under attack by pollution or something else, doesn’t have defenders. But a river that is loved and used by a great many people has a great many defenders and great strength.”⁶

That should raise a host of questions for Albertans who now see tributaries carrying different wealth and fishing holes of a different sort attracting capital and resource developers. The interwar generation saw some of the most dramatic environmental transformations in the history of the province. The changes to landscape and its imagination in the age of the automobile, the impatient emphasis on “success” in fishing common among tourists, the thoughtless behaviour of motorists riding roughshod over river fronts, leaving a trail of garbage behind them: all epitomize attitudes that have become commonplace in our own era of super-consumerism, higher-speed automobiles, quad sports excursions, and increasingly hectic lifestyles prompting urban “recreation” in the out of doors. Undoubtedly, the mass tourism emerging in the 1920s laid down elements of a society increasingly—and, today, often completely—disengaged from “nature” and from issues of conservation. This is surely a loss, given that now, more than ever, Albertans need to give greater attention to the sustainability and environmental integrity of their resource-rich province. The great challenge for scientific managers in the present is to animate what are called “citizen science” initiatives, that is, programming reminding Albertans of human–nature relationships, down to the community level, these to prompt them to act thoughtfully and respectfully in their very complex river ecosystems.

Of course, history leaves its legacy. When Benga Mining Ltd. sought approval for its Grassy Mountain Coal Project in the Crowsnest Pass from a joint review panel of the federal Department of Environment and Climate Change and the Alberta Energy Regulator in 2016, the public hearings that followed in 2020 and 2021 provided community leaders and scientific experts an opportunity to express their keen concerns for the proposal. Beyond the mine’s larger environmental impacts, panellists heard from scientists who pointed out the precarity of the subspecies of cutthroat native to Alberta, now occupying less than 20% of its historic range in the province. Mining would threaten critical cutthroat habitat in Gold Creek as well as Blairmore Creek—some of the last remaining in the province—while adversely affecting the Crowsnest River, the Oldman River, and the South Saskatchewan River. The “significant environmental effects on westslope cutthroat trout and their aquatic habitat” figured importantly in the report.⁷ It perhaps is no surprise that, in 2022, when the Alberta government announced support for coal mining leases to such ecologically sensitive mountain areas, High River became the first municipality in the province to endorse a policy to ban new coal exploration and development.⁸ The municipality joined the efforts of First Nations, ranchers, hunters, and anglers concerned not only by the immediate environmental degradation promised in expanded coal mining, but how it would affect water flowing and the health of streams in Alberta. The same communities reacted to renewed applications for upper tributary forest clearcutting.

If current-day environmental debates reveal anything, it is the deep roots of riverside conservation in Alberta. Plainly, as in the past, today’s questions about resource use in the Eastern Slopes underline the fact that each river needs its advocates, each stream its defenders. Any angler in the 1920s would have understood this very evident truth.