Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park: Studies in Two Centuries of Human History in the Upper Athabasca River Watershed (review)

Prodded by research done in standard Canadian archives by geographers at the Universities of Calgary and Waterloo in the mid 1960s, historians and archaeologists soon placed Canadian parklands under increased scrutiny, often as contract assignments from park agencies.

This handsome book supplements an already long list of published and manuscript studies. The contents divide under three heads: artistic and photographic representation of historical landscapes, historical land and resource use, and tourism and recreation history.

Michael Payne's fur trade essay reviews the economic setting prior to the park's establishment in 1907. The focus is on challenges posed by the Rocky Mountain barrier to trans-mountain commerce in the early nineteenth century, rather than on the minimal opportunities for fur-taking on the upper Athabasca. A local trade did persist, however, owing to the decision to route the Canadian Pacific Railway farther south. Discussion of Historic Sites and Monuments Board efforts to periodically adjust historic plaque statements draws attention to the time-bound nature of commemorations.

Editor Ian MacLaren examines the first important Euro-Canadian artistic records of the Jasper area. The 'documentary' works executed by Paul Kane and Henry James Warre in the late 1840s are compared with recent landscape photographs taken from the same general vantage point.

Peter Murphy's lucid essay on the institutional history of boundary changes of the park describes the role of forest reserve policy in those changes. The analysis and maps make this important reading for students of natural resource history in Alberta. In a second article, Murphy synthesizes his 1980 interview with a member of the Moberly family, shedding light on pioneer conditions and how early park policy impinged on residents living in what for them was a working landscape, one frequently subjected to modification, particularly by fire.

Pearlann Reichwein and Lisa McDermott's 'Opening the Secret Garden' follows American Quaker Mary Schaffer, one of the founders of the Canadian Alpine Club, in her 1908 quest to discover a mysterious lake known to the Stoney people as Chaba Imne. Just when hired to survey Maligne Lake in 1911, it was excised from the eastern reaches of the park by new legislation. Her effort to restore park boundaries is told with fine attention to place name issues and the politics of the Geographic Board of Canada.

C.J. Taylor considers the importance for landscape change of the rise in visitation occasioned by the steady shift from railway to automobile access. His analysis of what related demographic changes have meant for park managers is clear and compact. The initial wish to attract tourists gradually gave way to management concerns over increased visitor impacts on sensitive park resources. The general result has been to reinforce efforts to cater to tourists in previously developed zones while curtailing access to more remote areas.

Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux considers tourism from the viewpoint of promotional literature. Collectors of Canadiana will enjoy the visuals reflecting a time when not one but two railways crawled through the Yellowhead Pass. The 'trouble with wilderness tourism' is that the early appeal to patrician sensibilities revealed a paradox: to engage the mountain landscape for purposes of solitude was actually to import the contrary fruits of civilization to its borders. Ambiguous cumulative effects could only increase with the steady democratization of access to the mountains. Tourist literature, of course, has never been known for its philosophical subtlety, and the author proves it by discussing not just what was claimed by the literature, but also what was ignored.

With his eye focused on 'ethics form and style,' Zac Robinson draws attention to a presumed alteration of goals and attitudes among alpinists during the 'Golden Years of Mountaineering in Canada,' particularly between 1906 and 1925. The conservatism he detects in the leadership of the Canadian Alpine Club is perhaps exaggerated, for the membership always...