Modern Calgary is one of the
West's largest and youngest
cities, its close to
850,000-strong population having
grown from almost nothing in
barely 125 years. Long before the
coming of outsiders, however, the
area was the domain of the
Blackfoot
, who ranged over the site of
present-day Calgary for several
thousand years. About 300 years
ago, they were joined by
Sarcee
, forced south by war from their
northern heartlands, and the
Stoney
, who migrated north with Sitting
Bull into southern Saskatchewan
and then Alberta. Traces of old
campsites, buffalo kills and
pictographs from all three peoples
lie across the region, though
these days aboriginal lands
locally are confined to a few
reserves.
Whites first began to gather
around the confluence of the Bow
and Elbow rivers at the end of the
eighteenth century. Explorer David
Thompson wintered here during
his peregrinations, while the
Palliser expedition spent time
nearby en route for the Rockies.
Settlers started arriving in force
around 1860, when hunters moved
into the region from the United
States, where their prey, the
buffalo, had been hunted to the
edge of extinction. Herds still
roamed the Alberta grasslands,
attracting not only hunters but
also whiskey traders , who
plied their dubious wares among
whites and aboriginal peoples
alike. Trouble inevitably
followed, leading to the creation
of the West's first North West
Mounted Police stockade at Fort
Macleod
. Soon after, in 1875, a second
fort was built further north to
curb the lawlessness of the
whiskey traders. A year later it
was christened Fort Calgary
, taking its name from the
Scottish birthplace of its
assistant commissioner. The word calgary
is Gaelic for "clear running
water", and it was felt that
the ice-clear waters of the Bow
and Elbow rivers were reminiscent
of the "old country".
By 1883 a station had been
built close to the fort, part of
the new trans-Canadian railway
. The township laid out nearby
quickly attracted ranchers
and British gentlemen farmers to
its low, hilly bluffs - which are
indeed strongly reminiscent of
Scottish moors and lowlands - and
cemented an enduring Anglo-Saxon
cultural bias. Ranchers from the
US - where pasture was heavily
overgrazed - were further
encouraged by an "open
grazing" policy across the
Alberta grasslands. Despite
Calgary's modern-day cowboy life -
most notably its famous annual Stampede
- the Alberta cattle country has
been described as more "mild
West" than Wild West.
Research suggests that there were
just three recorded gunfights in
the nineteenth century, and poorly
executed ones at that.
By 1886 fires had wiped out
most of the town's temporary
wooded and tented buildings,
leading to an edict declaring that
all new buildings should be
constructed in sandstone (for a
while Calgary was known as
"Sandstone City"). The
fires proved no more than a minor
historical hiccup and within just
nine years of the railway's
arrival Calgary achieved official
city status, something it had
taken rival Edmonton over 100
years to achieve. Edmonton was to
have its revenge in 1910, when it
was made Alberta's provincial
capital.
Cattle and the coming of the
railway generated exceptional
growth, though the city's rise was
to be nothing compared to the
prosperity that followed the
discovery of oil . The
first strike, the famous Dingman's
No. 1 Well, took place in 1914 in
the nearby Turner Valley. An oil
refinery opened in 1923, and since
then. Calgary has rarely looked
back. In the 25 years after 1950,
its population doubled. When oil
prices soared during the oil
crisis of the 1970s, the city
exploded, becoming a world energy
and financial centre -
headquarters for some four hundred
oil and related businesses - with
more American inhabitants than any
other Canadian city.
Falling commodity prices
subsequently punctured the city's
ballooning economy, but not before
the city centre had been virtually
rebuilt and acquired improved and
oil-financed cultural, civic and
other facilities. Today only
Toronto is home to the
headquarters of more major
Canadian corporations, though the
city's optimism is tempered, as
elsewhere in Canada, by the notion
of federal disintegration .
Much of the West, which still
harbours a sense of a new
frontier, is increasingly
impatient with the "old
East", and happy - if
election results are anything to
go by - to become increasingly
self-sufficient.
