Lawrence Grassi: From Piedmont to the Rocky Mountains by Elio Costa, and Gabriele Scardellato (review)

Known as the "little Italian superman" of the Rockies, Lawrence Grassi is one of the most legendary figures of the Canadian west. Grassi achieved fame in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century as a mountain climber and trail builder. His work did much to make accessible some of the most beautiful vistas within the Rockies, most notably the Lake O'Hara region in Yoho National Park and in Banff National Park. In that way, Grassi's life was exceptional; in plenty of other ways, as Elio Costa and Gabriele Scardellato demonstrate, Grassi's life was more typical—and human.

Grassi was born in 1890 in the village of Falmenta, Novara, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. He died in 1980 at the foot of the mountains he loved in Canmore, Alberta. Grassi migrated west from Italy to the Great Lakes to the Rockies with thousands of other poor Italians on the eve of World War I, driven by a desire to earn income by first joining the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in northern Ontario and then by finding work in the coal mines further west in Alberta. By carefully and meticulously piecing together this part of Grassi's life, Costa and Scardellato neatly realize the subtitle of their work. Indeed, one of the scholarly strengths of the book is to present the life of Lawrence Grassi as a case study for Italian-Canadian immigrants in the early twentieth century. The authors did not confine their research to microfilm and the Internet; they made numerous trips to Falmenta, Italy; Jackfish Bay on the northern shores of Lake Superior; and Canmore, Alberta. That they literally hiked and explored the ground on which Grassi lived is evident; those efforts, combined with research in public records and reliable secondary works, enabled the authors to construct an engaging, informative, even colorful, narrative of Grassi's life before he began the work that made him famous.

By the summer of 1913, Grassi had migrated to the Kicking Horse Pass region of Alberta at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, where he spent the rest of his days, doing things that were more extraordinary and by 1926 gaining a reputation as one of the finest Canadian mountain climbers and trail builders of the century. Grassi made hundreds of climbs during the interwar period, both alone and with others as a highly sought-after guide. Costa and Scardellato summarize Grassi's mountaineering record in this period and then offer even more detail on his trail building, which stretched into the postwar years and which the authors suggest was the area of Grassi's greatest achievements.

Costa and Scardellato also succeed in revealing a more private, personal side of Grassi. Not surprisingly, he was a loner, an introvert, who suffered from what the authors label as a "pathological shyness." He was also extremely independent, leaving his family in Italy at a young age and—to the considerable pain of his mother and siblings—never really looking back, not even writing letters. There was a fine line between Grassi's independence and selfishness: "A solitary man all his life, whose passion for the mountains appeared to overshadow everything and everyone else, he nevertheless felt a deep desire to share their beauty with as many people as possible" (149). For those few people who knew Grassi well, he was kind, generous, and unassuming, despite his accomplishments and fame. Grassi also had a surprisingly strong aesthetic side, manifested in the large collection of photographs he shot from mountain peaks and the sensitivity that still marks the hiking paths he constructed: "Every inch of his trails reads like a novel," noted one local observer (49). Plentiful photographs (some taken by Grassi) of those trails, as well as the mountains scaled by Grassi, provide helpful illustrations for Costa and Scardellato's narrative, but a few more maps would have offered the...