First Nations

The territory encompassed by what is now Jasper National Park has been inhabited since time immemorial by Nakoda, Cree, Secwépemc, and Dane-zaa peoples.[1] Plainview projectile points have been found at the head of Jasper Lake, dating back to between 8000 and 7000 BCE.[2] In the centuries between then and the establishment of the park, First Nations land use has fluctuated according to climatic variations over the long term, and according to cyclical patterns of ungulate population numbers, particularly elk, moose, mule deer, and occasionally caribou.[3] Starting in the 1790s, Haudenosaunee and Nipissing hunters and trappers moved in large numbers to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, around the headwaters of the Athabasca and Smoky Rivers in particular, most of them employed by the North West Company.[4] By the time David Thompson crossed the Athabasca Pass in 1810, led by a Haudenosaunee guide named Thomas, there were hundreds of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people living in the region.[4] When Mary Schäffer Warren became the first settler to visit Maligne Lake—known by the Nakoda as Chaba Imne—in 1908, she did so by following a map given to her by Samson Beaver, a Nakoda guide and hunter.[5]

Fur trade

Jasper National Park's name originates from Jasper Haws, a Maryland-born fur trader who worked for the North West Company. In 1815, Haws took command of a North West Company trading post, built on Brûlé Lake in 1813, which subsequently became known as Jasper's House.[6] In 1830, the trading post was relocated further up the Athabasca River, just north of Jasper Lake. The site of Jasper House itself was designated a national historic site in 1924.

Jasper House was destroyed in 1910, but it gave its name to both the national park, and the town of Jasper within the Park.[7][8]

Jasper Park established

Jasper Forest Park was established by a federal order in council on September 14, 1907.[9] The park's establishment was spurred by plans for the construction of a second Canadian transcontinental railway, which was to cross the Rocky Mountains at Yellowhead Pass; Jasper Park was intended to be developed into an alpine resort in the mould of Rocky Mountains Park, with a train station, tourist hotels, and a service town.[10][11] Collectively, the mountain parks were intended as a sort of wilderness playground for middle-class workers, an antidote to the malaise of modern life.[12][13] However, the vision of wilderness on which the development plan depended was at odds with the presence of long-established Métis homesteaders within the boundaries of the park, many of whom were descended from the white and Haudenosaunee fur traders and trappers employed by the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company in the 19th century.[14] In 1909, six Métis families were declared squatters, paid compensation for improvements made to the land, including buildings, ditches, and fences, and ordered to leave the park.[15][16]

In 1911, Jasper Forest Park came under the administration of the newly established Dominion Parks Branch of the Department of the Interior, under the purview of James Bernard Harkin,[10] at which time the name was changed to simply Jasper Park.[17] Under Harkin, Canada's national parks were to fulfill a dual mandate of wilderness protection and economic development—primarily as tourist destinations.[18] In particular, the Parks Branch expressly forbade hunting in Jasper and the other mountain parks, deprecating First Nations' centuries-long history of subsistence hunting in the region[14] as indiscriminate slaughter of the local game wildlife.[19] Despite the prohibition on hunting, the park and its tourist facilities became a base of operations for wealthy Canadian and American sport hunters for hunting trips further into the Rockies, beyond the prohibitions in place in the mountain parks and the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve.[19]

 The Jasper Park Information Centre, originally constructed in 1914 as an administration building and as the park superintendent's residence

In 1930, Jasper Forest Park officially became Jasper National Park with the passing of the National Parks Act.[1] Section 4 of the act further underlined the park's wilderness preservation function, with Canada's National Parks "dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment" and "maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."[20] Ironically, given the mandate its mandate to preserve natural spaces, the act also redefined Jasper Park's boundaries, removing 518 square kilometres (200 sq mi) of land from the park—including Brûlé Lake and Rock Lake—opening the excised area to coal mining and hydroelectric development.[21]

Early tourism and sport  CNR advertising campaign from 1929

In 1911, the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP) laid track through the park and over Yellowhead Pass.[22] That same year, the GTP founded the town of Fitzhugh around the company's railway station; the town was renamed Jasper in 1913. The GTP's route across the pass was followed in 1913 by the Canadian Northern (CNoR).[10] Both having both fallen into financial difficulty, the two railways were nationalized—the GTP in 1919 and the CNoR in 1923—and eventually merged into the Canadian National Railway (CNR) by an Order in Council.[23] The railway was later followed by a road built between Edmonton and Jasper. The section between the town of Jasper and the eastern gate of the park was completed in 1928; however, it took another three years for the province of Alberta to complete the remaining stretch of the road into Edmonton.[24]

By the time the GTP's railway track cleared Yellowhead Pass in 1911, there were already eight hotels established in Jasper, but they were rudimentary, and did not meet the expectations of the well-heeled clientele to which the GTP advertised.[25] Jasper Park Lodge, the focal point of the GTP's Jasper advertising campaign, did not open until 1922, three years after the company's bankruptcy and only a year before the railway was merged into the nationally owned CNR.[26] Like the GTP before it, Canadian National featured both Jasper park and the lodge prominently in its advertising literature.

From its founding, the town of Jasper, and later the Jasper Park Lodge, served as a hub for a variety of outdoor sporting activities. Even as Mary Schäffer Warren was becoming the first settler to visit Maligne Lake, outfitters were springing up in the park to rent out equipment and guide hikers and alpinists.[27] The Alpine Club of Canada, formed in 1906 and sponsored through the 1920s in part by the CNR,[28] held seven of its annual alpine camps in Jasper between 1926 and 1950.[29] And while hunting was forbidden within park grounds, the park's facilities served as a base of operations for outfitters and guides who led wealthy hunters on hunting trips into the forest reserves outside Jasper's boundaries.[30]

Internment camps

In 1916, following the precedent set at Rocky Mountains Park, the Government of Canada opened an internment camp for individuals deemed enemy aliens, primarily immigrants from the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Ukrainians, who made up the largest affected population, and the Ottoman Empire.[31] The interned men were primarily employed in the construction of a road from the town of Jasper, along the Maligne River first to Medicine Lake, and later on to Maligne Lake.[32]

In 1931, in response to the Great Depression, the government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett enacted the Unemployment and Farm Relief Act, which allocated funds for public works projects in the national parks.[33][34] Labourers, many of them laid-off Canadian National Railway workers, were employed on road and bridge projects within the park, for which they were paid 25 to 30 cents per hour, working eight hours a day up to six days per week.[35] In October, 1931, under the auspices of the relief project, construction started on a road between Jasper and Banff, which ultimately formed the basis for the Icefields Parkway.[36]

Internment camps were established again during World War II, when three hundred Japanese Canadians were forcibly sent to three road camps in Jasper.[37] Additionally, 160 conscientious objectors, many of them Mennonites from the Prairie provinces, were interned at Jasper and put to work upgrading the Maligne Lake and Medicine Lake roads, as well as building a road from Geikie to the British Columbia border.[38]