The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (review)

This impressive history of Alberta’s Bow River examines the relationship between natural processes and human societies along the river, mainly from the last third of the 19th century to the end of the 20th. It is primarily an account of human initiatives to master the Bow, and borrowing from Donald Worster’s work on water in the American west, a study of “the power relations resulting from control over water, but also on the power exerted by the consequences of environmental manipulation.” (16) The book tells the story of an intensely variable and unpredictable mountain stream, a very desirable homeland for millennia of Native residents as well as incoming European settlers from the 1860s, and its thorough remaking by the technology of the high modernist era, as well as the changing ways that people have thought about the river as a result.

While earlier residents (Natives, ranchers, and homesteaders) shaped their lives to the rhythms of the river, really substantial change began around the start of the 20th century, when the hydroelectric potential of Horseshoe Falls, upstream of the growing city of Calgary, dazzled the eyes of Montrėal financier Maxwell Aitken (the future Lord Beaverbrook). Aitken’s sight cleared quickly when the first massive flood carried away his work on the unfinished dam, but by that time “capital had already been committed.” (126) New engineers were acquired, and the industrialization of the wild river proceeded through a half century of dam building, irrigation projects, and euphemistic “nutrient loading” from Calgary’s sewer outfalls. By the 1960s the Bow had been thoroughly redesigned – diverted, restrained, and flattened out – all in order to “salvage and improve upon the ill-considered investment decisions” of the early century. (147) Throughout the 390 pages of The River Returns (and 74 pages of notes), Armstrong, Evenden, and Nelles attempt to prove that these events constitute a case of nature and culture made one, rather than the simple abuse of the former by the latter. They conclude that “there is no more ‘pristine nature’ out there to be preserved or restored, [and] the history of humanity along the river is so bound up with the history of the river as to make the two inseparable.” (389)

The book can be thought of in three parts, each with its own character. First, in chapters 2 through 4, the authors examine the mainly free-flowing early years of the Bow. After an initial look at pre-European Native presence in a chapter that skips effectively but lightly over well trodden ground, the account of settlement makes effective use of diverse primary source material to paint a truly engaging portrait of the lives of the farmers, ranchers, lumbermen, schoolteachers, and others who settled along the Bow from the 1860s through the 1910s. The river pulled settlers, as well as the traders who built Fort Calgary, to its banks; and the railroad that followed them to the city and beyond, up into the mountain pass that the Bow had carved. But the river pushed as well, with its unpredictable floods, and as the authors demonstrate more than once, settlers drawn at first to the floodplain were quick to withdraw to the uplands when dryland agriculture offered the chance. Intriguingly, the authors here point out the influence of climate, in that a long period of greater-than-average rainfall shaped settlement as much and as ominously as a titanic flash-flood might. It is just one example of how quickly, and to what good effect, they abandon in practice their stated objection to the idea of the river’s own historical agency. Indeed, the first part of the book is characterized by a river “more acting than acted upon,” that therefore “wound its way into the lives of many of the people who settled on its banks.” (85) It is also in marked contrast to what follows, as the Bow flows into its industrial era.

The...